evolution

The issue of gifts to American universities from foreign citizens, governments, and institutions became an issue recently when it came up that the same Saudi prince which tried to donate $10 million to the city of New York after the attacks of 11 September 2001 (and whose gift was declined by then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani) recently donated hefty chunks of his largesse to several American universities, including Harvard and Rice.¹

Stanley Kurtz of National Review filed a FOIA request to obtain the names of the donors (in some cases), the amounts of the gifts, and the donor’s country of origin. These are here. Here’s Kurtz:

To treat all or even most foreign gifts to American colleges or universities as somehow nefarious would be a serious mistake. America’s institutions of higher education — with their superb programs in science, medicine, and engineering — rightly benefit from the largesse of America’s foreign friends and allies, many of whom have benefited directly from the technical expertise developed in these institutions.

On the other hand, there are reasonable grounds to fear that some foreign donations may purchase undue influence over the way in which highly controversial subjects are treated in American lecture halls. For example, Virginia congressman Frank R. Wolf recently sent a letter of concern to Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia regarding a $20 million donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal to Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (the second largest gift in Georgetown’s history). A second $20 million gift from Prince Alwaleed to Harvard University has raised additional concerns…

Congress is soon likely to re-authorize the Higher Education Act. The House and Senate have passed very different versions of HEA, particularly Title VI of that Act, which governs the system of federal subsidies to university programs of Middle East studies and other area studies. The Senate bill is a carefully worked out compromise between both parties, led by Senators Kennedy and Enzi. That bill incorporates a number of urgently needed reforms that restore oversight to a program whose unsupervised character has rendered it liable to abuse by foreign donors (as I argued in “Saudi in the Classroom”).

In contrast, the House version of Title VI, a product of the Democratic majority, almost totally guts the Senate’s Title VI reform proposals. The House offers a single provision purporting to deal with the problem of undue foreign influence: a requirement that foreign gifts in the amount of $1 million or above be publicly disclosed, if specifically directed toward a Title VI center.

I picked through it looking for the Kansas universities, and found nothing worthy of concern. Fort Hays State received a fairly large sum of money from two universities in China; one of which is jointly funded by the U.S. and China, and the other appears to be a vehicle for business students in China (both Chinese and American) to earn American college credit toward business degrees. KU has two contracts with the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining in Switzerland. Here is the KU-operated Web site that describes the relationship. K-State had only one contract with St. George University in Grenada, and Ottawa University has a contract what what appears to be an American institute in Hong Kong.

I’m with Kurtz on this. It is counter-productive for both the aims of education and the aims of counter-terrorism to discourage foreign donations to American universities with hysterics and paranoia. There are, however, good reasons for asking these sorts of questions in some cases.

1. There’s no evidence that this is relevant to this issue, but Harvard recently instituted “women only” hours at its gym expressly to accommodate Muslim women who cannot, under Islamic law, appear in public in the company of men not their husbands or relatives. [↩]