March 26, 2008
Questioning Foreign Donations to Higher Education
Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is questioning the foreign private donations given to higher education in a piece he wrote in the National Review after analyzing the records of such gifts.
Congress will soon decide disclosure requirements for American colleges to report foreign gifts and Mr. Kurtz believes the legislation currently on the table “at best, would be redundant, and at worst would radically dilute current gift-disclosure requirements.”
Donations in the past several years to institutions such as Harvard and Georgetown Universities from benefactors in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have some people concerned about “foreign influence on American higher education,” Mr. Kurtz writes.
“Given the size of our higher-education system and the variety of potential questions raised by the records I am releasing today, the best way to uncover further problems is to make this material available to mainstream reporters, bloggers, student newspapers, alumni, and concerned citizens throughout the country,” he says.
Erin Strout | Posted on Wednesday March 26, 2008 | Permalink
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