Dr. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, described the controversial money trail on “Washington Watch” just days after he testified about it in front of a U.S. Senate committee.
Wood appeared March 12 before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions for a hearing called “Transparency and Trust: Exposing Malign Foreign Influence in Higher Education.”
“Since 2015,” Wood told the Senate committee, “the National Association of Scholars has made tracking, exposing, and neutralizing malign foreign influence from authoritarian regimes and hostile powers within academia a central focus of its work.”
Describing that work on “Washington Watch,” Dr. Wood was asked his answer to why he is concerned over foreign donations to U.S. universities and colleges.
“I would respond that if the countries are friendly to us, and not engaged in mischief, there really is no concern at all,” Wood replied.
If that foreign nation is a U.S. adversary, such as China, he added, then the donations are nefarious in nature and must be exposed.
“In the case of China, all of that is well documented,” Wood told the program. “China has been engaged in disruptive activities in American higher education for a generation.”
In the world of higher-ed espionage, China is low-hanging fruit. China’s most reliable vehicle for gaining access to U.S. campuses has been the Confucius Institute. Promoted as sort of a cultural center to promote Chinese language and culture to American students and professors, a Confucius center gave the Chinese Communist Party the ability to drop agents on a university campus and to access sensitive information from research projects and laboratories.
Back in 2020, the U.S. State Department designated the Confucius Institute a “foreign mission” of the People’s Republic of China, which shut that door on that espionage effort.
A second front was the “Confucius Classroom,” which targeted K-12 education in the U.S. until it was exposed by the watchdog group Parents Defending Education, AFN previously reported.
Even though China and its Confucius Institutes have been getting most of the public attention, Wood said a lesser-known example is approximately $480 million that has flowed to Yale University.
Where did that money come from? It came from the Isle of Guernsey, the English Channel island that is only 24 square miles.
“So what is happening?” Dr. Wood explained. “Well, Guernsey is a cutout. Someone else is giving Yale money, and that person or entity doesn't want its identity known.”
What should be happening, the scholar told the program, is universities and colleges should be disclosing any foreign gifts over $250,000 or more. That action is required under the Higher Education Act, Wood stressed, but the law is not being enforced.
“So we're in a world now where American higher education, tax-exempt because it serves the interests of the American people, is not serving the American people,” he warned.
