Harvard, Cornell, and MIT routinely conceal millions in donations from the Gulf states, China, and Russia.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made a well-publicized visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard in March 2018, touting multi-million dollar partnerships between the Saudi government and those elite universities.
Traveling in the crown prince’s entourage was Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a diplomatic official who appeared to be acting as a bodyguard. Six months later, Mutreb would coordinate the killing of Saudi citizen and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Saudi officials wanted to take Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia. However, Mutreb told his team that if Khashoggi resisted, “we will kill him here and get rid of the body,” according to recordings obtained by Turkish intelligence. Around 15 Saudi agents subsequently executed Khashoggi and dismembered his corpse with a buzz saw.
Mutreb “had engaged with members of the M.I.T. community” during the crown prince’s visit, associate provost Richard Lester told the New York Times in June 2019. Lester said it was “an unwelcome and unsettling intrusion into our space, even though evident only in retrospect.”
This is but one example of the compromising situations American universities find themselves in when partnering with foreign nations. While governments of allies such as England, Germany, and Italy all donate directly to U.S. colleges, roughly one-third of declared foreign funds come from nations that abuse human rights on a massive scale.
Following a series of investigations by the U.S. Department of Education, various universities reported receiving $6.6 billion in recent years from countries including Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Education Department said it “believes this amount is a fraction of the true total,” and that these funds could be considered a “national security risk.”
Universities that receive donations from foreign governments are among the most elite U.S. educational institutions, and include Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Texas A&M, Cornell, and MIT, among others. According to Education Department records reviewed by the Clarion Project, between 2012 and 2019 Harvard has disclosed donations of $79,272,834 from China, $7,077,754 from Qatar, and $30,637,202 from Saudi Arabia. MIT has disclosed $83,358,344 in donations from Russia, $31,472,548 from China, and $83,100,000 from Saudi Arabia.
But these amounts represent only the tip of the iceberg of actual contributions because universities have tried to conceal a substantial amount of those donations, as Ryan Mauro, director of the Clarion Intelligence Network, said in an interview with National Review. For example, Cornell University disclosed the donations only after the Education Department began an investigation into the issues, and the university said it did not know why the funds were not reported in the first place.
“In many of these cases, especially when it comes to China, they simply don’t want the information out there. They want to get the Communist Chinese money, set up a program that then increases their tuition, get students to sign up for it, and then they make bank,” Mauro said. “It’s basically loads of free money, and it’s hard for a business to turn down a deal like that.”
Much of the funding from foreign actors can be impossible to trace if universities don’t report the donations. Current rules require that universities inform the Education Department of any donation exceeding $250,000 from a foreign government, but countries can sidestep this rule by routing money through charities or nonprofits, essentially disguising the funds as a private donation. Universities do not have to disclose foreign government donations of less than $250,000.
“What’s really disturbing for me is for a parent of a student or a student to sign up for a class, [where] they’re not notified about the product they’re buying,” Mauro said. “If you buy a supplement at a store, there are warning labels. There are no warning labels when you sign up for a college campus class as to who is funding that professor, and how that may be influencing the education you’re buying.”
The purposes of these donations can vary from project to project. In the case of China, the goals are espionage, intellectual-property theft, and the laundering of propaganda to an audience of future American elites. China’s most well-known attempts at projecting propaganda on U.S. campuses are its Confucius Institutes, which ostensibly seek to spread knowledge of Chinese language and culture but which the FBI has identified as projectors of “soft power.”
In addition to the money taken in by universities, many professors never disclose the Chinese funding they receive directly. Most recently, Song Guo Zheng, 58, a former professor of internal medicine at Ohio State University, pleaded guilty to hiding funding from the Chinese government in applications for U.S. government research grants. Zheng used “$4.1 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health to develop Chinese expertise in the areas of rheumatology and immunology,” according to a Justice Department press release. In above-board funds, Ohio State has disclosed $2,396,592 in Chinese government donations to the university from 2012 to 2019.
The Gulf Arab states have slightly different motivations, aiming to build strategic partnerships with the U.S. in part through education and research. This is especially true of Qatar, which hedges its strategy of funding Hamas and Hezbollah, and allying with Iran, by partnering with the U.S. military, most notably in operating the Al Udeid air base. Qatar has also attempted to deepen its relationship with the U.S. by establishing “Education City” in the capital of Doha, which hosts the campuses of six leading American universities, among them Northwestern and Georgetown.
Qatar has given Northwestern University at least $343 million from 2012 through 2019. In 2013, Northwestern’s Qatar branch signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Jazeera, the Qatari government’s media mouthpiece. The memorandum explicitly states that Northwestern in Qatar “will conduct consultations with Al Jazeera leadership based on its faculty research interests and expertise in the American media industry, as the news network moves forward with its planning for Al Jazeera America.” The university currently touts the opportunity for students to publish articles in Al Jazeera itself.
It is odd, to say the least, that an American university is advertising placing its students’ journalistic output in the pet media outlet of Qatar’s rulers. A September letter from the Justice Department referred to Al Jazeera Plus, a digital media division of the company, as “a publicity agent within the United States on behalf of the Government of Qatar.”
Disturbingly, the Department of Education’s report found also that the Qatar Foundation — a state-linked charity — had constrained an American professor’s freedom to conduct research with other Gulf Arab states. The unnamed professor had asked to clarify protocols governing his university’s ability to enter nuclear-research contracts with foreign governments. The university itself was planning to give nuclear training to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia; however, the professor was told to consult the Qatar Foundation before embarking on research agreements with those countries. (Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., as well as Bahrain and Egypt, instituted a blockade of Qatar in 2017 after a series of diplomatic incidents, so it seems that the unnamed professor and his university ran the risk of getting in the middle of that conflict.)
While the U.S. has even closer official ties to Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., these countries also attempt to project influence through educational initiatives. New York University has its own campus in Abu Dhabi, whose “core curriculum” aims to “nurture civic awareness fundamental to global citizenship and leadership by developing your abilities to grapple with the complex conceptual and ethical dimensions of global issues.” Among those “global issues” might be that the campus itself was built by South Asian migrant laborers, some of whom earned roughly $400 per month while living in shared dorms with ten or more people to a room. NYU has reported receiving $80,739,559 from the U.A.E. from 2012 through 2019.
There have been various attempts in Congress to increase university transparency regarding sources of foreign funding. In June of this year, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Safeguarding American Innovation Act (SAIT), which lowers the threshold for reporting foreign donations to universities from $250,000 to $50,000 and strengthens visa requirements to deny foreign nationals access to sensitive technologies. The legislation was written by Senators Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Tom Carper (D., Del.), and has received over a dozen cosponsors.
SAIT has not yet been approved by Congress, however, because the bill was folded into Republicans’ latest coronavirus relief package (the HEALS Act), and the Senate and House are currently deadlocked in negotiations over that relief. Groups representing American universities have also lobbied against the new legislation, saying restrictions on foreign students could stymie research innovation.
“Some of our research universities are not just naïve,” Senator Portman said in June. However, when it comes to foreign sources of funding, “sometimes they want to look the other way.”