Confucius says the Biden administration seems not to care about corrupt foreign influences on American society.
Alas, that’s no joke.
Biden’s Education Department plans to end all remaining investigations into foreign donations to American universities, even as experts say China continues to use “Confucius Institutes,” Chinese-backed cultural centers on college campuses, for academic and economic espionage and intellectual property theft.
The Trump administration wisely opened at least 19 so-called “ Section 117 investigations ” into such foreign (not just Chinese) gifts to see if schools were avoiding legally mandated reporting requirements that are intended to guard against foreign corruption. Already, the Biden administration had shut down the “China Initiative ” that targeted actions of the (misnamed) People’s Republic, and, as reported by National Review’s Jimmy Quinn, has looked the other way as universities drastically reduced their reporting of all foreign gifts.
And now, Biden is shutting down all such inquiries under Section 117 while moving oversight of compliance from the Education Department’s legal team to its financial aid office. --->READ MORE HERE
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| Jason Lee/Reuters |
The Biden administration is reportedly planning to roll back Trump-era investigations into U.S. universities’ foreign donations, a move that is likely to trigger a congressional response as Republicans prepare a China-focused legislative onslaught.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday on the Department of Education’s plans to wind down investigations into all remaining inquiries into the sources of foreign funding in higher education. Department officials, according to the report, have informed trade groups representing universities of the plan. In one letter to the department in August, Terry Hartle, an executive with the American Council of Education, referenced that the department had conveyed that it “plans to close the outstanding section 117 investigations that remain open,” referring to the legislative provision on foreign funds that requires universities to disclose foreign gifts of $250,000 or more.
The American Council on Education had asked the incoming Biden administration, in a letter addressed to Biden in November 2020, to review and potentially terminate the Section 117 investigations, which it characterized as “politically motivated.”
Unsurprisingly, Beijing’s influence is front of mind for the administration’s critics. Universities’ self-reporting of foreign gifts has declined significantly during the Biden administration. After Department of Education records showed that universities reported only a bit over $4 million in foreign gifts throughout part of 2021, compared with over $1.5 billion between July 2020 and January 2021, Representative Mike Gallagher expressed concern that the administration “may have relaxed its enforcement standards” and “thrown the Chinese Communist Party an important lifeline.” --->READ MORE HERE
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