A number of years ago, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) began an investigation into the massive funds that foreign countries have been channeling, undisclosed, into American universities. After discovering a vast Chinese network that not only sought to influence scholars, students, and institutions but that also undertook the “surveillance of Chinese students” and the “undisclosed recruitment of American academics for Chinese programs, and espionage,” NAS turned to Saudi and Qatari investments into Middle Eastern studies programs and “the mysteriously funded anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.” Peter Wood, the president of NAS, writes:

In trying to figure out how much money was flowing to the universities through [China’s campus] institutes, we turned to the Department of Education, which we knew was supposed to track such information. We quickly found that it had done nothing of the kind. And that set us on the path to encourage the reinvigoration of [the] enforcement of the law, ideally improving it by requiring [the] disclosure of gifts smaller than the $250,000-per -year threshold specified by Congress. We figured that this threshold could easily be gamed by parties making multiple gifts of smaller amounts, so we proposed a lower one of $50,000. After all, it doesn’t take a lot of money to buy the complicity of the average college administrator.

The question of who funds American colleges and universities ought not to be hidden in darkness when substantial amounts of that funding come from the nation’s rivals and adversaries. At a minimum, Americans should demand transparency from these institutions that are so favored by our laws, and so generously funded by our people.

Georgetown and Harvard, for example, each received gifts of $20 million from Saudi Arabia’s Prince al-Waleed bin Talal in 2005. Why? No one knows for sure. [The journalist] Stanley Kurtz suggested such funding was linked to a widespread Saudi attempt to influence the country’s portrayal in American K-12 education after 9/11.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.