Strangling foreign funding to American universities could slow down the surge of anti-Israel protests on their campuses, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, who is pioneering a bipartisan bill to combat the influence of American adversaries on higher education, claims.

“There’s a direct correlation between the money coming from malign actors and the demonstrations on the campuses,” Ms. Foxx, who is the chairwoman of the Education and the Workforce Committee, tells the Sun. She is co-sponsoring what’s become known as the Deterrent Act, which aims to end the “nefarious transactions” taking place between elite universities and “rogue regimes.” 

The bill, awaiting approval in the Senate after passing the House in December, seeks to restore transparency and accountability in foreign donations granted to American universities. It would toughen requirements for foreign gifts by cutting the threshold for reporting by colleges and universities to $50,000 from $250,000, with an even stricter $0 threshold for countries of concern, including Communist China, Iran, and Qatar.

The legislation comes amid surging antisemitism on college campuses and growing concerns over Communist China’s influence campaigns in higher education. Gallup polling shows that public confidence in American universities has dropped almost three percentage points a year on average across the last eight years, while a growing portion of American adults think colleges and universities are having a negative impact on the country. The political turmoil campuses have found themselves in relating to the Israel-Hamas war has only added fuel to the fire. 

The Deterrent Act requires individual staff and faculty at research-heavy institutions, in addition to the schools themselves, disclose foreign gifts. That question has already impacted the sanctity of research at elite universities. Last April, the chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Charles Lieber, was sentenced for secretly accepting large sums of money from a Chinese government initiative program in collaboration with Wuhan University. 

Other cases of foreign influence operation are harder to identify, such as the China-funded educational programs operating on American campuses known as Confucius Institutes. Most of the institutes closed after Congress restricted federal funding to schools where they operate in 2018, fearing Communist China’s efforts to influence public opinion abroad. A 2019 Senate report found, however, that 70 percent of gifts from the CCP are not reported.

“When foreign governments give money to our universities, they don’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts; they want something in return,” Congresswoman Michelle Steel, who co-sponsored the legislation, said in a statement. The bill is the first in a series aimed at reforming the Higher Education Act. Signed by President Johnson in 1964, the act governs the administration of federal higher education programs and has not been updated since 2008. 

Colleges and universities that fail to comply with the proposed legislation would be fined or lose Title IV funding. Ms. Foxx’s probe into antisemitism in the Ivy League is also throwing into question the future of federal grant money to Harvard and other elite universities. Federal subsidies for high-need college students are in jeopardy.

“To each of the issues plaguing modern universities, the answer is restoring the principles of transparency and accountability,” Ms. Foxx said in a statement ahead of the bill’s approval in the House in December. She added that “passing this legislation would send a strong message to our foreign adversaries” — that they can’t get away with puppet-mastering American campuses to serve their own interests.