Trump recently signed executive order to scrutinize foreign influence at US universities
The University of Pennsylvania is under federal investigation for filing “inaccurate” disclosures of its foreign funding for years, the Department of Education announced in a Thursday letter.
The department’s Office of the General Counsel accused the Ivy League school of submitting “incomplete, inaccurate, and untimely disclosures” to the department in violation of “its foreign source funding statutory disclosure obligations.” As a recipient of federal funding, the University of Pennsylvania is required by the Higher Education Act of 1965 to disclose “qualifying foreign source gifts and contracts” worth $250,000 or more.
The investigation comes two weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order ramping up his administration’s scrutiny of foreign influence in U.S. universities. The order mandates that universities provide detailed information about the sources and purposes of such foreign funding. Failure to do so could result in the loss of federal funding.
Foreign funding has poured into elite American universities in recent decades, including $3.2 billion to Harvard University, $2.8 billion to Cornell University, and $2.5 billion to the University of Pennsylvania, according to a report from the group Americans for Public Trust. Much of the funding has come from China and Arab states.
The Education Department’s letter said Thursday that the University of Pennsylvania’s record of noncompliance is “a source of tremendous concern.”
The Ivy League school failed to disclose any foreign funding until February 2019 and has since then “frequently masked the identity of foreign donors who had engaged in particularly large qualifying transactions with UPenn,” according to the letter. More than a quarter of the 692 disclosures the university submitted between February 2019 and June 2020—valued at around $80 million—were marked as anonymous.
The Education Department also found that foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania has grown 542 percent since former president Joe Biden’s “Penn Biden Center” launched in 2018.
“For far too long, foreign funds have flowed to U.S. colleges and universities with inadequate transparency or oversight,” said a White House fact sheet on April 23. “Undisclosed foreign funding raises serious concerns about potential foreign influence, national security risks, and compromised academic integrity.”
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