Last month, a coalition of 26 academic, policy, and civil society organizations called on Congress to act on a problem lawmakers have studied, documented, and left unresolved: the flow of foreign money into American universities through disclosure systems that remain incomplete and unevenly enforced. The coalition does not seek new investigations. It asks Congress to finish work it began nearly forty years ago.

The coalition is right.  Congress does not lack information. Congress needs to act now by strengthening and modernizing the law where it clearly falls short.

The House has passed the DETERRENT Act twice, with bipartisan support. Each time, the Senate has received it and stalled. Meanwhile the underlying problem has continued to expand, in ways that years of research at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) have shown to be measurable, patterned, and consequential.

In recent memory, foreign gift reporting under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act has lacked effective enforcement and has been largely ignored by several colleges and universities in the United States. For example, a 2019 Senate investigation by the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affair’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found that nearly 70 percent of US schools that received more than $250,000 from the Chinese government-linked Confucious Institutes failed to properly report that amount to the Department of Education. The same report also found that between 2006 and the report’s publication, China has directly provided a staggering $158 million in funding to US schools for Confucius Institutes and very serious foreign influence issues were raised about those programs.  Then Congress acted in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2021 (P.L. 116-283, Section 1062) and restricted Department of Defense funding to institutions of higher education that host a Confucius Institute.  

Then ISGAP’s initial “Follow the Money” findings in 2019 revealed the existence of billions of dollars in Middle Eastern funding (primarily from Qatar) to US universities that had not been reported to the Department of Education as required by law.  A subsequent 2020 Department of Education review identified more than $6.5 billion in previously unreported foreign funding at a small number of institutions once scrutiny intensified, an order of magnitude suggesting how much still goes unreported. Colleges and Universities’ inability or refusal to properly report their foreign donations opens them up to authoritarian regimes influencing curriculum, university administration, and projects sensitive to national security.

ISGAP's "Follow the Money" project has traced specific funding streams from authoritarian states and state-linked foundations, including Qatar and Muslim Brotherhood entities and affiliates, into endowed chairs, area studies programs, research centers, and curricular initiatives at American universities, and in foreign campuses like in Doha. What emerges is not a series of isolated gifts but a pattern of structured, long-term investment that shapes hiring, research priorities, and the framing of inquiry, often without students, faculty, or the public knowing the source. ISGAP’s work has also shown that funding opacity has at times coincided with the narrowing of legitimate scholarship on subjects ranging from authoritarianism to antisemitism itself.  The convergence we have documented is too consistent to dismiss as a coincidence.

The DETERRENT Act addresses these failures directly. It lowers the foreign gift reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000, and to zero for countries and entities of concern. It requires disclosure of gifts to individual faculty and staff, closing a loophole that has allowed influence to flow around institutional reporting. It creates a publicly searchable database. And it introduces real financial penalties for non-compliance, including the potential loss of federal student aid eligibility, the only sanction universities have historically treated as serious.

The American university is a foundational institution of liberal democracy. It is where the evidence base for public policy is produced and tested, where a scholar should be able to follow an argument to an uncomfortable conclusion without penalty, and where the next generation of judges, journalists, and legislators learns what intellectual honesty requires. When that institution is compromised, the consequences do not remain on campus. They shape the analysis that informs legislation, the climate in which minority communities, including Jewish students and faculty, participate in academic life, and the integrity of democratic decision making itself.

Transparency is a precondition for independence. The DETERRENT Act does not prohibit universities from engaging in international partnerships. Rather, it ensures that such engagements are conducted with accurate reporting of funding sources and amounts. The Senate has the bill. It has the evidence. It has a record of bipartisan support in the House and an unusually broad coalition of academic and civil society organizations urging action. What remains is the decision to act. Now is the time.

Dr. Charles Asher Small is the Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) and a globally recognized scholar on contemporary antisemitism studies. He leads the ‘Follow the Money’ research project into illicit funding of United States universities by foreign governments, foundations and corporations that adhere to and promote anti-democratic and antisemitic ideologies.