Trump to Harvard: Open Your Books On Foreign Income

The latest salvo from the Trump administration fired at Harvard comes only in part from the current standoff over anti-Semitic intimidation campaigns and discriminatory practices. Five years ago, Trump’s team opened an investigation into Harvard’s revenue streams over concerns of full reporting as well as foreign influence in Academia. Joe Biden buried that probe, officially last year but almost certainly never took it seriously.

Suddenly the investigation is back on, the Wall Street Journal reports, and this time the Trump administration has at least three years to pursue it:

The Trump administration is pressing Harvard University to turn over records on the money it receives from foreign sources going back a decade, the latest in a growing pressure campaign against the nation’s most prominent university.

American universities get billions in grants, contracts or gifts from foreign sources, which they must report semiannually to the government. In a Thursday letter to Harvard President Alan Garber, the U.S. Department of Education’s office of the General Counsel wrote that Harvard made “incomplete and inaccurate” disclosures between 2014 and 2019.

“Today’s records request is the Trump administration’s first step to ensure Harvard is not being manipulated by, or doing the bidding of, foreign entities,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. The letter to Harvard presented no evidence that was occurring.

A couple of paragraphs later, it certainly looks as though the first administration found probable cause to suspect that Harvard was not in compliance:

In 2020, the first Trump administration also opened an investigation into Harvard, as part of a review that it says found U.S. universities broadly failed to report at least $6.5 billion in foreign funding. The Biden administration notified Harvard in 2024 that the investigation was closed.  

That’s a lot of unreported foreign cash flowing into universities and colleges. To compare, the US loaned students $107.8 billion in 2020. But in an even more apt comparison, a recent report from Americans for Public Trust estimates that US schools have taken in $60 billion over the last few decades from foreign countries, with ten top schools accounting for more than a third of that amount. Harvard is right at the top of the list (page 2).

National Review covered the issue last month, before the fight with Harvard over its anti-Semitism and discriminatory practices heated up. It’s not just the amount of money that’s the concern, but the origin of the money:

Harvard University received the most foreign funding at an estimated $3.2 billion, followed by Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University at $2.8 billion each, the University of Pennsylvania at $2.5 billion, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at $2.1 billion. …

Americans for Public Trust identified significant amounts of foreign aid from U.S. adversaries and Middle Eastern nations. Last year, Qatar poured over $342 million into colleges and universities, while China spent another $176 million.

Saudi Arabia, an oil-rich, Muslim nation with longstanding ties to the U.S. despite its human rights record and alleged involvement in the 9/11 attacks, gave $175 million to colleges and universities last year. Another $81 million came in from Hong Kong, where the Chinese Communist Party has repressed civil liberties and taken complete control of the political system.

And that’s the money we know about. The effect from Qatar’s money has been evident in the Poison Ivies and elsewhere for the last nineteen months. China’s influence on American education is equally evident. Americans for Public Trust also wonders about the money we don’t know about, as does the Trump administration:

Lax enforcement enables bad actors from around the world to by-pass safeguards and pour vast sums into US schools, sometimes without any public reporting.

That is a legitimate security concern, as well as a concern for the Department of Education on corruption of educational institutions. 

Harvard is a good place to start in pursuing better enforcement and transparency, even without the current feud with Donald Trump. But in that context, it might behoove Harvard to settle all of these accounts and keep from digging themselves an even deeper hole in the near future. 

And who knows? Maybe if Trump and McMahon keep pursuing this with other Ivy League schools, Democrats may start begging to shut down the Department of Education.