Before you consider giving a gift to your alma mater, ask yourself, “Can I outmatch China’s gifts?” Chances are that China is donating to your school in amounts that would make your own contribution laughable.
From Harvard to Carnegie Mellon
In 2017, reporter Bill Gertz sounded the alarm in an article exposing $360 million in Chinese gifts to Harvard University.
By 2020, the Department of Education had uncovered “$3.6 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts”—not just from China—to schools including “Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, Texas A&M University, and Carnegie Mellon University.”
This $3.6 billion is only what was uncovered, not the total that was actually received. Schools are very cagey about donors and amounts. Although the Department of Education requires schools to report foreign gifts, they often don’t.
According to U.S. News & World Report, “ ‘The largest colleges and universities are multi-billion dollar, multi-national enterprises using opaque foundations, foreign campuses, and other sophisticated legal structures to generate revenue that is intermingled with domestic sources of funding from tuition, grants, and the like,’ Education Department officials told Congress in a preliminary report on the agency’s investigation.
“ ‘These colleges and universities actively solicit foreign governments, corporations, and nationals for funds although some donors are known to be hostile to the United States.’ ”
By last November, the situation seemed worse, with the New York Post reporting that “Over 200 US universities, including elite institutions Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have been accused of raking in $13 billion” from foreign governments, including China.
Funding ensures the academic equivalent of “good will” toward the donor.
The money described in such reports is separate from funding for the language and culture programs of the Confucius Institutes. In 2019, Politico noted that a recent “bipartisan report by a Homeland Security subcommittee [blasted] the language and cultural centers at more than 100 U.S. universities as too strictly controlled and a threat to academic freedom” and called on institutions to stop hosting the Institutes.
In September 2023, “Nicole Neily, president of the Parents Defending Education (PDE) grassroots organization, told lawmakers that their research suggested that in the past ten years, more than $17 million had been given to 143 school districts by the Confucius Classrooms initiative, across 34 states and the District of Columbia.”
When a month later, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that almost all Confucius Institutes in the U.S. had closed, it seemed to be referring to college branches only: “The number of Confucius Institutes at U.S. universities and colleges declined since 2019, from about 100 to fewer than five.”
The Parents Defending Education website presents Confucius Classrooms as active at the district level. So high schools may still be getting communist attention and cash.
The GAO report also included this important note: “Our survey of schools showed that many closed their [Confucius Institutes] because of concerns about losing federal funds.”
Donations, contracts, tuition
The Confucius Institute funding was probably reasonably low and easily offset by this or that threat to a particular federal subsidy. The non-CI defunding could be more problematic. If the foreign governments’ college cookie jar is filled with $13 billion (or more), it would take a lot of threatened federal cuts to push foreign funding out of the picture. And the more fed funds that might be cut, the less control D.C. would have over what is taught or researched—a disincentive for Washington.
Programs, gifts and donations are just part of the problem. Another part, Fox News observes, is contracts: “China-based entities, including the Chinese government, secured $120 million in contracts with American colleges in 2021…. The Chinese institutions entered into agreements ranging from $105,000 to $31 million with more than two dozen universities, a search of the College Foreign Gift and Contract Report database shows.”
The kind of deals China puts on the table includes joint ventures with Chinese schools. “Chris Stipes, the director of media relations for the University of Houston, told Fox News that [their] contract is between Houston and Dalian Maritime University in China. The two schools combined forces to form the Dalian Maritime University International Institute.”
Chinese tuition-paying students are another source of income to colleges, and the presence of these students on campus allows pressure at all levels, including on students and speakers.
“At Brandeis University near Boston,” ProPublica reported in 2021, “Chinese students mobilized last year to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling ‘bullshit’ and ‘fake news’ over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.” Just one incident among others.
As long as “colleges and universities actively solicit foreign governments, corporations, and nationals for funds,” money will talk and reporting to the DOE will walk. Tax donations by foreign government or even outlaw them. Criminalize failure to report. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
Also see:
The New York Sun: “Congress Weighs Bill To Cut Funding to American Universities From Communist China, Iran, and Qatar”
“The bill, awaiting approval in the Senate after passing the House in December, seeks to restore transparency and accountability in foreign donations granted to American universities. It would toughen requirements for foreign gifts by cutting the threshold for reporting by colleges and universities to $50,000 from $250,000, with an even stricter $0 threshold for countries of concern, including Communist China, Iran, and Qatar.”
