A trio of House Republican leaders gave Harvard, Yale, and a handful of other universities a week to hand over documents and other information on their foreign funding amid increased scrutiny about the influence of the Chinese Communist Party and other foreign entities on U.S. campuses.
The GOP letters told the schools that “we write to further understand the effects of adversarial foreign direct investment in the U.S. higher education system” and noted that an Education Department investigation “has uncovered over $6.5 billion of previously unreported foreign donations” to U.S. institutions of higher education.
Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, James Comer of Kentucky, and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina — the ranking members on the Judiciary, Oversight, and Education committees, respectively — requested Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Chicago, the University of Delaware, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania provide answers about all of their gifts from and contacts with the governments of or businesses and nationals from China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia by next Monday.
The letters sent to the schools referenced a May 20 briefing from the Education Department, in which the agency “raised concerns about this level of IHEs dependency on foreign funding from adversarial states and the inherent national security risks” and noted that “the Committee learned that many countries use donation agreements or contracts (agreements) with IHEs, professors, or researchers (recipients) to leverage their money into some type of benefit, or quid pro quo.” The Republicans said that “some recipients” of foreign funding also “alter their decision making based on the donations received.”
“During the briefing, the Department informed the Committee that after reports the COVID-19 pandemic may be the result of negligence in a lab in Wuhan, China, two universities that have contracts with the Chinese Communist Party aligned Jilin University publicly defended the CCP and claimed those reports were false,” the GOP letters warned.
Jordan, Comer, and Foxx also provided details on the amount of anonymous foreign funding from China, Russia, Qatar, Iran, and Saudi Arabia received by each school since 2015: 31 gifts or contracts totaling $101,177,826 to Harvard; 18 gifts or contracts totaling $22,049,302 to Yale; 30 gifts or contracts totaling $23,059,862 to the University of Chicago; six gifts or contracts totaling $28,558,456 to the University of Delaware; 15 gifts or contracts totaling $40,388,603 to NYU; and 92 gifts or contracts totaling $62,204,380 to UPenn.
The Education Department said in June that it is “spearheading … foreign source compliance and verification efforts” with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at the helm and noted that it has uncovered “numerous” university contracts with Chinese government-subsidized companies and “at least one” with “direct contracts with the Chinese Communist Party itself.” The agency said it had discovered that schools have “anonymized” the identities of the donors of at least $1.14 billion in foreign funds flowing in from China, Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.
The Education Department announced individual investigations into foreign funding and possible illicit foreign ties at Georgetown University and Texas A&M University last June, Cornell University and Rutgers in July, MIT and the University of Maryland in September, Harvard and Yale in February, the University of Texas in April, and Case Western Reserve University in May.
Multiple members of the Chinese military have been charged by the Justice Department in recent weeks for concealing their ties to China’s military and allegedly committing visa fraud while acting as students or researchers at U.S. universities. The DOJ’s China Initiative aims to combat both Chinese espionage and its Thousand Talents Program, suspected of being geared toward stealing research, and the United States has arrested and charged a number of scientists, including Harvard’s chemistry department chairman, Charles Lieber.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Sen. Rob Portman, released a 109-page bipartisan report in November concluding foreign countries “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests” and “the most aggressive of them has been China.” The subcommittee released an initial report in February 2019 warning about foreign funding and Chinese influence both in K-12 classrooms and university campuses nationwide, noting that “foreign government spending on U.S. schools is effectively a black hole.”
These reports spurred the Education Department into action.
Portman introduced legislation in June to amend Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 by lowering the reporting threshold required for U.S. universities that receive foreign gifts from $250,000 down to $50,000 while empowering the Education Department to punish schools that fail to report.
Republican senators proposed a ban on issuing visas to graduate students in technology fields, while House Democrats have raised concerns that ethnically Chinese scientists are being racially profiled. The Trump administration announced in May it would revoke thousands of visas held by Chinese graduate students who had ties to the Chinese military.
