This piece originally appeared in The Hill.
The recent congressional testimonies of university presidents before the House of Representatives have brought attention to the risks of antisemitism on campus. Following the money is an obvious next step to see how this problem has grown: U.S. colleges and universities have received billions from Qatar over the years, and Qatari money has been shown to correlate with antisemitic incidents on campus. A recent study from the Network Contagion Research Institute revealed how institutions that took money from Middle Eastern countries faced an average of 300 percent more antisemitic incidents on their campuses.
But the harm to American higher education goes beyond Qatar and antisemitism. We need to take a closer look at what money is coming into our universities from other countries — especially China and Russia — and the other consequences it can have. Chinese contributions often correlate with the campus censorship of ethnic minorities such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, and Chinese contributions have even led to scientific espionage. Qatari money has also led to censorship on campus: multiple universities with Qatari campuses have caved to Qatari demands for demands for censorship. And in the case of Russia, even before MIT kicked the Russian Skolkovo Foundation off campus following the Russia-Ukraine war, the FBI had expressed concern that the Foundation was engaging in scientific espionage.
We only know about these contributions because of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Section 117 mandates that postsecondary institutions report foreign contributions they receive above $250,000 to the Department of Education. A recent update in the Section 117 database provides complete data for 2022 and partial data for 2023, offering new insights into what money is coming into our education system. Overall contributions seem to have declined since the pandemic — from roughly $4 billion in 2019 to roughly $1 billion both in 2021 and 2022. However, given that colleges and universities have historically not fully complied with Section 117, there is a strong chance that they are not reporting all their contributions. Because reporting contribution data is done voluntarily, the Department of Education has limited enforcement power to make these institutions properly report their contributions.
