US investigating Harvard, Yale over alleged China, Saudi Arabia secret funding
By Dow Jones Newswires February 13, 2020;

The Education Department opened investigations into Harvard and Yale as part of a continuing review that has found U.S. universities failed to report at least $6.5 billion in foreign funding from countries such as China and Saudi Arabia, according to department materials viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The investigations into the Ivy League schools are the latest in a clash between U.S. universities and a coalition of federal officials including law enforcement, research funders such as the National Institutes of Health and Defense and Energy Departments, and a bipartisan group in Congress that has raised concerns about the reliance of higher-education institutions on foreign money, particularly from China.

A Harvard spokesman said the university is working on a response. A Yale spokeswoman didn’t immediately have a comment.

The Education Department described higher-education institutions in the U.S., in a document viewed by the Journal, as “multi-billion dollar, multi-national enterprises using opaque foundations, foreign campuses, and other sophisticated legal structures to generate revenue.”

Officials accused schools of actively soliciting money from foreign governments, companies and nationals known to be hostile to the U.S. and potentially in search of opportunities to steal research and “spread propaganda benefitting foreign governments,” according to the document.

In addition, while the department said it has found foreign money generally flows to the country’s richest universities, “such money apparently does not reduce or otherwise offset American students’ tuition costs,” the document said.

U.S. officials say China uses a variety of means to target academia, including government-funded talent recruitment programs such as the Thousand Talents Plan. The arrest last month of the chairman of Harvard’s chemistry department on federal charges of lying about receiving millions of dollars in Chinese funding through the program while the U.S. shelled out more than $15 million to fund his research group catapulted the issue into the spotlight.

In a letter to Harvard dated Feb. 11 and posted on the Education Department website, officials cited the recent Justice Department case and asked the school to disclose records of gifts or contracts involving the governments of China, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. It also requested records regarding telecommunications giants Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. of China; the Kaspersky Lab and Skolkovo Foundation of Russia; and the Alavi Foundation of Iran, among others.

https://gellerreport.com/2020/02/ivy-lea...ign-gvmts.html/

'Scratching the surface': Education Department uncovers $1.3B in foreign university funding
by Jerry Dunleavy
December 10, 2019 07:00 AM

An Education Department investigation revealed universities failed to report more than a billion dollars in foreign funding, which officials believe is only a sliver of the unreported overseas donations flowing onto campuses.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told the Washington Examiner she had launched a preliminary investigation into six universities but already turned up an alarming $1.3 billion in foreign funding over the past seven years from nations such as China, Russia, and Qatar that the schools hadn’t told the federal government about, despite their legal requirement to do so.

“It is already a reporting requirement for schools to report all foreign contributions. From my perspective, it’s a simple requirement: Report all foreign money you get.” DeVos said. “We’re going to continue to raise the flag on this, and we think, just given what we’ve seen scratching the surface, there’s a lot there that has gone undetected.”

DeVos said foreign funding is an administration-wide national security concern.

"We’re raising this issue and letting schools know that we’re going to be paying attention in ways that hasn’t happened before,” she said.

In a seven-page letter to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the Education Department said the six investigations, still in their early stages, have revealed what acting general counsel Reed Rubinstein called "disturbing facts.” Rubinstein did not name the universities associated with each finding, citing the department's general policy not to comment on the status or results of current investigations. But the universities under review are Georgetown, Texas A&M, Cornell, Rutgers, the University of Maryland, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

China’s secretive influence on campus figured most prominently.

“One university received research funding from a Chinese multinational conglomerate to develop new algorithms and advance biometric security techniques for crowd surveillance capabilities,” Rubinstein said.

China has developed advanced surveillance technology, often with international funding from U.S. companies. The country has drawn attention for its capabilities during recent high-profile incidents such as pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and surveillance of the country's Muslim minority population, especially ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang province, where 1 million or more have been sent to reeducation camps.

The Education Department investigation also revealed five of the six universities had or have contacts with Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications company that the U.S. intelligence community deemed a national security threat, the FCC banned from federal broadband subsidies, and the Justice Department is prosecuting for allegedly evading sanctions, stealing trade secrets, and obstructing justice.

The investigation also showed one university had multiple contracts with the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee, and one university also received gifts from a foundation “suspected of acting as a propaganda and influence front” for the Chinese government. Another promotes a Thousand Talents Program, which the FBI deems a Chinese form of “nontraditional espionage," through a Chinese company with close ties to China’s government.

And China wasn't the only country of concern. The investigation showed one university had a relationship with Kaspersky Lab, a Russia-based cybersecurity company whose products the Trump administration has banned government agencies from using amid concerns it worked with Russian intelligence. The attorney also cited court filings that show Qatari donations are made strategically to advance Qatari interests and that secrecy is often part of the agreement in receiving those funds.

“Apparently, similar provisions are often part of foreign money agreements,” Rubinstein wrote. “Unfortunately, the Department cannot confirm whether donors and recipients use such provisions to justify nonreporting and nondisclosure of foreign source donations to the U.S. government and the American taxpayers.”

The investigation also revealed “one university accepted funds from the arts of a foreign government to create an ‘academic’ center expressly for the dissemination of propaganda and to conduct other ‘soft power’ information activities” without specifying the country.

“The evidence we have reviewed to date tracks congressional findings that American colleges and universes have provided unprecedented access to foreign governments, corporations, and persons without adequate oversight,” Rubinstein told the senators.

Sens. Rob Portman and Tom Carper, who lead the subcommittee, released a 109-page bipartisan report in November concluding foreign countries “seek to exploit America’s openness to advance their own national interests” and “the most aggressive of them has been China.” It revealed China used its Thousand Talents Program over the past two decades to exploit access to U.S. research labs and academic institutions. “China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain," they said, criticizing the federal government's failure to combat the problem.

“These failures continue to undermine the integrity of the American research enterprise and endanger our national security,” the senators on the subcommittee said.

The subcommittee released an initial report in February warning about foreign funding and Chinese influence both in K-12 classrooms and university campuses nationwide. The report concluded that “the Department of Education does not conduct regular oversight of U.S. schools’ compliance with required foreign gift reporting.” In response, the Education Department sent letters in May to the roughly 3,700 universities, reminding them of their “important obligations” under the law.

The department then pushed for further details from six universities this summer. The Federal Register shows the Department of Education sent letters to Georgetown and Texas A&M in June, Cornell and Rutgers in July, and the University of Maryland and MIT in September, expressing concern that reporting done by the universities “may not fully capture” all their foreign funding.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/...tries-on-campus