A new report from an influential conservative think tank calls on Congress to fix the college accreditation process and end accreditors’ stranglehold on higher education.
With the stated aim of returning “accreditation to its original function as a mechanism for quality assurance and improvement,” the report asks lawmakers to adopt several changes to the Higher Education Act as they work through its first reauthorization since 2008.
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A Texas congressman is asking the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to investigate funding that foreign entities have bestowed on the University of Pennsylvania.
Last week, U.S. Representative Lance Gooden (R-TX-5) authored a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in which he noted that $51 million flowed to the Philadelphia Ivy League university from non-American sources in 2021 and 2022. Of those donations, $14 million came from unnamed Chinese or Hong Kong entities and $2.4 million came from Saudi Arabia.
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Newly introduced legislation would require think tanks and nonprofits to reveal whether they have significant funding from governments and political groups in Russia and China.
U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, introduced the “Think Tank and Nonprofit Foreign Influence Disclosure Act” Thursday, which would require nonprofits and think tanks to disclose foreign donations over $50,000. The bill would require the U.S. Treasury Department to create a “publicly available in a searchable database information relating to such gifts and contributions received from foreign governments and political parties…”
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TRANSCRIPT: McCabe: Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer, in his new book Red-Handed, reports how the Chinese Communist Party has targeted American institutions of higher learning. Schweizer told The Star News Network how these institutions, after receiving funds from communist China, have worked to suppress criticism of the communist regime there and also have misreported or even failed to report millions of dollars received from China. Schweizer: Section 117 of the Education Act in 1965 is very explicit. It says that if U.S. colleges and universities take in foreign donations, substantial foreign donations, they are required to report those to the federal government. McCabe: Many American colleges fail to report any or all of their Chinese cash haul, Schweizer said. Such as Yale University and the millions of dollars it received from Joseph Tsai, co-founder of Alibaba and owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Schweizer: This is particularly applicable to China today, because hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing to American colleges and universities from Chinese nationals, many of them linked to the Chinese Communist Party and to the Chinese state. He’s donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Yale. He says that they come from his foundation based in California. The…
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Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Bill Hagerty (R-TN) are calling for increased transparency for the foreign funding in higher education. The Foreign Funding Accountability Act will target Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. That law requires universities to submit biannual reports on all foreign gifts and contract transactions. The Department of Education reported last October that many colleges and universities fail to comply with Section 117.
The two Tennessee senators introduced the Foreign Funding Accountability Act alongside Senators Tom Cotton (R-AK) and Tim Scott (R-SC). China was identified as the main foreign actor that spurred the legislation. The bill would require the full names of all levels of foreign donating entities and the purpose(s) for those gift-transactions, close the loopholes allowing gifting by registered foreign agents and exempting in-kind gifts from counting towards the disclosure minimum, lower the minimum reporting threshold for disclosure in terms of dollar amount to $25,000, and levy a graduated civil penalty structure against higher education institutions that willfully and repeatedly violate Section 117.
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North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein joined a coalition of 32 attorneys general pushing for the lawsuit filed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania against student loan servicer Navient to go forward in the federal courts.
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