Harvard, Yale Investigated for Undisclosed Foreign Funding

The US Department of Education is looking into allegations that the institutions failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts from other countries.

Written byCatherine Offord

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The US Department of Education is investigating Harvard and Yale Universities for allegedly failing to disclose funds from other nations, according to an statement released yesterday (February 12). First reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, the investigations are the latest in a series of efforts by the department to crack down on foreign influence in US institutions.

“This is about transparency,” US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says in the statement. “If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. . . . Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all.”

The news follows on the heels of investigations into six other universities, including Cornell and MIT, in an effort that the department says has already led to the reporting ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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