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Harvard received upwards of $218 million in foreign funding since January 2022, according to recent data from the Department of Education.
Per Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, American universities are required to report gifts and contracts received from foreign sources that exceed $250,000. The latest update to the portal reflects funding reported up until April 6, 2023, though reported funding includes some gifts and contracts with start dates in the future.
The report comes amid an ongoing investigation by the Department of Education that began in 2020 on the grounds of Harvard allegedly soliciting funding from foreign governments. Other institutions facing foreign funding inquiries by the Ed Department include Stanford, MIT, and Yale.
In compliance with the Ed Department’s requirements, Harvard reported more than $1.1 billion in foreign funding from 2012 to 2020 and retroactively updated its reporting criteria at the time of the opening of the investigation.
The report groups funding into four categories: gifts, restricted gifts, contracts, and restricted contracts. The greatest amount of funding came in the form of restricted contracts with $73.2 million, while gifts, restricted gifts, and contracts followed with $63.8 million, $48.5 million and $33.2 million, respectively.
The United Kingdom topped the list as Harvard’s largest source of foreign funding at $51.7 million, comprising 23.6 percent of the total share of foreign funding. Switzerland, China, and Hong Kong were also big contributors, giving $21.3 million, $16 million, and $14.2 million, respectively.
Dan G. Currell, former deputy under secretary and senior adviser in the Ed Department, said while an initial assumption may be that foreign countries give money to American universities to “buy influence or get access to secrets,” in most cases, countries have other motives for providing funding.
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Currell said he believes the main impetus for countries to send financial support to American universities is “cultural placement,” citing the example of Chinese support to the Juilliard School, a private performing arts conservatory in New York.
Funding funneled into American universities is also the product of higher education and research being a collaborative “ecosystem,” Currell said.
“It reflects the fact that you have ongoing, enormous amounts of collaboration between Harvard and other institutions as well that require a lot of money to run,” he added.
On the effects of geopolitical tensions on foreign funding, Currell said the “continuing flow of money into especially elite schools” in addition to consistent enrollment from international students during the Covid-19 pandemic showed how “robust” the relationship between these countries and elite institutions like Harvard.
Thomas D. Parker ’64, a senior associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, said one of the main reasons for high figures of foreign funding to schools like Harvard is “purely intellectual.”
“It’s hard to make a claim that you’re a great university if you’re not a repository of knowledge and scholarship about different cultures in the world, including languages and literature and history,” Parker said.
Parker said Harvard’s largest contributors of foreign funding say less about the University than about individual countries’ academic interests, like science and engineering.
“Good science doesn’t know national boundaries. And increasingly good science requires international cooperation,” Parker said.
Correction: October 23, 2023
A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Dan G. Currell.
—Staff writer Rohan Rajeev can be reached at rohan.rajeev@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @rohanrajeev_.
