Colleges Lobby Biden to Halt Federal Probe Into Foreign Donations

Education Dept. investigation has already found $6.5 billion in unreported gifts

Top universities are already lobbying the incoming Biden administration to reverse a Trump-administration policy that required colleges to fully disclose foreign donations and halt investigations into alleged violations.

The American Council on Education (ACE), a lobbying group led by former Obama-administration official Ted Mitchell, is asking President-elect Joe Biden to "halt expanded reporting requirements" for contracts and foreign donations to universities. ACE represents nearly all of the major universities in the country, including top Democratic donors such as Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of California system. The council called for federal regulators to abandon ongoing investigations into university coffers despite revelations that top universities hid billions of dollars in donations from foreign powers.

"The Department’s response to instances of insufficient institutional reporting should have focused on reporting remediation to enhance the intended transparency rather than launching investigations," the group said in a Nov. 18 letter to Biden.

The Education Department's push to shed light on university ties to foreign donors is one of the major achievements of the Trump administration, one which has irritated top colleges, which receive the lion's share of foreign gifts. In the last four years, the department launched several probes into Harvard, MIT, Georgetown, and other top schools, uncovering more than $6.5 billion in unreported foreign gifts.

Reed Rubinstein, a senior Education Department official who spearheaded the push for greater disclosure, said that universities are "not fans of what we've done" and have deployed considerable political capital to resist the oversight effort.

"I mean honestly, the industry's reaction is just so distressing," Rubinstein told the Washington Free Beacon. "From the university associations, the business mouthpieces, the opposition has been intense. They have vigorously lobbied Congress and the executive branch to try and shut down our efforts."

The probe helped uncover millions of dollars in university donations from unsavory sources such as Huawei, a Chinese tech giant widely considered a national security threat. The department has also made publicly available all reported foreign donations to U.S. universities, allowing for public scrutiny. The Washington Free Beacon used the public dataset to uncover that the Chinese military-industrial complex has funneled $88 million to U.S. universities.

The oversight effort, however, was not welcomed by universities. Nearly 50 other higher-education special interest groups signed onto the ACE letter, making it an impressive show of force by the nation's top universities, which represent a major constituent group for the Democratic Party.

American universities are one of the most partisan donor groups in the country. The education industry spent about $312 million on the 2020 elections, with 90 percent of money going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The lop-sided donations make universities more partisan than other core Democratic constituents such as public sector unions.

Individual colleges have also lobbied against legislation that would force greater transparency in university financing. Yale University spent $110,000 in the third quarter of 2020 in lobbying in part to oppose the America FIRST Act, which would require colleges to "disclose gifts from foreign sources in the publications of certain professors and affiliates."

As education groups redouble their outreach campaign, the Department of Education has sent out a flurry of new regulatory proposals, letters to congressional allies, and investigative inquiries into universities to cement its legacy in the last days of the Trump administration. The new regulatory proposals would require American universities to disclose the original contracts that they signed with foreign donors to the Department of Education, while the letters to Congress told legislators there is still much work to be done.

Rubinstein said higher education groups will have a difficult time undoing the Trump administration's transparency efforts in the face of both Democrats and Republicans who increasingly see foreign donations as a threat to academic freedom and national security.

"A lot of that work is being done at the career level, not the political level. So presumably, it would be extremely difficult for any administration now to come in and try to make all of that cease, even if they wanted to," Rubinstein said. "But I don't know what the Biden folks will do."

How Hostile Foreign Actors Subvert American Universities
Frontpagemagazine ^ | Dec 7, 2020 | Raymond Ibrahim
FR Posted on 12/7/2020, 9:56:17 AM by SJackson
Can you guess where the billions of unreported “donations” come from?

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article first appeared on the Gatestone Institute

A recent governmental report exposes the “purchased” influence foreign nations have on America’s most prestigious universities and, as a result, on what America’s current and upcoming generations of analysts and policymakers think and believe.

More than one-third of the nearly $20 billion in foreign donations and contracts made to American universities between just 2014 and 2020 were never disclosed as required by federal law, according to “Institutional Compliance with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965,” a Department of Education report released on October 20, 2020.
Among those “gifts” were more than $3 billion from the Muslim Brotherhood’s number one state backer, Qatar; more than $1.1 billion from the chief disseminator of “radical” Islamic ideology, Saudi Arabia; and nearly $1.5 billion from China.

According to the report:
[A]t least some of these foreign sources are hostile to the United States and are targeting their investments (i.e., ‘gifts’ and ‘contracts’) to project soft power, steal sensitive and proprietary research, and spread propaganda. Yet, the Department is very concerned by evidence suggesting the higher education industry’s solicitation of foreign sources has not been appropriately or effectively balanced or checked by the institutional controls needed to meaningfully measure the risk and manage the threat posed by a given relationship, donor, or foreign venture.

This new report follows earlier initiatives. In March 2019, an event described as a “Three-Day Anti-Israel Hate-Fest,” was sponsored by the University of North Carolina’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies and the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies. Following this event, the Department of Education warned the Consortium, in a letter dated August 29, 2019, to stop misusing federal grants by advancing “ideological priorities.”

According to the letter: The Duke-UNC CMES appears to lack balance as it offers very few, if any, programs focused on the historic discrimination faced by, and current circumstances of, religious minorities in the Middle East, including Christians, Jews, Baha’is, Yadizis, Kurds, Druze, and others. Also, in your activities for elementary and secondary students and teachers, there is a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or any other religion or belief system in the Middle East. This lack of balance of perspectives is troubling.

