patrick.net

Harvard and Yale are in hot water — well, at least lukewarm — for failing to disclose enormous gifts from foreign sources, as they are required to do by federal law. After falling fast asleep on the enforcement of that law for more than 30 years, the US Department of Education (ED) has suddenly decided that, yes, colleges and universities really should divulge when they have decided to accept significant funding from abroad. ...

ED announced its investigation of foreign-gifts reporting at Harvard and Yale — the latter of which may have failed to report ‘at least $375 million in foreign gifts and contracts’ over just the past four years. Multiply this by the decades of non-reporting that preceded it, and Harvard and Yale alone probably received unreported foreign gifts and contracts in the billions of dollars.

ED also said that its enforcement efforts since July 2019 have prompted the reporting of ‘approximately $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign money’.

Why is this a problem? For one thing, there’s that federal law: gifts above $250,000 from foreign sources to American colleges and universities must be disclosed. ...

We chose three areas where it seemed apparent that undisclosed foreign money was having a significant impact: China’s Confucius Institutes; Saudi Arabia and Qatar’s funding of Middle East Studies centers, and the mysteriously funded anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement...

these institutes were part of a very large and complex effort by the Beijing government to gain sway over American higher education. More than a hundred had been established at US universities. Ostensibly benign programs to teach Americans Chinese language and culture, they served as cover for a variety of other efforts, including surveillance of Chinese students, undisclosed recruitment of American academics for Chinese programs, and espionage. ...

China responded in the ham-handed way totalitarian regimes often do. It called a press conference in Washington and lined up a collection of compromised American college and university presidents to testify that the institutes were nothing but a splendid instance of China’s benevolent intentions. ...

Harvard and Yale, of course, will find ways to dodge the scandal. They are the very definition of well-connected, immune to adverse consequences from their own misdoings. ...

Georgetown and Harvard, for example, each received gifts of $20 million from Saudi Arabia’s Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal in 2005. Why? No one knows for sure. ...

Confucius Institutes don’t stop at whitewashing China’s history of suppressing democracy protesters, Falun Gong adherents, Uighurs and other national minorities; or covering up its brutal enforcement of its former one-child policy with forced abortions and sterilizations; or obscuring its adventures in the South China Sea and its policies toward Taiwan and Tibet. Rather, they are beachheads for a government intent on stealing American intellectual property and research. Every US college president who signs a Confucius Institute agreement is making himself party to such an assault on the national interest. ...

This investigation is good news for all who value our national security. Colleges and universities are, after all, intended to serve a national purpose. But the nation in question is the United States, not Saudi Arabia or the People’s Republic of China. The failure to keep track of this flood of money has led to the moral and intellectual corruption of college officials and some faculty members. And it has diverted our academic institutions into a dangerous pursuit of favor from the nation’s adversaries.