Don’t miss Stanley Kurtz’s “Following the Foreign Money” today on NRO, an exclusive look into international-gift disclosures from American colleges and universities, which Kurtz has acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request. Take a look to see how much your alma mater receives from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, or China — you’ll find the roster of grantee institutions here, listed by state.

The next step is for alumni, current students, and college-town reporters and bloggers to do the digging to make sense of these records — the investigative-reporting equivalent of distributed computing.

For instance, wouldn’t some Columbia alums like to know how all that money from Switzerland is being used? If the gifts come from Swiss banks, we may never know who gave them — but Columbia may reveal how they’ve been spent, if enough students and alumni make enough noise about it. The answer may be totally innocent: people the world over have benefited from clinical breakthroughs developed at the Columbia University Medical Center, some of them very rich and very grateful. But the answer may be more troubling. So let’s get to work.