House Committee Moves to Tighten up on Foreign Gifts to Universities, Colleges

The Confucius Institute building on the campus of Troy University, in Troy, Ala., on March 16, 2018. Kreeder13/Wikimedia Commons

A House committee has approved a bill that would further regulate foreign financial gifts to American universities and levy hefty fines against those who fail to comply.

A bipartisan majority of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce voted on Nov. 7 to approve the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act.

Committee chairwoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said that the bill was necessary to counter the increasing malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and other adversarial powers.

“What we know is happening in institutions all around the country is that countries like China, Qatar, maybe even Iran … give money to the universities,” Ms. Foxx told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

“And when they do that, we know they’re not doing it innocently or for nothing in return.”

Wary of Chinese Funding Sources

Foreign funding at American universities has become a key topic of concern since 2019 when a Department of Education investigation found more than $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign gifts to American universities.

Many of those gifts were made by entities with ties to adversarial powers including China, Iran, and Russia.

Sometimes, the funds were leveraged as part of a wider strategy to infiltrate U.S. universities in order to gain access to valuable research or else affect public perception among America’s elite.

Such was the case with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Confucius Institutes, which were funded in part by the regime’s propaganda wing and served as a backdoor means of proliferating pro-communist sentiment on college campuses under the guise of cultural exchange.

Other universities persisted in attempts to profit from lucrative government research grants while also maintaining ambiguous ties to authoritarian regimes.

Such was the case with Alfred University in New York which, until earlier this year, simultaneously received funding from the Pentagon for hypersonic weapons research and partnered with a university in China that conducted similar research for the CCP.

Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) said that academic leadership up to this point had failed to resist an “internal attack” within their institutions against American taxpayers.

“Since 2015, U.S. colleges and universities have received more than $1 billion in gifts and contracts from Chinese Communist Party-affiliated sources,” Mr. Owens said.

“The Chinese [communist] regime is spreading anti-democracy and anti-American propaganda by funneling large sums of money into higher education.”

Lowering the Threshold

The DETERRENT Act aims to get ahead of the trend by amending the 1965 Higher Education Act.

The bill would lower the threshold for mandatory reporting of foreign payments from $250,000 to $50,000. Similarly, it would mandate that all gifts received from a country of concern be reported, no matter how small.

Likewise, it would require the disclosure of foreign gifts at some key research institutions all the way down to the level of individual faculty members.

Committee member Michelle Steele (R-Calif.) said that the bill was necessary to curb the malign influence of rival powers at America’s schools.

“This bill will protect students and academic institutions from malign foreign influence. We know our foreign adversaries love to hide in the shadows,” Ms. Steele said.

“Ignoring foreign influence at our institutions will hurt not only today’s students but also future generations.”

Still, not all were happy with the bill.

Some among the Democrat minority expressed concern that the language of the bill could be used to target the Asian-American community or otherwise cast doubt on the reputations of everyday working people.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) described the bill as “dangerous, xenophobic, and unworkable,” saying that it would “increase racial profiling and hate” against Asian-Americans.

She also expressed concern that academics who received foreign gifts would have their transactions presented alongside those related to malign activities, impugning their reputation regardless of whether they had done anything wrong.

“If an American researcher accepted something as trivial as a cup of coffee from a researcher in China, they would be required to put their name and address into an online database,” Ms. Jayapal said.

For her part, Ms. Foxx said that universities would need to be held to the same standard as any American citizen, who is expected to report all foreign gifts if they total more than about $18,000.

“It is not a radical idea that universities should be held to the same standard as the American people,” Ms. Foxx said. “We deserve to know which countries are paying for influence on college campuses.”

“At a time when our adversaries are emboldened, this committee must stand firm.”

NTD’s Steve Lance and Melina Wisecup contributed to this report.

A previous version incorrectly stated the committee as a Senate panel. It is the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Epoch Times regrets this error.