Our universities are targets for the world’s worst regimes to launder their images and sway American students. The Biden administration doesn’t seem to care.
Our universities are targets for the world’s worst regimes to launder their images and sway American students. The Biden administration doesn’t seem to care.
C ollege students across the country spent much of the past few months protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, calling on their universities to “divest” from Israel. However, there’s another topic they should be protesting just as vehemently, and far closer to home: their universities’ continued willingness to accept staggering sums from some of the world’s most heinous dictatorships, including those that are actively abetting groups like Hamas.
American universities’ acceptance of such dirty money was in the spotlight just a few years ago, when the Trump administration oversaw an unprecedented investigation into universities’ failing to disclose foreign funding. Thanks to legislation first introduced in the 1960s, universities were required to disclose all substantial gifts and contracts with foreign entities. But for decades, that requirement was effectively unenforced.
That is, until federal officials began poking around in the late 2010s — and discovered that the American universities they surveyed had failed to report over $6 billion in foreign funding that they’d been legally required to report.
Nor were these no-name universities. Yale failed to report nearly $400 million in foreign gifts and contracts, with the university admitting that it didn’t submit a single report on the funding for years on end. Other universities, like Harvard, maintained “inadequate institutional controls over . . . foreign donations and contracts,” according to federal investigators, while Stanford anonymized foreign donors, meaning that investigators couldn’t track tens of millions of dollars in funding from Chinese sources. Meanwhile, Cornell University somehow couldn’t account for an astounding $760 million in foreign funding. As investigators said, Cornell University officials “chose the word ‘dumbfounded’ to explain this reporting error and provided no explanation.”
The findings were nothing short of shocking, both for the amount and the regimes involved. Thanks to investigators’ efforts, however, Americans gained new insight into the dictatorships bankrolling leading U.S. universities — insight that has continued to this day.
With little fanfare, and with even less analysis in the years since, in 2020 the U.S. launched a new, publicly accessible database to track these funding streams. Available on the Department of Education’s website, the new database allows anyone around the world to examine the financial links between American universities and foreign regimes and foreign entities. All told, the new database provides unprecedented insight into the oleaginous arrangements American universities have set up with foreign, and often dictatorial, patrons.
Look, for instance, at the country doing arguably more to prop up Hamas leadership than any other: Qatar. In the past year alone, the Department of Education database reveals that hundreds of thousands of dollars have flown from Qatar to places like Penn State University and Johns Hopkins University, with hundreds of thousands more going to places like Bard College and Rice University the year before. More broadly, Qatar has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to other leading institutions, including giving nearly $700 million to Northwestern University alone. Thanks to the database, we also know that the Qatari regime has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on financial aid for students to study in the U.S.
But Qatar is hardly alone. Saudi Arabia, for instance, was a onetime pariah, especially after the Saudi regime assassinated journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But American universities don’t seem to care. As the database reveals, the Saudis have continued donating millions and millions of dollars to American universities in recent years. Nor is it just the Ivy Leagues. Most recently, Saudi Arabia shoveled nearly $7 million to the Florida Institute of Technology — the largest single unrestricted donation the regime has ever made to an American university, according to the database. In the past year alone, the regime sent hundreds of thousands more to universities from the University of Missouri and Mississippi State University to Stanford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — all of it without any reported strings attached.
Or look at the university that is arguably the epicenter of the recent Gaza-related protests. According to the database, Columbia University has hoovered up donations from some of the most repressive nations on the planet. For instance, Columbia has received millions of dollars in gifts from entities in China, including a $1.4 million gift out of China just last year — despite the fact that the regime in Beijing is committing an actual, veritable genocide against its Uyghur population.
Unfortunately, the details on that latter gift remain unclear, which points to one of the primary problems with the database. Unlike things like the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) database — which provides, among other things, the actual contracts and documents involved in foreign lobbying dealings — the Department of Education database provides details only on things like the recipient university, the amount, and the country of origin. It also provides few details on what these donations may be specifically earmarked for. But even those scant details are enough to expose these universities’ transformations into sieves for authoritarian funding.
The bigger issue with the database, however, comes from the current administration. Instead of continuing the momentum to force universities to reveal their foreign patrons, the Biden administration in 2022 announced that it would put an effective moratorium on any more inquiries, with “plans to close the outstanding . . . investigations that remain open.” Nor is that all. A previous National Review analysis found that university disclosures collapsed as soon as Biden took office.
That implosion is, of course, unsurprising. Like the student protesters, the Biden administration appears completely unwilling to hold universities’ feet to the fire when it comes to dictatorial donations — allowing those universities once more to become targets for the worst regimes on the planet to launder their images and sway American students in the process.