Commission reports that tens of millions of dollars in unreported funds from a joint venture that China funded at UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley, is then cutting ties with a Chinese college after receiving$ 87.5 million from China to power a joint venture.
” After careful thought, which began roughly a year ago, UC Berkeley is in the operation of relinquishing all rights in the Tsinghua Berkeley Shenzhen Institute non-profit object in Shenzhen”, Dan Mogulof, associate vice president for UC Berkeley, told The College Fix via internet.
The University” constantly reevaluates and listens to the risks and benefits posed by international commitment and takes concerns about analysis security quite seriously,” he said.
According to a recent Start the Books statement, millions of dollars , from China funded the TBSI, a “hub of international research and education at UC Berkeley designed to promote international research collaboration and grad student training”, according to the agency’s website.
Start the Books says that the joint venture has sites in the U. S. at Berkeley and in Shenzhen, China. The university at Berkeley was funded by two sizable Chinese contracts totaling$ 19 million and$ 15 million.
Colleges are required to report all foreign efforts to the Department of Education, according to Christopher Neefus, vice chairman of contacts at Open the Books, but they are not responsible for making the whole deal public or providing a thorough description of the purpose, according to Neefus.
” As a result, we’re ready to see which places and foreign institutions sent income to our colleges, but we cannot always investigate the purposes”, he said.
But, in the case of Berkeley, the watchdog party was “able to explain some of China’s paying through the House Select Committee on the Communist Chinese Party“.
According to Neefus, the statement reveals that Berkeley and different universities perhaps been receiving more international money than they have disclosed as a result of poor supervision and imperfect monitoring, according to Neefus.  ,
MORE: Contracts between U. S. universities, China total more than$ 2 billion
UC Berkeley’s combined programme with China’s Tsinghua University bypassed monitoring needs, as it was considered a separate legal entity from the institutions themselves, he said.  ,
Free speech advocates are concerned about the wider impact of such funding on academic independence in light of these findings.
The role that foreign funding can play in higher education is” serious cause for concern,” a researcher with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression wrote in an email to The College Fix.
Authoritarian nations may privately impose their policies on universities in a way that benefits those nations ‘ political objectives, but they may not even be required to do so, according to Sarah McLaughlin.
Additionally, McLaughlin added that universities frequently fear negative press and are “unwilling to admit if foreign funding influences institutional decision-making.”
Universities may be concerned about alienating these partners and self-censoring politically sensitive topics without ever being asked, she said.
McLaughlin cited a 2015 incident at Harvard Law, in which a meeting about human rights in China was changed to ensure that the university’s future would not suffer. She also cited a Dalai Lama performance from 2009 that was canceled to protect the state’s financial interests in China.
” I would not be surprised if many more stories like these disappeared under the radar.” Universities should be transparent about funding, including with foreign partners”, McLaughlin told The Fix.
” Unfortunately, billions of dollars have gone undisclosed and unreported by universities in recent years. She advised them to make the terms of their contracts and grants known so that their communities can see if unfavorable terms are in place.
MORE: China heavily funds Harvard, Stanford, many other top universities: report
IMAGE: Tsinghua University/Youtube
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