Some of America's leading universities have financial partnerships with or have received large donations from countries that lead the world in human rights abuses, National Review Reports.
According to the outlet, about one-third of foreign funds donated to American colleges come from countries that commit large amounts of human rights violations.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, several universities reported receiving $6.6 billion in recent years from countries including Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The Education Department said it “believes this amount is a fraction of the true total,” and that these funds could be considered a “national security risk.”
One example noted by the National Review came in March 2018 when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. During the visits, he talked up multi-million-dollar partnerships between the Saudi government and the schools. Diplomatic official Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb accompanied the prince on his visit. Just six months later, he helped coordinate the killing of Saudi citizen and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
In June 2019, associate provost at MIT Richard Lester told the New York Times that Mutreb “had engaged with members of the MIT community.” He told the newspaper it was “an unwelcome and unsettling intrusion into our space, even though evident only in retrospect.”
Other universities that receive donations from foreign nations include Stanford, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Cornell. According to Education Department records reviewed by the Clarion Project, between 2012 and 2019 Harvard has disclosed donations of $79,272,834 from China, $7,077,754 from Qatar, and $30,637,202 from Saudi Arabia. MIT has disclosed $83,358,344 in donations from Russia, $31,472,548 from China, and $83,100,000 from Saudi Arabia.
The Clarion Project focuses on the threat of extremist ideologies. Director of the Clarion Intelligence Network Ryan Mauro told National Review that schools are receiving more donations than they disclose.
“In many of these cases, especially when it comes to China, they simply don’t want the information out there. They want to get the Communist Chinese money, set up a program that then increases their tuition, get students to sign up for it, and then they make bank,” Mauro told the publication. “It’s basically loads of free money, and it’s hard for a business to turn down a deal like that.”
The magazine reports that schools often get away with not reporting foreign donations over $250,000, as required by law, by funneling the money through nonprofits or labeling them as a private donation.
“What’s really disturbing for me is for a parent of a student or a student to sign up for a class, [where] they’re not notified about the product they’re buying,” Mauro said. “If you buy a supplement at a store, there are warning labels. There are no warning labels when you sign up for a college campus class as to who is funding that professor, and how that may be influencing the education you’re buying.”
Marisa Herman ✉
Marisa Herman, a Newsmax senior reporter, focuses on major and investigative stories. A University of Florida graduate, she has more than a decade of experience as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, and websites.
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