The latest round of campus madness, in the form of student protests over the Israel-Gaza conflict, should prompt American onlookers to ask a simple question: Why exactly do we give these institutions our money? But as Americans hopefully reassess their continued financing of activist madhouses, we will also need to look more carefully at the funding that American higher education receives from abroad.
Simply put, our universities are flush with money from countries of concern. Since 2014, U.S. institutions of higher education have received $1.7 billion in contracts and gifts from China, $2.7 billion from Qatar, $1.3 billion from Saudi Arabia, $565 million from the United Arab Emirates, and $103 million from Russia. This money could be used to establish research centers, fund pet projects or professors, and generally help direct an institution’s priorities, with few guardrails to prevent abuses or conflicts of interest.
As a predictable result, foreign funding has enabled serious security breaches and contradicted our own foreign policy goals. In 2022, for example, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, was found to have had his research building surveillance software funded by grants from both the Department of Defense and the Chinese company Alibaba, a company the Chinese government uses to surveil its Uyghur population. It hardly makes sense to adopt a forceful posture, and in the case of China, to talk of a potential war, against countries at the same time that we welcome their money into some of our most important institutions.
These numbers, however high, likely don’t tell the whole story, given the faulty management and enforcement of law around foreign payment disclosure. By Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, colleges and universities must disclose all foreign payments above $250,000 to the Department of Education, which publishes the data online. (The numbers above are based on my calculations of the data.) But the law has long suffered from lax enforcement — it’s easy for schools not to comply, without repercussions — and weak disclosure rules, which potentially allow significant funds legally to go unreported.
With growing concern about the state of our universities, now is a good time to reassess our policies regarding foreign influence in higher education and to ensure that foreign actors don’t have free rein to undermine our own institutions. As our universities’ students and presidents have made clear, we are perfectly capable of setting our educational institutions’ credibility on fire on our own, thank you very much. But why would we let our adversaries pour fuel on the fire?
For a first step toward addressing the problem, we need a better understanding of exactly what money is entering our schools. That means Congress should lower the reporting threshold for payments and require stricter enforcement of the law on the part of the Department of Education.
In December, the House of Representatives passed a bill with bipartisan support that would address both points. The DETERRENT Act, sponsored by Rep. Michelle Steel (R-CA), would lower the reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 and require all gifts to be reported from countries or entities of concern, including China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. The legislation would also require more detailed information about foreign payments and would authorize the Department of Education to penalize colleges and universities that fail to comply.
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These proposed reforms to Section 117 offer a straightforward opportunity to make progress on two salient topics at once: campus turmoil and malign foreign influence on American society. The recent legislation forcing a divestment of the Chinese app TikTok reflects a growing recognition of the folly of letting foreign competitors control the dissemination of ideas throughout the country. Our universities are just as important as social media platforms for shaping the public opinion of the future, and their funding deserves a similar level of scrutiny.
Unmonitored foreign money in our schools is hardly the only problem with American universities — ultimately, the insanity is coming from inside the house, so to speak. But on the politically contentious topic of higher education, foreign funding offers a bipartisan opportunity to strengthen our schools and our national security alike.
Robert Bellafiore is the research manager at the Foundation for American Innovation.