Republicans in Congress plan to increase pressure on major universities to fully disclose how they receive billions of dollars from shady foreign sources and explain whether these countries seek to influence the American college experience with a strong dose of leftism and anti-Israel. propaganda, The Post has learned.
The expected move follows a bombshell report released last week showing that billions of dollars “from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian,” including those in the Middle East, are wasting the budgets of our elite schools.
The report claims there is a correlation between where the money was spent and anti-Semitic activity on campus.
According to my sources on Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers also believe that these foreign donations are at the heart of the increasingly radical pedagogy at these hallowed universities, a factor that contributes to the disgusting displays by student groups at these schools celebrating the brutal Hamas terrorist attack on October 7. Attacks on Jews near Gaza.
Why foreign countries like Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates care so much about American higher education is an obvious question. One answer: Many students from those countries attended American universities.
However, you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that places like Qatar and China, in particular, would want to use university classrooms to promote their strategic interests, which don’t actually align with ours.
Qatar, for example, is nominally a US ally, but is also home to the Hamas leadership.
China is, well, China, and that has many Republican lawmakers concerned that both countries are using their influence at elite universities for nefarious purposes.
“Congress will put pressure on universities to show how much money comes from these types of sources,” said a Wall Street executive involved in the matter.
The House recently introduced legislation for greater disclosure of foreign contributions to American universities; hearings are a possibility.
What do they get?
“Legislators also want to know what countries get in exchange for their investments,” the executive added.
The executive says many in Congress believe that universities that accept this foreign money may also be evading the law.
Universities must disclose sources of donations that cumulatively reach $250,000 or more.
But many don’t, he says, at least not in a timely manner.
Additionally, universities often do not provide complete information about donor identities.
The Network Contagion Research Institute’s report on the flow of foreign cash to American campuses found that, from 2015 to 2020, “institutions that accepted money from Middle Eastern donors had, on average, 300% more anti-Semitic incidents than those that they didn’t do it. “
Not surprisingly, UPenn, the source of massive anti-Semitic protests after October 7, was high on the list of recipients of funds from these suspicious sources, but it wasn’t the only one.
According to the report: “Eight Ivy League schools were disproportionately represented in the institutions with the most funding coming from what it called “undocumented” backgrounds.
Among them, “Cornell (2nd) and Harvard (3rd), Yale (6th), Stanford (14th), Columbia (16th), and the University of Pennsylvania (18th), ranked in the top twenty overall.”
Does such funding lead to weaponizing academic expertise to produce anti-Semitic monsters?
Paul Kamenar, an attorney at the National Legal and Policy Center, makes a case that does prove this.
“The money goes to the schools that finance the teachers and their programs that are far left,” he tells me.
“Schools get various grants to teach students from a left-wing perspective.”
Following the money should yield some interesting results.
In 2020, Kamenar’s organization made a surprising dive into funding a think tank known as the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
A “think tank” named after Sleepy Joe Biden is almost comical; What’s not funny is UPenn’s curious source of funding after the center’s creation: communist China, the same country that crushes dissent of all kinds, engages in religious persecution, and has imperialist ambitions.
Coincidence?
Maybe, but Kamenar says his group’s research found some disturbing coincidences.
As millions of dollars of Chinese money flowed into UPenn, Penn Biden began inviting Chinese government officials as speakers at his conferences.
A conference during the early days of COVID glossed over China’s role in the spread and likely creation of the deadly virus that led to a global pandemic, instead bizarrely focusing on Hungary’s supposedly xenophobic reaction in restricting the entry of citizens Chinese to the country.
Of course, leftism masquerading as academic freedom has been a problem for some time.
For years, universities have demeaned courses on Western civilization, calling them remnants of an educational system run by dead (and racist) white men.
They were replaced by increasingly conscious basic requirements.
Syracuse University is typical of the radicalization of the college learning experience.
Its so-called “course requirement” for undergraduates includes classes on “Magic and Religion,” “Gender in a Globalized World,” and “Popular Culture in the Middle East.”
Try not to laugh when talking about that study load, but there’s an Orwellian quality to what passes for an academic experience these days.
Those soft themes also include brainwashing into leftist, anti-American and anti-Israel dogma, critics say.
