UNITED STATES
During the meeting of the United States House of Representatives Education Committee’s grilling of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Representative Elise Stefanik asked Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, if she was aware that Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) department had received US$1.5 billion from foreign entities and governments over the past three years.
Gay had answered several previous questions on the source of the department’s funding in one or another version of the words: “We receive funding from alumni from all over the world.” On the question of the amount, she changed tack and told the Republican congresswoman from upstate New York: “I don’t know if that’s the correct number, but that’s the number you shared.”
But the Harvard CMES figure is just the tip of the iceberg for American universities, according to Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), an NGO based at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (that identifies and forecasts threats in the age of information disorder). American universities and colleges have received US$19 billion from foreign sources that have no recorded nor reported dates of receipts, per the Department of Education (DOE) report dated 6 April 2023 on total donations to that date of US$47 billion.
In the latest DOE report dated 13 October 2023, the most up-to-date undated receipt total amount is US$22 billion, on a total of all donations to date amounting to US$51 billion.
More than 50% of this has come from authoritarian and antidemocratic Middle East governments, according to the veteran accountant hired on the recommendation of international accounting firm KPMG to verify NCRI’s data.
Continuation of a trend
The increase in the amount and extent of unreported funds by colleges – a large number, detailed below, did not surprise NCRI’s researchers because it was the continuation of a trend they and other analysts have documented dating back to before 2019.
That year, after being alerted to the fact that billions of dollars in funding from authoritarian governments, including several in the Middle East, was going largely unreported, the DoE established an online portal where universities were required to post donations, the names of donors, what the donation was for, and the dates of the projects.
Between 2014 and 2019, NCRI estimates that approximately US$7 billion of US$18 billion donated went unreported, though ‘rush-reports’ were made after the Department of Justice announced in 2019 that it was opening an investigation into the violation of Federal law by colleges and universities that had not reported.
Between 2014 and 2019, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates donated at least US$4.4 billion to numerous US colleges. Together with donations from other Middle East nations, over the five years in question, more than US$5 billion was donated to American universities from authoritarian Middle Eastern nations.
The top five universities that benefitted from these donations include Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh), which received US$1.4 billion, Cornell (US$1.2 billion), Harvard (US$894 million) and MIT (US$859 million), and Texas A&M (College Station, Texas) which received just over half a billion dollars.
The next five universities include Yale (New Haven, Connecticut), Northwestern University (near Chicago, Illinois), Johns Hopkins (Baltimore, Maryland), Georgetown (Washington, DC) and the University of Chicago, which received, US$495.8 million, US$402 million, US$401 million, US$379 million and US$364 million, respectively as of the report dated 30 March 2020.
For transparency, it should be noted that NCRI receives receives grants from the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) and the Combat Hate Foundation, according to Cause IQ. According to a
report in The Nation, the ICC has links to Israeli intelligence.
University World News interviewed the accountant quoted earlier in this article, who below is referred to as NCRI analyst No. 2, and another analyst about their findings. UWN agreed not to name either of them due to concerns for their personal safety raised by NCRI.
“Over the past three years, the rate of contributions has increased by nearly 55% since 2020. It’s not just that we have a problem, it’s becoming a force multiplier,” said NCRI analyst No 1.
“Our previous work on funding from [Middle Eastern] authoritarian regimes, much of it undocumented, and how it predicts the erosion of democratic norms and antisemitism on campus, gives us reason to suspect downstream influences from these investments,” the analyst added.
Gaps in reporting
Even more important than the eye-popping figures, as one NCRI analyst characterised them, is what the IR reveals about what it puckishly calls “The Anti-Transparency Portal”. Beginning in September 2020, the DoE stopped reporting donors’ names, according to the NCRI, and what the donation was for. Further, going forward from this report, subsequent reports did not list this historical information.
“They [the DoE] just stopped reporting them,” said NCRI analyst No 2. “I know they had them. We have them because we downloaded the information for our work. They stopped reporting them, which is very strange,” the analyst added.
