Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Project for the Blogosphere   [Stanley Kurtz]

Can the blogosphere really do things big media can’t? Let’s find out. I have a project I think is perfect for just the sort of folks who read The Corner and other political blogs. This project is way too big for me to do all by myself. What’s needed to make it work is an informal alliance of local bloggers, student newspapers, and concerned citizens across the country.

Through Freedom of Information Act requests and discussions with officials at the Department of Education, I recently obtained a comprehensive list of large gifts to American universities originating in foreign countries. American colleges and universities are legally required to report foreign gifts of $250,000 and above to the Department of Education, and NRO has just posted the DoE’s entire body of foreign gift data online. There have been a number of public controversies lately about large gifts from Saudi Arabia and the UAE to major American universities. Some of this new data may well bear on that sort of controversy.

All kinds of questions are raised by this material. Are American institutions of higher education complying with their foreign gift reporting obligations? While most gift reports include donor names, many do not. Is it fair and reasonable for some schools to withhold large foreign donor names from their gift reports, when most other schools report these names? Are at least some large foreign gifts evidence of undue foreign influence on American higher education? Is there a danger that Congress is about to weaken foreign gift reporting requirements?

You can find discussions of these issues and more, along with a link to a special web-page containing the newly-released gift data, in my piece, "Following the Foreign Money." If you do read this piece, please consider looking further into this issue at a college or university near you.

03/26 10:02 AMShare