Billions donated by Middle East to American colleges: OpenTheBooks

The NYPD responding to a protest encampment at NYU this morning at the request of NYU. Meanwhile, universities where protests are the most violent are the ones we’re raking in billions of dollars in donations. Madison Allworth is live at the NYU campus right now. Madison, what’s going on? Good morning, Brian. Yeah, those arrests, they started earlier this morning around 6:00 AM and as you can see behind me, they’re now starting to clear out the encampment here. They’ve made really quick work of this. The tents are all completely gone. They’re now sweeping and collecting all of the items that are there Now these colleges and universities that are witnessing anti Israel protests are also the same ones, bringing in billions of dollars in donations and taxpayer funds. But while some individual donors are pulling back and there have been calls for our federal government to do the same. Foreign governments. They are keeping their wallets open thanks to Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Those donations are supposed to be reported twice a year. What opened the books found is that over the last 25 years, Middle Eastern countries have been some of the largest donors to American universities. In fact, they found donations from that region are now so prevalent, they make up 1/4 of financial activity over the course of the last 40 years, with $44 billion worth of foreign gifts and grants disclosed. Roughly one out of every four of those gifts came from those four Middle Eastern countries, which are Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. And so that’s a massive amount of influence in America’s institutes of higher education. And obviously this is a gainful area for further exploration and for further questions. That influence potentially playing out here at NYU, where China and the UAE are by far their largest foreign government donors. Switzerland, Switzerland, which has given the third most of the school, has given 57 million compared to the over 160 billion with AB that China and the UAE have given now US universities. They get money through obviously tuition as well as gifts, donations and contracts, and over the last four years, by far the biggest donor to US university’s non tuition. Is Qatar Ryan? Oh wow. It’s amazing. Thanks so much, Madison, for uncovering that.