Four years after the Trump Department of Education’s and Clarion Project’s landmark reports revealed that billions of dollars of foreign money was flowing into American Universities — most of it coming from hostile powers like China — a study by the National Association of Scholars revealed that “the flow of foreign money into our universities from adversarial nations” has continued.

The NAS report entitled Shadows of Influence Uncovering Hidden Funds for American Universities suggests that large amounts of undeclared foreign funding could be the reason behind the pro-Hamas movements that erupted in American campuses following the October 7 atrocity.

We must ask where and how American college students receive propaganda when they support foreign terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes. “The hundreds of millions of dollars spent by Qatar and Saudi Arabia as well as Iran, China, Russia, and China are a great place to start your search,” NAS stated.

Neetu A. Arnold, the author of the report, cited heavy funding from Qatar to be “the focal point behind spreading pro-Hamas propagandists on American universities.”

Arnold warned first in 2022, that Qatari financial investments in American Universities “led to compromises in freedom of expression in order to appease Qatar’s autoritarian government.”

Arnold discovered that Qatar had donated billions to American universities. This included huge donations which were not reported. His research is related to the landmark investigation by the Trump Education Department in 2020 that found universities only reported a fraction the foreign money they had received.

Before President Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, the Education Department had been very lax in investigating these donations. Once Trump left office, the Biden and Harris administration returned to the old ways of ignoring foreign money.

This summer, the Biden-Harris Education Department completely shut down its database of foreign funding.

Arnold warned that “as a consequence, Americans don’t know the full extent of how much foreign money is used by universities, what these funds are supporting, and which governments have influence over our universities.”

NAS created a Foreign Donor database to fill in the gaps. It used over a 100 public records requests to compile the data. Soon, it was discovered that universities had failed to disclose at least a $1 billion of the $2.6 Billion dollars they received from foreign sources during Joe Biden’s first two year tenure. The majority of the undeclared money was from China, Qatar and Russia.

Arnold reported that “universities were not always willing to share with us this information: institutions would stall, inflate cost estimates and claim bogus exceptions, which we successfully appealed.”

She said, “It wouldn’t be surprising if there was no deviation from the reporting amount expected. But what we found is jaw-dropping.”

She observed that some universities stopped reporting completely after they learned the Biden Department would no longer investigate any underreporting.

Arnold suggested some simple reforms to increase transparency, including making donor names public. He also proposed auditing universities regularly to make sure they disclose all foreign funding. She proposed giving these reforms some teeth by imposing harsh fines on universities who fail to comply with disclosure requirements.

Arnold said that forcing universities to reveal more about their foreign donations “could help lead the way” if the desire to improve American education and strengthen American security overpowers the lobbying of foreign governments and higher education.