Four years after landmark reports by the Trump Department of Education and the Clarion Project revealed billions of dollars in foreign money were flowing into American universities — much of it from hostile powers such as China — a new study from the National Association of Scholars (NAS) revealed that the “flow of foreign money from adversarial countries into our universities” has continued.
The NAS report, entitled Shadows of Influence: Uncovering Hidden Foreign Funds to American Universities, suggests that huge amounts of undisclosed foreign funding might be one reason for the shockingly large pro-Hamas movement that erupted on American campuses after the October 7 atrocity.
“When American college students stump for foreign terrorist organizations and authoritarian governments, we must wonder where and how they receive such propaganda. The hundreds of millions spent by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, and Russia are a good place to begin the search,” NAS said.
Report author Neetu Arnold pointed to heavy funding from Qatar as a “focal point behind the spread of pro-Hamas propaganda on American higher education campuses.”
Arnold first warned in 2022 that Qatar’s financial investments in American universities “led to compromises on freedom of expression to appease Qatar’s authoritarian government.” The Qataris are bitter foes of Israel and major backers of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israel movement.
Arnold found Qatar has donated billions of dollars to American universities, including huge donations that went unreported. Some of his research ties to the Trump Education Department’s landmark investigation in 2020, which found some universities were reporting only a fraction of the foreign money they received.
The Education Department was very lax about investigating these donations before President Donald Trump appointed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and, as soon as Trump was gone, the Biden-Harris administration went right back to ignoring the river of foreign cash.
The Biden-Harris Education Department actually shut down its foreign funding database entirely this summer.
“As a result, Americans do not know the full extent to which universities benefit from foreign funds, what those funds support, and which foreign governments influence our universities,” Arnold warned.
NAS created its own Foreign Donor Database to fill the gap, using over a hundred public records requests to compile its data, and soon discovered universities were failing to report at least a billion dollars of the $2.6 billion in foreign cash they accepted during Joe Biden’s first two years. Most of the undisclosed money came from China, Qatar, and Russia.
“Universities were not always happy to share this information with us: along the way, institutions stalled, inflated cost estimates, and claimed bogus exemptions that we successfully appealed,” Arnold reported.
“It would be unsurprising if we didn’t see any deviation from the expected reporting amount, but what we found was jaw-dropping,” she said.
“Once universities knew the Biden Department of Education would no longer investigate underreporting, some universities stopped reporting altogether,” she observed.
Arnold proposed some simple transparency reforms, such as making all donor names public and conducting regular audits of universities to ensure they are disclosing all foreign funds. She suggested giving these reforms teeth by imposing stiff fines on universities that fail to meet disclosure compliance.
Arnold said that compelling universities to disclose more of their foreign donations could “help lead the way should the desire to strengthen American security and better American education overcome the lobbying power of higher education and foreign governments.”