College cash eyed
Feds probe foreign donations to U.S. schools
The federal Education Department is investigating whether Harvard and Yale failed to properly disclose hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign donations.
The probe is part of a broader effort to monitor the influx of donations from other countries to American universities, which also includes investigations of Georgetown and Texas A&M. U.S. colleges are required under federal law to report foreign donations of $250,000 and above.
“Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all. We will continue to hold colleges and universities accountable and work with them to ensure their reporting is full, accurate, and transparent, as required by the law,” said Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Education Department officials said they discovered Yale may not have reported up to $375 million in gifts and contracts from other countries, and didn’t tell federal authorities about any such gifts from 2014-2017 despite the university’s strong international presence.
Harvard, meanwhile, may “lack appropriate institutional controls over foreign money,” a department official said.
A chemistry professor at the renowned Massachusetts university was arrested last month for failing to disclose his financial ties to a Chinese government tech initiative.
Prosecutors said the professor, Charles Lieber, was paid $50,000 a month by the Wuhan University of Technology and given $1.5 million to start a research lab. Lieber was arrested at his Harvard office in January.
Harvard spokesman Jonathan Swain said the university was reviewing the notice from the Education Department and preparing a response. Yale spokeswoman Karen Peart said the university was tracking down records for foreign gifts federal officials requested and reviewing the notice.
The Education Department said its efforts since last July to enforce the provision in the higher education act requiring disclosure of foreign contributions has revealed $6.5 billion in previously unreported gifts. The department said that about half that money came from just 10 universities, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Penn, and the University of Chicago.
The American Council on Education, a group representing colleges and universities, said in a January letter to DeVos that the rules for reporting can be murky and requested more clarification from the Education Department.