Mike Pompeo made a similar claim recently. This is a legitimate concern.
Campus Reform reports:
Betsy DeVos says China is ‘attempting nothing short of espionage via America’s colleges and universities’Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos wrote a recent op-ed in the New York Post recommending greater transparency of foreign donations to American universities.DeVos drew attention to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), claiming it “must find a lot to like about the Biden team’s decision-making” after the administration relaxed oversight of foreign influence in higher education.“China,” DeVos argued, “is attempting nothing short of espionage via America’s colleges and universities–buying its way into influencing teaching, stealing our intellectual property and manipulating US foreign policy.”She noted the uptick in anonymous donations from China to the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) after the 2017 opening of the Penn Biden Center. The think tank became a source of controversy in January 2023 for housing classified documents, which “reportedly include[d] intelligence memos and briefing materials regarding Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom,” according to Forbes.The op-ed continued by referring to the Penn Biden Center as a “national-security-council-in-waiting.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl, White House counselor Steven Ricchetti, and others in the administration have worked for the Penn Biden Center in some capacity, according to DeVos.UPenn is one of the universities that received an August 2020 congressional inquiry letter because of its alleged failure to report foreign gifts and donations to the Department of Education. President Biden later dropped the Trump-era investigations, putting a stop to what DeVos argued was “just scratching the surface of how much undisclosed foreign money has been injected into American academia.”“Reviews of just 12 higher-ed institutions conducted while I was secretary revealed more than $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign contributions,” DeVos wrote.
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