CounterCurrent: Week of 03/16/2026
Foreign influence in American education has been on my mind since the Department of Education (ED) released its finalized foreign gift disclosure portal for 2025 in early February. Now, the events of the past week have provided the opportunity to report on foreign influence and some new steps being taken to safeguard American education.
Last Thursday, National Association of Scholars (NAS) President Peter Wood testified before the Senate HELP Committee at a hearing titled “Transparency and Trust: Exposing Malign Foreign Influence in Higher Education.”
He joined two other witnesses in delivering opening statements before facing questions from committee members about foreign funding and its effect on American higher education. Senators highlighted the troubling volume of funding from countries such as Qatar and China and pressed witnesses on how to safeguard U.S. institutions. In his opening statement, Wood noted,
The vulnerabilities of American higher education are built into its strengths. The great strength of American higher education, we’re told, is its openness. Its openness has been seized by our adversaries and exploited beautifully well to take advantage of what we are unable to bolt down as we should.
Last year, it was reported that Qatar gave $8.8 billion in gifts and contracts, and China gave $6.8 billion. Both countries are known to exert soft power ploys upon American colleges and universities, as funding rarely comes without strings attached.
While the Senate HELP Committee seeks policy solutions to curtail malign foreign influence in higher education, the Department of Education (ED) is taking additional steps to provide transparency to the American public.
The ED reportedly told the Daily Signal that it will soon require colleges and universities to publicly disclose not only the amounts of money received from foreign gifts and contracts, but also the names of their donors and contractors. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act mandates that colleges and universities report foreign gifts and contracts totaling more than $250,000 per calendar year. A public database dashboard is available from the ED, but with the latest statement from an ED spokesperson, more information will be available in the coming months. Currently, not even members of Congress can view the records submitted to the ED. This needs to change. According to the article, “The law is very clear,” the official said. “It says that the Department of Education has to make available for public inspection the reports submitted by the universities. We’re not doing that right now.”
Underreporting by colleges and universities has been a longstanding problem, largely because institutions self-report the data. If a foreign entity wished to fund a college or university and “fly under the radar,” it would simply have to break up the gift or contract into smaller amounts to avoid ED scrutiny. NAS has proposed that the ED lower the reporting threshold to $50,000 to increase transparency. It is still in the best interest of the American public for the ED to do so, along with providing the names of foreign donors, as it claims it will do in the coming months.
Just as those who monitor higher education perhaps thought that Chinese influence in academia was dwindling, NAS Senior Fellow for International Affairs & Academic Integrity Lilla Nora Kiss reports that China appears to be gaining a new foothold in the door through international secondary schools.
China has been exposed multiple times for meddling in American education. From Confucius Institutes—which NAS discovered to be vectors of Chinese espionage and soft power operations, rather than the Chinese language and culture programs they were purported to be—to rebranded centers still operating on university campuses, China has just gotten craftier in its operations.
For example, Kiss writes that the Western International School of Shanghai (WISS) is the first mainland Chinese school of its kind to offer the International Baccalaureate Career-related Program, “a vocationally oriented study pathway for students aged 16–19.” WISS promotes a dual-enrollment aeronautics pathway with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a U.S. institution that is known for its pilot training and aerospace engineering programs. This partnership introduces Chinese students “to aviation, engineering, and aviation business while they are still in high school.” China is apparently relying on overseas training, especially from the U.S., to address its civilian and military aviation shortfalls. Partnerships like this are strategically consequential, but pose problems for American higher education. Kiss explains,
Even though they might not involve federal grants, classified laboratories, or formal research agreements, they operate in fields such as aviation, engineering, design, and creative industries that are foundational to national competitiveness. By treating these collaborations as strategically neutral, U.S. higher-education and national-security policies overlook how technical capacity and professional trajectories are shaped well before university education or research oversight begins, creating a vulnerability that falls outside nearly all existing safeguards.
It is in our national security interest to shore up our education system against malign foreign influence. It is encouraging to know that policymakers seem to be taking this issue more seriously—perhaps the reams of college-age Hamas and Chinese Communist Party supporters have opened a few eyes. It remains to be seen, however, whether legislation will make it through. (The “Safe Responsible Ethical Scientific Endeavors Assuring Research for Compassionate Healthcare Act” or the “Safe RESEARCH Act,” which would have conditioned federal research funding on transparency in foreign ties but did not make it into law last year, signals that lawmakers are aware of foreign mischief in academia.) But as always, our work continues to expose malign, influential powers and safeguard the national interest through academia.
Until next week.
CounterCurrent is the National Association of Scholars’ weekly newsletter, written by the NAS Staff. To subscribe, update your email preferences here.
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