
A recent report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claims that a sizable portion of the funds were donated by authoritarian regimes around the globe, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China, and the UAE. The huge windfall of cited money was not recorded with the US Department of Education between 2014 and 2019. Carnegie Mellon University received the most from foreign entities in that time span at $1.47 billion while Cornell University scooped up $1.29 billion, Harvard University notched $894 million, and MIT collected $859 million, according to the report. The authors of the report, Lee Jussim and Joel Finkelstein say that it “raises the sobering possibility that international actors are using undisclosed channels to funnel large amounts of money into college campuses (including elite institutions that often have outsized influence on American culture and politics) for purposes harmful to the democratic norms of pluralism, tolerance, and freedom.”