U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos speaks during the daily briefing on the Chinese Communist virus (Wuhan pneumonia) in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 27, 2020.
The U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has asked the University of Alabama to provide records of all contracts, gifts, or donation agreements it has entered into with dozens of Chinese Communist institutions and companies.
The request was made by the Department of Education’s Office of General Counsel in a letter to the university’s president on Dec. 22. The letter began by stating that under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, institutions of higher education are required to report any contracts, gifts, and donations “with or from foreign countries.
The Department of Education requires the university to submit, within 30 days, true copies of “each donation agreement, contract and/or conditional gift or donation agreement, and list of gifts, if any,” with public companies or institutions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
The letter also lists companies like huawei, as well as some universities based in China, such as Chengdu University of Technology and Jilin University.
Chief Deputy General Counsel Reed Rubinstein also said in the letter, “It appears that the University of Alabama failed to report an alleged partnership with China’s (Communist Party of China) Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.”
But the university denied that such a partnership existed and said it had notified the Ministry of Education about the issue.
In a Dec. 23 email, the University of Alabama told The Epoch Times, “Earlier this year, we noticed the news about the University of Alabama on the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research website. At that time, we reviewed all potentially relevant records to determine the source of these messages.”
The statement said, “We found no connection between the University of Alabama and the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, nor any reason to include the University of Alabama on its website. Our university officials have challenged the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research to remove the University of Alabama-related information from its website, but have not received any response. We have reported this information to the U.S. Department of Education.”
In May of this year, President Trump (Trump) hinted that he saw evidence that the Chinese Communist virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The institute is a top lab where researchers study how the CCP virus spreads from animals to humans.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said in April that intelligence agencies concluded the virus was not man-made or genetically modified.
A recent Department of Education investigation found $6.5 billion in unreported foreign gift donations and contracts to U.S. universities, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, along with officials from the Justice Department and State Department, unveiled the findings at an event on Oct. 20.
The threat is real,” DeVos said at the time, “so we took action to ensure that the public has the transparency required by law. We found widespread violations at U.S. institutions of higher education and a clear involvement between foreign countries and U.S. colleges and universities.”
According to historical data from the U.S. Department of Education, as well as the most recent data posted on its new online reporting website, U.S. universities received a total of more than $19.6 billion in foreign gifts and funding contracts from 2014 through 2020, including nearly $1.5 billion from China, nearly $3.1 billion from Qatar and more than $1.1 billion from Saudi Arabia.
A Department of Education report released Oct. 20 said the vast majority of foreign funding went to the nation’s top, most prestigious universities, which received billions of dollars through a group of intermediaries. At the same time, all of these universities and related institutions rely on tens of billions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer subsidies. But essentially, they all “run counter to their obligations to taxpayers or to U.S. national interests, security or values.
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