Investigation Prompts Schools to Report $6.5 Billion in Undisclosed Foreign Gifts and Contracts Ivan Pentchoukov, The Epoch Times, October 20, 2020
American Universities failed to report $6.5 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, an investigation by the Department of Education found. Federal law requires schools to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education (DOE) twice a year. Many have for years failed to do so, while others severely underreported the income. The deluge of the financial disclosures poured in as the department opened investigations into 12 elite universities.
Universities reported receiving a total of more than $19.6 billion in foreign gifts and contracts from 2014 to 2020, including nearly $1.5 billion from China, almost $3.1 billion from Qatar, and more than $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia, according to historical DOE data and most recent figures posted on its new online reporting portal.
Carnegie Mellon University reported receiving almost $1.61 billion in foreign gifts and contracts, the most of any university. Harvard tops the list in terms of total funds received from China, reporting nearly $116 million.
“The threat is real, so we took action to make sure the public is afforded the t***sparency the law requires,” Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said. “We found pervasive noncompliance by higher-ed institutions and significant foreign entanglement with America’s colleges and universities.”
The vast majority of the foreign funds went to America’s largest and most prestigious universities, which have received billions of dollars through a bevy of intermediaries, according to a report released by the DOE on Oct. 20 All of the institutions involved are in the meantime dependent on tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer subsidies while operating largely “divorced from any sense of obligation to our taxpayers or concern for our American national interests, security, or values,” the DOE report states.
“Institutions manage to track every cent owed and paid by their students; there is no doubt they can—and indeed do—track funds coming from foreign sources, including those adversarial to American interests,” the report states. “Nevertheless, our investigations confirm a Senate subcommittee’s finding that Section 117 reporting is systemically underinclusive and inaccurate.”
In addition to under-reporting, some universities have been anonymizing gifts from foreign sources, including more than $1.14 billion in unidentified gifts from China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Russia since 2012.
“Accordingly, for decades, foreign state and non-state actors have dev**ed significant resources to influence or control teaching and research, to the theft of intellectual property or even espionage, and to the use of American campuses as centers for propaganda operations and other projections of soft power.”
The report stresses that foreign funding disclosures are crucial since hostile governments are actively targeting the U.S. higher education sector to pilfer intellectual property and research, influence curricula, and recruit talent. The report cited several recent indictments to illustrate the problem, including charges brought against the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department and a visiting Stanford University researcher who lied about her active status with the military forces of the Chinese C*******t Party (CCP).
“As you know, C*******t Chinese troops attacked United Nations forces defending non-C*******t South Korea from unprovoked North Korean aggression. North Korea was then, and remains today, a brutal c*******t totalitarian dictatorship,” the letter, signed by principal deputy general counsel Reed Rubinstein, states. “According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, 54,246 U.S. service members gave their lives to defend South Korean [sic] from the North Koreans and the C*******t Chinese between 1950-53,3 making this a particularly bizarre (and extremely indecorous) image for Stanford to highlight.”
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