The Department of Defense has ordered 30 US universities to audit their partnerships with mostly Chinese universities and military training institutions as the Trump administration scrutinises the country's growing global influence.
If the schools don't complete a review and terminate any arrangements deemed problematic within the next two weeks, they face losing funding. The goal is to protect taxpayer-funded research from theft and exploitation, the Pentagon said on Monday.
"The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security," Emil Michael, the Pentagon's chief technology officer, said in a news release.
The release didn't name the schools, but a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters said they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president at the American Council on Education, which represents college and university presidents, raised concerns that the announcement suggests, without any evidence, that the schools are engaged in wrongdoing.
The order comes after the Pentagon last month released an updated list of 130 foreign institutions it accused of engaging in "activities that increase the likelihood of US government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated."
While the vast majority were Chinese, such as the University of Science and Technology of China and the country's Academy of Military Medical Sciences, several Iranian and Russian institutions also appeared on the list.
The first version of the list was developed during Trump's first term, with the help of the American Council on Education, Spreitzer said.
She said most of the council's member institutions moved away from research partnerships with those institutions in the years that followed. She said she worries US schools will be held liable for partnerships that predate the creation of the list.
"We don’t appreciate the implication that we are not good partners on research security, given that we helped create this list, and given that we’ve always partnered with the federal government when there has been national security concerns," she said.
Here are the universities reportedly instructed to audit their ties with overseas institutions:
Georgetown University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, San Diego
University of Texas at Austin
Emory University
Harvard University
Oklahoma State University
Penn State University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Cincinnati
University of Minnesota
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of South Carolina
University of Southern California
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Bryant University
Cornell University
Drake University
Duke University
Illinois Institute of Technology
Johns Hopkins University
New York University
Northeastern State University, Tahlequah (Oklahoma)
Portland State University
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
Stony Brook University
University of Delaware
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Chinese reaction
The audit comes as the Trump administration continues to express deep concern about China’s activities in the Americas, pushing back on Chinese ownership of ports at either end of the Panama Canal, infrastructure projects funded by China and Chinese investment in the telecommunications sector.
The Justice Department also is investigating whether Harvard University is allowing Chinese donors to create scholarships that exclude American students, adding to the barrage of federal inquiries the Trump administration has opened in its battle against the Ivy League school.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said in a statement that the country opposes what it described as the politicisation of "normal scientific, educational, and academic exchanges."
"The US side," the statement continued, "should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific, and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States."
