The Biden administration is not doing enough to punish universities that fail to disclose donations from countries with adversarial regimes.
The Biden administration is letting American universities break federal law by underreporting the money they receive from foreign donors. Since Biden took office, universities have failed to disclose at least $1 billion in foreign donations. Worse still, these unreported funds were disproportionately from authoritarian regimes such as those in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
These are the latest findings of my new research, published by the National Association of Scholars. Universities are required by law to report foreign funds worth at least $250,000 per calendar year to the Department of Education. But when the Trump administration investigated a dozen elite universities in 2019, it turned out they had neglected to report more than $6.5 billion from countries such as China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. As a result, universities were under a harsh magnifying glass, and for a while it seemed like reporting would be taken more seriously.
But even in the years after the Trump administration’s investigations, I found that universities continued to evade the law. For instance, a handful of universities across the country didn’t report millions of dollars they received from Chinese company ByteDance for race-based scholarship funds. I wanted to see just how much universities continued to evade the law.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the National Review Online (paywall)
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Neetu Arnold is a Paulson Policy Analyst at the Manhattan Institute.
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