Similarly, a 2018 report found that “elite U.S. universities took more than half a billion dollars” from Saudi Arabia in gifts and donations between 2011 and 2017; as far back as 2005, Georgetown and Harvard each received $20 million “to support Islamic studies on their respective campuses.”
Here the question arises: why would nations such as Saudi Arabia — which treats women like chattel, teaches Muslims to hate all non-Muslims, arrests and tortures Christians “plotting to celebrate Christmas“; a nation that has crack units dedicated to apprehending witches and warlocks — why would it become a leading financial supporter of America’s liberal arts?

The answer seems to be so that foreign donors can influence what students are taught about the Middle East and Islam. The new report’s concerns, for example, regarding Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which are paradigmatic of its overall concerns, are worth quoting at length:

[T]he Center could advance Islamic ideology in a fashion that belittles opposition, threatens academic integrity, and improperly influences future civil servants. The Center also received criticism for deceptively labeling itself as pluralistic; according to critics, the ‘Christian’ studies portion of the Center was a ‘misnomer’ as there was no Christian representation. Additional worries spawned from Saudi Arabian infiltration of an institution commonly known to siphon graduates into government employment. Such concerns were salient because the Saudi Arabians had communicated that their money would ‘follow’ the Center’s first Director. This strategy of funding a particular director [John Esposito] is concerning, as it would allow a foreign government unduly to guide the Center’s content.
This donation empowered the Saudi Arabian government to advance a particular narrative about Islamic society to the West via a legitimate Western institution like Georgetown University…..

The Saudi Arabian government had successfully impacted American foreign policy thinking through money alone. The Saudi Arabian government invested significantly into the dissemination of its favored ideological views at Georgetown University and several other U.S. academic institutions. Prince Alwaleed has made considerable international donations and has conducted similar soft power operations by creating Islamic studies centers at the University of Cambridge and Edinburgh University located in the United Kingdom, for examples. Prince Alwaleed’s controversial and political past, ranging from anti-Zionism to handsomely rewarding Saudi Arabians who participated in Yemen bombing raids, shadows him and his donations.
Prince Alwaleed’s agreement with Georgetown exemplifies how foreign money can advance a particular country’s worldview within U.S. academic institutions — influence that has often remained undisclosed to American taxpayers as required by Section 117.

While raking in and failing to report on these billions in foreign “gifts,” these same universities “depend on direct and indirect subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, including through Federal student loans that have encumbered Americans with staggering debt loads, to operate,” the report states. Even so, “the evidence suggests institutional decision-making is generally divorced from any sense of obligation to our taxpayers or concern for our American national interests, security, or values.”

In all spheres of life, education is an indicator of the potential for success; its opposite, ignorance — or worse, indoctrination in falsehoods — is an indicator of potential failure. The reason U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has traditionally tended towards disaster may partly be — in addition to the elixir of wishful thinking — because policymakers and the advisors and analysts on whom they rely are products of programs in which benefactors are hostile to the United States.

WHYY-TV reported the University of Pennsylvania made a $100 million contribution to the School District of Philadelphia,
Is the U of Penn's donation Chinese money? Are they getting rid of evidence?

Two weeks after the University of Pennsylvania made a $100 million contribution to the School District of Philadelphia, it’s unlikely the cash infusion will inspire copycat donations from major higher education peers in the city. When the Ivy League school made its announcement, City Councilmember Helen Gym and others voiced hope that other universities with large landholdings, like Temple or Drexel, might also pony up.

“I certainly hope that some of our strongest civic institutions can see beyond their individual acts of charity and generosity,” she wrote in a statement. “When universities and our major nonprofits, who have long been invested in education and public health, unite on a mission to invest in our schools, we send a clear message to Harrisburg and to Washington, D.C. that we are invested in our future.” (Excerpt) Read more at whyy.org ...

If the label says “Biden,” it was definitely influenced by China. – John Solomon at JustTheNews.com is reporting that The National Legal and Policy Center has asked the U.S. Department of Education to investigate its findings that the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) has over the past several years accepted more than $22 million in anonymous China-originated donations to its Biden Center and failed to properly disclose the contributions.

From Solomon’s report: The complaint, filed by the National Legal and Policy Center, says that over the past three years, the university has accepted around $22 million in anonymous funding from Chinese sources. That’s out of a total of more than $70 million from Chinese donors during that time, the NLPC said. Those significant funds, including the anonymous amounts, rolled in after the Biden Center was announced in early 2017 and launched in February 2018. The center is located in downtown Washington, D.C. Federal records show that the University of Pennsylvania has received significant donations from China since the opening of the center.

One 2018 donation alone totals $14.5 million; it is listed as “anonymous” in federal records. The NLPC alleges the university may have violated federal law in accepting those anonymous monetary donations. The Higher Education Act mandates schools report the national origins of any donations above $250,000 although not necessarily the individual names of donors themselves. [End]

This serves as just one more reminder that Biden, his son and his brother have long been in the pockets of Chinese interests. The stark reality facing our country today is that, should Biden manage to win the election in November, all of the gains President Donald Trump has made through the sheer force of his will in terms of U.S./China relations and trade policy will be immediately reversed the day after Biden assumes office.

If you like the fact that virtually all U.S. antibiotics and PPE are sourced through China at some point along their supply chains and want it to stay that way, vote for Biden. Because that would be a fait accompli should he win. There are trillions of dollars at stake, and Creepy Uncle Quid Pro China Joe wants to ensure his family continues to get its fair share.

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