Report Offers Ways to Mitigate Risks of Foreign-Funded Institutes
“Foreign-funded language and cultural institutes” offer challenges to “academic freedom, freedom of expression, governance, and national security,” but the U.S. government can take steps such as developing a “harmonized, consistent approach across federal agencies for the reporting of foreign gifts and contracts by U.S. institutions of higher education” and helping to create “a publicly available clearinghouse of research security information and resources that universities can access.” For their part, institutions “should possess full managerial control of any foreign-funded institute, including control over curriculum, instructors, textbooks and teaching materials, programmatic decisions, and research grants,” among other actions “to identify, address, and mitigate risks associated with foreign-funded language and culture institutes on campuses,” according to recommendations in a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The report was completed by the Committee on Confucius Institutes at U.S. Institutions of Higher Education with funding from the Department of Defense. Jayathi Murthy, president of Oregon State University, was vice chair. The committee “reached consensus on a set of findings and recommendations that will go a long way toward mitigating the risks posed by foreign-funded language and culture institutes on U.S. campuses,” Murthy said in a June 27 announcement, adding committee members included “higher education administrators and researchers, foreign language and China experts, and members of the national security community.”
