The Department of Defense is directing 30 U.S. universities to conduct reviews of their overseas academic relationships, with a particular focus on partnerships involving Chinese universities and military-linked training institutions, as the Trump administration intensifies its scrutiny of China’s expanding international reach.
Universities have been given two weeks to assess those arrangements and end any agreements the Pentagon considers concerning, or risk losing federal funding. Defense officials said Monday the move is intended to shield taxpayer-backed research from potential theft, misuse or foreign exploitation.
“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 announcing the action.
The Pentagon’s statement did not publicly identify the universities involved. However, a U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the matter involves internal deliberations, said the list includes Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University.
The Associated Press contacted the schools by email for comment, but they did not immediately respond.
Sarah Spreitzer, vice president of the American Council on Education, an organization representing college and university presidents, said the announcement was troubling because it appeared to imply possible misconduct by the institutions without presenting supporting evidence.
The directive follows the Pentagon’s release last month of an updated roster of 130 foreign institutions it said were involved in “activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.”
Most of the institutions named were based in China, including the University of Science and Technology of China and China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences, though the list also included several organizations in Iran and Russia.
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 U.S. 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.
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’s Belt and Road initiative in the region 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 politicization of “normal scientific, educational, and academic exchanges.”
“The U.S. 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.” ___
Associated Press writer Collin Binkley contributed to this report.
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