The amount of historical information scrubbed from the portal, NCRI’s IR states, is more than 52,000 donor names and 4,100 dates of receipt, with no new dates added for receipts under contracts since the report dated 23 September 2020.
It’s not just that the portal has gaps, Analyst No.1 explained. Rather, if he were to go to the site now, he would have no idea what information about funds had not been reported in the past because the collection and reporting of dates of contract payments has stopped and some have actually seen to have been removed, since the report dated 23 September 2020, that totalled US$29 billion.
“I would be starting from ground zero,” said the analyst. “There’s no way of knowing because all you see is a blank lump sum starting from 2020.”
The analyst paused for a moment before continuing: “The new money we were talking about before, the US$22 billion, is in that lump sum. It’s not really traceable. We don’t know where it’s coming from. There are no donor names and all we have is the donor country.
“We don’t know where it’s going because there are no target names and there are no names of programs or details, that the money supports. And we don’t know who donated it and if the money even got there. All we now have, since 23 September 2020 are contract beginning and end dates.”
Without this information, analysts cannot measure the effects of the donations – or even know if contracts have been completed and the DoE would be unable to conduct compliance investigations.
Another NCRI official put it this way: “It’s supposed to be a transparency portal. So how can they have removed the information? There are no dates when the monies were received, just the contract and the amounts and the university. If you want to conduct an audit, as a researcher or anybody in the hierarchy, you don’t know when the money showed up in people’s bank accounts.
“So, you might say: ‘Here’s a contract for US$500 million’. You don’t know what the money was actually transferred for. When was it paid? Quarterly, over the course of a year? Or all at once?”
More anomalies
NCRI found even more anomalies in the DoE’s October 2023 report. According to Analyst No 2: “the information for 19 colleges that reported in April 2023 is gone. They weren’t huge amounts, but they totaled US$74 million, and now they’re not shown at all. I’ve never seen this happen before. I went back and checked previous reports. The information was there. So, this happened in the very latest report”.
Much larger amounts concern funding provided by Qatar which, according to NCRI, was not the US$1.2 billion previously reported but, in fact, was US$2.2 billion. However, in the latest DoE report, US$2.0 billion of Qatari donations to colleges in Education city Doha, similarly mysteriously vanished.
Of the 10 universities and colleges that now report having accepted less money from Qatar, four are present on the emirate’s international education hub in Doha, Education City, which hosts eight international branch campuses, including six operated by US universities.
The April 2020 report, which NCRI downloaded from the DOE receptacle for reports, shows that Qatar gifted Cornell US$1.9 billion. In the October 2023 report, that figure was (inexplicably revised to) US$1.18 billion. The Qatari donation to Georgetown likewise fell, from US$823 million to US$209 million. The donation to Northwestern declined from the previously reported US$647 million to US$43 million. Texas A&M’s reported donation fell from US$792 million to US$605 million.
This is concerning as at the very least reports should reflect the details from the previously issued report, but under no circumstances should there be, as is now seen, the above large reductions of previously reported donations, per this report (13 October 2023) totalling US$2.2 billion.
Having large amounts, currently $22 billion, of donations no longer identifiable by dates, makes the effective use of this data severely compromised for all users including the DoE.
Concerns over transparency
NCRI’s analysts are unable to say why these changes have occurred. Analyst No 1 said that they’ve heard that colleges were not happy about donor information being presented and that they put pressure on the DoE to not disclose donor names.
Analyst No 1 said that the data gap and the revised figures makes this story far worse than they originally imagined. University World News was told that it was curious to see the reductions of Qatari donations to Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown universities in the midst of NCRI’s investigations and congressional concern into foreign donors to America’s universities and colleges.
NCRI’s IR ends with an observation cum warning: “Taken together, these findings portray that a pool of substantial foreign funding, significantly correlated with antisemitic and antidemocratic trends on campus, has grown enormously since the dates covered in the NCRI’s initial report and has grown significantly less transparent for public scrutiny.”
This article has been corrected and updated with new figures from NCRI on 10 December. The original article quotes figures from NCRI text messages that Harvard had received US$2.2 billion over three years. This figure was incorrect and has been removed. UWN apologises for the error.
