WASHINGTON — As Republicans targeting President Joe Biden take aim at the University of Pennsylvania and the offices where classified documents were found, they've also piled on another fraught topic: Penn's financial support from Chinese donors.
GOP members of Congress have pointed to sharp upticks in giving to the school from individuals and businesses in China during Biden's time at Penn. They've implied, without any clear lines of connection, that those contributions may add a nefarious layer to the classified documents controversy that began with a discovery at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.
But educational experts say the growth in donations from Chinese sources is unsurprising for an elite school such as Penn. While such donations to American colleges overall have raised bipartisan concerns about national security, Penn's overseas support is in line with similar schools during the same time frame.
"Penn is in no way, if you look at the broad picture, in no way distinctive," said Northwestern University's Kyle Long, who tracks foreign influence in higher education.
Elite peers such as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, among others, also saw significant increases in donations from Chinese sources in the mid- to late-2010s, according to federal disclosures.
China accounts for one-third of the foreign students attending American colleges and universities, according to data compiled by the U.S. Department of State and, as the Chinese economy has grown, newly wealthy individuals have increasingly sent donations to America's most prestigious schools, say experts in higher education.
"There's just many more people (in China) who can afford an American education, who can afford to send their children to go to school here, or to make more donations," said Karin Fischer, who reports on international education for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
At the same time, brand-name schools, including Penn and its peers, have increasingly tapped foreign countries for donations and partnerships as they try to expand their reaches, said Long.
"To be a world-class university requires you to have a global footprint," he said.
That effort has sometimes included partnerships or cooperation with geopolitical rivals or countries with repressive regimes, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, or Qatar. The countries are often looking to tap into American universities' expertise and resources — Arab countries, for example, have funded research around oil, Fischer said — or simply bring a recognized educational brand to their shores.
Penn's Wharton Business school opened a Beijing campus in 2015.
Separately, in 2018, Penn launched the Penn-Biden Center in Washington, tying itself to a former vice president and again aiming to bolster the school's global imprint. Biden was also appointed to a lucrative and vaguely defined teaching job, and a number of his longtime aides landed jobs at the Biden Center.
Digging into Penn's donations
One of the Republicans leading the investigations into the president, Rep. James Comer, R., Ky., chair of the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Penn in January demanding to know if the Chinese Communist Party gained influence with the future Biden administration through anonymous donations.
But Penn spokesperson Ron Ozio said the only gifts given specifically to the Biden Center were from two U.S. citizens, and totaled $1,100.
"No gifts from Chinese or other foreign donors went to the Center," Ozio said in a statement to The Inquirer.
Overall, Penn received a little less than $20 million in donations or contracts from Chinese sources from 2015 through 2017, the year Biden joined the school, according to disclosures filed with the federal Department of Education.
Donations from China then more than tripled to more than $61 million combined in 2018, 2019, and 2020, just before Biden became president. (He joined Penn in 2017, launched the Biden Center the next year, but took a leave of absence in April 2019, when he began his presidential campaign.)
The increase in giving from China, however, was part of a broader jump in overseas donors giving to Penn and other schools. Penn's total in foreign donations spiked to around $233 million from 2018 to 2020, up from around $93 million the previous three years. The school's endowment is worth around $21 billion.
"Penn, as a world-class educational and research institution, has a global reach, with students, parents, patients, and alumni living throughout the world. This community has long supported Penn, its academic programs, facilities, and research as a way of giving back to the university," Ozio said.
He said "most" gifts from Chinese donors between 2017 and 2022 were designated for Wharton, the school that had launched a Beijing campus. About 1.3% of the money gifted to Penn overall during that time was from Chinese donors, Ozio said.
"This pattern is consistent with gifts made to other major U.S. universities with leading business schools, which are global in scope," he said. "All of the gifts from Chinese donors were designated for specific purposes. None of the gifts were designated for or used by the Penn Biden Center."
How foreign donations to schools have grown
While advocates for colleges and universities warn against reading too closely into the federal data because of the muddy rules around how schools report foreign donations, the overall picture at a number of other universities mirrors Penn's.
Columbia, for example, got more than $7 million in donations or contracts from Chinese sources in the three years ending in 2017. That leaped to more than $50 million total from 2018 to 2020.
Stanford went from nearly $11 million in such gifts or contracts from 2012 to 2014 to more than $36 million in 2018 to 2020. In the same time periods Yale's donations or contracts from Chinese sources grew from $11 million to more than $44 million.
Such donations have fallen sharply in more recent years, likely as a result of the pandemic's effect on China's economy and its students' freedom to travel abroad, and amid pressure on universities, led by former President Donald Trump and his education secretary Betsy DeVos, who raised questions about the money from China flowing to American higher education.
Lawmakers in both parties have also worried about the potential for partnerships with foreign countries or researchers to open the door to espionage, or for sensitive research to be shared with international rivals and countries with abhorrent human rights records.
MIT, in one prominent example, had to break off a partnership with Russia after that country invaded Ukraine.
Advocates for colleges and universities have cautioned against comparing data across schools and years. Reporting varies widely, said Sarah Spreitzer, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education.
That's because even though disclosure requirements have been on the books for decades, few schools reported in detail until recently, when the Trump administration started applying pressure. That led to schools ramping up their reporting in recent years, Spreitzer said, and in some cases potentially over-reporting to avoid falling afoul of the government. But the rules around disclosures are unclear, so some report more donations or in more detail than others, she said.
"There's no way to compare trends because everyone seems to be reporting in a slightly different way," Spreitzer said.
"The Department (of Education) has been unclear on definitions and has never carried out formal rule-making, so there is confusion about how to report under" the federal rules, she added in an email.
Long, of Northwestern, said that even accounting for those variations, the data provides a broad picture of how foreign donations to American higher education institutions have changed over time.
He also argued that the issue may be amplified by Republicans as part of a wider attack on higher education.
"I do think that Republican rhetoric on this issue is out of step with reality and feeds into a large general narrative on the right that is hostile to American higher education for other reasons," he said.
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(Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer Ryan Briggs contributed to this report.)
