How concealed foreign funding of U.S. higher education predicts erosion of democratic values and antisemitic incidents on campus
Over the last decade, institutions of higher education across the United States of America received billions of dollars from foreign donors that were not reported to the U.S. Department of Education, as required. The U.S. Department of Education required that those institutions file reports detailing how much such funding they received and from where.
Using the information that ISGAP uncovered and via other sources that are publicly available, ISGAP commissioned the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) to examine the correlation between this funding and the deterioration of liberal democratic norms around free speech and academic freedom, as well as antisemitism on campus.
As part of the ISGAP Follow the Money research project, we found that:
- The receipt of undocumented money was associated with erosion of free speech norms: Increased campaigns to punish scholars for their speech (it was associated with increased levels of such campaigns from both the left and the right).
- The receipt of undocumented money was associated with increased levels of campus antisemitism, and this relationship was larger when the undocumented funding came from Middle Eastern/authoritarian states – Qatar is the largest donor to U.S. universities.
- The receipt of undocumented money predicted increased perceptions of campus antisemitism.
- The money preceded the rise of antisemitism and drove this into its local communities.
