‘Serious Mistakes’ on Communist China Are Laid to Harvard

Harvard’s legacy of “service to the nation,” as FDR put it, is in danger as the university puts its links with Communist China ahead of America’s national security. That’s the warning from a House committee accusing Harvard of “compromised independence” vis-à-vis Beijing. Following a 15-month investigation, the panel is illuminating connections between the university and communist party bodies tied to “China’s military and human rights abuses.”Feature it. “The American people expect our nation’s leading universities to protect American research and innovation, and never advance the interests of our nation’s adversaries,” asserts the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, Congressman John Moolenar. He points to “serious mistakes” by Harvard, ranging from “allowing violence against anti-China protestors to collaborating with entities linked” to the People’s Liberation Army.The panel is surfacing what it calls “numerous instances where Harvard systematically prioritized lucrative financial ties over American national security and ignored its institutional responsibilities.” Among these instances, per Congressman Tim Walberg, is Harvard’s formation of “an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws.” The congressman calls this “unacceptable.”The House China committee spotlights the university’s creation of Harvard Global, a non-profit organization that is “apparently designed to circumvent federal disclosure laws on foreign donations in higher education.” Harvard Global’s own website, per the panel, says “it would serve as a conduit for transactions where the university” is “unable to accept the sponsor’s terms due to legal or financial reasons.” The language, the panel says, was later deleted.The panel stresses the “systemic nature of the collaboration,” between Beijing and Harvard, pointing to some 140 research papers written jointly by Harvard researchers and affiliates of Chinese universities linked to the People’s Liberation Army and the mainland’s defense establishment. The panel found, too, that one of Harvard’s “lead compliance officials refused to categorically rule out research collaborations with the Chinese military.”This is of a piece with the mentality, unearthed by the House panel, of open-mindedness bordering on sympathy for the regime at Beijing. The panel’s report found that a senior compliance official at the university, “during a transcribed interview” for the committee’s investigation, “initially hedged” on the question of whether “China is conducting a genocide against the Uyghurs.” The official, after subsequent legal advice, later backtracked and conceded the point. A critic of the Beijing regime, the Gatestone Institute’s Gordon Chang, calls the report’s findings “distressing because clearly the Chinese have gained very important knowledge and technology from the U.S.” Mr. Chang avers that “this is a failure at Harvard,” but a failure, too, of “the American political system to prohibit these types of contacts because we’ve known that they’ve been going on for decades.”Harvard’s apparent absence of moral clarity when it comes to Beijing suggests a traversal of the university’s historic role as a wellspring for the American defense and foreign policy establishments, including the research that helped make possible the Manhattan Project. The university’s attempts to evade federal funding rules, Mr. Walberg says, are particularly troubling “given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements.”The disclosures follow, as well, the misconduct that emerged in the Justice Department’s China Initiative. This probe led to the conviction of the former head of Harvard’s chemistry and chemical biology department, Charles Lieber. The professor lied to investigators over his affiliation with Red China’s Thousand Talents Program, the DOJ said, as well as his ties to the Wuhan University of Technology, from which he had derived income.The university’s amity for China contrasts with FDR’s praise of “Harvard men” who “made their minds swords in the service of American freedom.” Today’s university could well take a page from Churchill, who in 1943 warned on Harvard’s campus that “Tyranny is our foe, whatever trappings or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks.” He concluded: “We must forever be on our guard, ever mobilized, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat.”

‘Serious Mistakes’ on Communist China Are Laid to Harvard

‘Serious Mistakes’ on Communist China Are Laid to Harvard

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