The War in Our Schoolyards
By LyLena D. Estabine
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On December 10th, 2019, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted a meeting titled “Foreign Money in U.S. Universities: Implications for Academic Freedom and National Security.” The speakers included Robert Daly, Director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States; Ted Mitchell, President of the American Council on Education; and Ben Freeman, Director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
“Foreign funding of universities... [is] behind the curve in our understanding of how foreign influence works in America right now,” cautioned Freeman.1 In the years following his warning, there have been virtually no changes in the policies regarding how universities report foreign funds. The issue has caught more attention, however, as discussions of free speech and academic freedom at US universities grow louder.2
In 2022, American schools reported over $631 million in foreign funding.3 Nearly 62% of that funding went to ten elite institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, and UPenn. These universities, along with many others, were also ranked by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) according to their support for free speech. While the average free speech score given to other institutions was about 47.13 (Average), across the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford, it was a measly 27.45 (Poor).4 While there does not seem to be a statistically significant correlation between a school’s FIRE ranking and the amount of foreign funding it receives when top-10 schools are removed from the dataset, those elite schools do show such a connection. When they are included in the overall analysis, a pattern appears: the more foreign funding a school receives, the worse its ranking is.
As such, policies that protect the academic integrity of our nation’s most elite institutions are important. Naturally, bad actors abroad want the best return on their investments—shaping the intellectual homes of our best and brightest, as well as directing their technological research, might be appealing to those wishing to weaken the United States from within. Both the magnitude of foreign dollars directed towards the Ivy League and their apparent effect on campus discussion bear out this supposition.
After all, as Freeman said in the 2019 discussion, “[w]e’d be naive to believe that this amount of money wasn’t at least designed to buy influence. That may be the Norwegian government wanting us to do more deforestation research. It’s not necessarily nefarious. But it is designed to buy influence of some sort.” Of course, Freeman is right to point out that not all foreign funding is bad. Some of that money is used for scholarships that enhance diplomacy and projects that genuinely contribute to intellectual advancement. The challenge, however, is in deciphering what funding is intended to provide leverage against institutions of higher education, especially when most of that money is coming from non-governmental sources.
In fact, while foreign governments primarily donated to non-Ivy League schools in 2022, the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford received more than double the amount of privately-sourced funding provided to all other schools combined.
China offers perhaps the most interesting example of this trend. China’s promotion of Confucius Institutes, advertised as centers for Chinese education, has been criticized because it often attempts to use the funding attached to those centers to censor discussion of topics like Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square.5 These centers are funded by the Chinese government, and what little money the Chinese government did provide was transparent: all 1.3 million dollars in 2022 government funds from China had some kind of description associated with them. Even the money going to support Confucius Institutes was labeled as such, allowing policymakers to recognize the problem they posed and take steps to address it. But most of the Chinese money being accepted by our universities does not come from its government. In fact, none of the money that was reported by the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford in 2022 came from the Chinese government. Elite schools report receiving most of their foreign money from private sources instead.
That’s precisely the problem. The potential for negative impact is greatest with private foreign funds, because the lack of transparency associated with private funding can make its influence hard to understand until it's too late. For example, at MIT, funding from a Chinese company called SenseTime—a company that’s known to use facial recognition technology to oppress China’s Uyghur Muslim population—was used by students studying neural networks.6 The school was apparently not aware of the technology’s use at the time, but if the students’ work is used by the Chinese to further their oppression, MIT is complicit due to its negligence in monitoring these funds.
That case is merely one example of a broad trend of poor documentation of the purpose of foreign funds. Of the over 47 million dollars of private Chinese funding in 2022, only 13 million dollars carried descriptions about their intended use, and those descriptions are not always helpful. For example, Columbia lists their descriptions as things like “Research” rather than describing what kind of research is being paid for. This kind of opaque reporting should be cause for concern given the vital role our universities play in creating the next generation of American leaders—their curricula and their intellectual cultures should not be shaped by America’s enemies.
The future of our discussions around foreign influence in our universities cannot ignore their private foreign funding. If our leaders do not address the influence of non-government foreign donors’ and start requiring more transparency from the institutions that take their money, we will have more than just the intellectual integrity of our nation’s elite institutions to worry about. We could be handing over the ideas and innovations our enemies need to destroy us.
EURIPIDES
A version of this article originally appeared in Home Front, the February 2024 print issue of the Salient.
Robert Daly, “Foreign Money in U.S. Universities: Implications for Academic Freedom and National Security,” Council on Foreign Relations, Dec. 10, 2019.
Zoe Gladstone, Joyce Ho, and Jenny Wang, “Unraveling China’s Attempts to Hinder Academic Freedom: Confucius Institutes,” Human Rights Foundation, Aug. 4, 2021.
Based on data in the Department of Education’s College Foreign Gift and Contract Report with a receipt date falling between 01/01/2022 and 12/31/2022.
“2024 College Free Speech Rankings,” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 2023.
Zoe Gladstone, Joyce Ho, and Jenny Wang, “Unraveling China’s Attempts to Hinder Academic Freedom: Confucius Institutes,” Human Rights Foundation, Aug. 4, 2021.
Thomas McKenna, “How MIT Helped Develop Tech for a Chinese Company That Surveils Uyghurs,” The Washington Free Beacon, Aug. 8, 2023.