As Americans fight China’s land-buying spree across the US, the capture of the nation’s highest intellectual resources continues unabated. Courting foreign dollars with little regard for the compromises such dealings inevitably bring has become business as usual for American academia, and efforts to provide some urgently needed sunlight have just been dealt a setback. The online portal where US universities were required to report such massive foreign deals has been taken down.
‘Inexplicable Decision’
“Frustrated by decades of foreign gift and contract disclosure failures by America’s universities, in June 2020 the US Department of Education launched an online portal for reporting foreign source gifts and contracts valued at $250,000 or more per calendar year, as required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965,” Paul R. Moore, former chief investigative counsel at the US Department of Education, wrote for Real Clear Education. “But in June 2024, the Education Department announced that due to a ‘contract change’ it had decommissioned the reporting portal’s interactive data table for analyzing foreign funding disclosures. The Department’s inexplicable decision removed an important tool for accountability after decades of massive disclosure failures by universities."
Contract change? Does that explanation make the slightest bit of sense?
“Why did the Department create the foreign funding reporting portal? Because of widespread foreign funding disclosure failures by America’s universities,” Moore pointed out.
Let’s make it clear what is going on here. Major US universities have spent years flouting federal law as part of their ravenous pursuit of foreign money.
“Over the last decade, institutions of higher education across the United States of America received billions of dollars from foreign donors, much of which went unreported, to the US Department of Education, as required,” a 2023 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) stated. “The US Department of Education required that those institutions file reports detailing how much such funding they received and from where in accordance with regulations for foreign gift and contract reporting.”
There should be no mystery as to why colleges do not want to be upfront on this matter. An eye-popping amount of secretive cash is coming from nations hostile to America.
Billions to US Universities
“In 2019, The Department of Education uncovered billions of dollars in undocumented foreign funds contributed to American universities, with a good deal of it coming from authoritarian regimes hostile to the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights,” the NCRI report noted. In response, the Department “structured an online portal and issued a call to institutions of higher learning to report on donations from foreign regimes shown to be widespread and many were withheld in violation of federal regulations,” NCRI continued. “The institutions that received funding cumulatively … obtained a total of $15,763,675,142 from 2014-2019.”
Communist China ranked number three on the list of countries providing funding.
An accompanying table of “US Institutions Receiving the Largest Amounts of Previously Unreported Funding” reveals two Ivy League linchpins in the top two spots. Cornell University raked in $950,610,704 in “previously unreported funding,” while Yale received a tidy $376,917,577.
Who benefits from the dismantling of the foreign funding reporting portal? Prominent American universities with oversized ties to China, of course - and one very notable example has President Joe Biden’s name attached to it.
“Without the reporting portal, the media and Congress almost certainly wouldn’t have unearthed the University of Pennsylvania’s extensive financial ties with China, particularly following the January 2017 establishment of the Penn Biden Center,” Moore observed. “Nearly $130 million in ‘donations’ came from China to UPenn between 2018 and 2023, with tens of millions coming from anonymous entities and individuals, prompting an investigation by the US House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.”
As Liberty Nation News documented in May, “America’s credentialed universities are deeply unwilling to let this money spigot go.”
“Nearly 200 US colleges and universities held contracts with Chinese businesses, valued at $2.32 billion, between 2012 and 2024,” The Wall Street Journal reported in April. “The extensive trade in American expertise presents a quandary for universities and policymakers in Washington: Where’s the line between fostering academic research and empowering a US rival?”
Biden and former Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president, played a vital role in the corruption of US universities by Chinese money and influence. “Biden himself specifically encouraged the escalation” in the number of Chinese international students on US college campuses this century, LNN detailed in December 2020. “In a 2011 speech at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, he said that ‘more than [130,000] students from China attended our universities last year. We’re hoping that number will be even larger.’”
As always, transparency is key, though it’s apparently the last thing America’s leading academic institutions want to provide to the public. “The [Education] Department’s reporting portal had provided a critical search tool for Congress, the media, and taxpayers to see and analyze the often-staggering inflow of foreign funding to many of America’s most prominent research universities,” Moore wrote.
But if you’re an Ivy League titan like Cornell, and you have your hand in the communist Chinese cookie jar for close to a billion dollars and likely more, why on Earth would you want the American people to know about it?
