House Republicans worry about China’s influence on colleges

House Republicans are pledging to hold to account colleges and universities that don’t report foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more, lawmakers on the higher education subcommittee said Thursday.

The subcommittee held a hearing to discuss the role of the Chinese Communist Party and other foreign governments on college campuses as well as ways to strengthen Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, which requires the disclosure of foreign gifts and contracts twice a year.

“China and other foreign adversaries are determined to undermine America’s national interests and infect our political discourse,” said Utah representative Burgess Owens, the top Republican on the subcommittee. “The modern battleground now includes college, university campuses and our students’ young minds.”

A Senate report in 2019 found that 70 percent of colleges and universities failed to comply with the federal law. The Biden administration has said it’s improving the system for reporting and is on track to make more filings public.

Republicans on the committee and some of the witnesses were sharply critical of the Biden administration’s decisions regarding Section 117, particularly the decision to shift enforcement from the Office of General Counsel to the Office of Federal Student Aid.

“The Office of General Counsel is full of attorneys, and so universities take that a little bit more seriously,” said Paul Moore, senior counsel at the Defense of Freedom Institute, a conservative think tank.

Democrats on the committee said they were also worried about the Chinese Communist Party and defended the administration’s decision to shift enforcement to Federal Student Aid. They also were concerned about the tone of the hearing, the focus on China and how the rhetoric could fuel resurgent xenophobia.

“Chinese students and professors feel caught between a rock and a hard place,” said John Yang, executive director of Asian-Americans Advancing Justice, the Democrats’ witness. “On one hand, the Americans feel like they’re not American enough, and on the other hand that the Chinese Communist Party is targeting them. We need to be, in our American community, embracing many of them.”