Top universities in the United States took billions of dollars in secret funding from foreign entities, according to a Tuesday report from the Department of Education.
The report is the result of an investigation by the department launched last year into whether colleges and universities were accurately reporting foreign donations. Such donations from foreign countries are not illegal, but must be cleared with the federal government if they amount to over $250,000 in one year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“The threat of improper foreign influence in higher education is real. Our action today ensures that America’s students, educators, and taxpayers can follow the money,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in a statement. “Transparency in foreign funding of higher education is not just something I think is a good thing; it’s the law. For too long, enforcement of that law was lax, but not anymore.”
Federal investigators found that a portion of donations to top U.S. universities came from countries with interests hostile to the United States, such as China and Russia. Those countries also sought to use their financial leverage “to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda,” according to the report.
According to the Department of Education, the highlights of the report are:
- Two universities failed to accurately account for foreign funding of their campuses in Doha, Qatar, which are funded in part by the Qatari government. The Qatari Foundation exerted its financial influence to stifle free speech.
- Huawei, the Chinese technology giant supported by the Chinese Communist Party, had financial ties to nearly all the investigated institutions. Huawei targets its higher education funding to issues important to national security such as nuclear science, robotics, and online cloud services.
- Two Chinese companies are working with one U.S. university on a research project involving crowd surveillance and predictive behavior technology, which the Chinese government could potentially harness for nefarious purposes.
- A large donation by Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to Georgetown University empowered the Saudis to push a particular ideologically-driven narrative through the teaching and learning done on specific topics relevant to the Middle East.
- One university accepted a $25,000 sponsorship from Kaspersky Government Security Solutions, a cybersecurity company with suspected ties to the Russian government, to host a cybersecurity conference.
The report comes as the federal government especially seeks to combat the influence that China has been building on college and university campuses through such initiatives as the Thousand Talents Program and Confucius Institutes. The crackdown has led the U.S. government to pursue charges against American academics with hidden connections to the Chinese military, as well as expel thousands of Chinese students with ties to Chinese military schools.
The crackdown on foreign influence has caused some backlash in China. Officials in Beijing are reportedly warning U.S. government officials that continuing to purge China’s influence from U.S. higher education may push the Chinese government to begin arresting Americans in China, a tactic dubbed by experts as “hostage diplomacy.”