In March 2025, National Association of Scholars (NAS) President Peter Wood testified before the U.S. Senate on the pervasive and malign effects of foreign influence on America’s colleges and universities. He spoke about the effect of China’s Confucius Institutes, funding of American universities from Qatar, ideological capture of Middle East Studies Centers, the foreign role in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Iranian connections to American academia, the lack of university transparency about foreign gifts, and technology transfer risks. He recommended a variety of government actions to address these problems, and ended with this general conclusion:

Protecting academic freedom and international collaboration does not require closing American universities to the world. It does, however, require transparency, accountability, and clear safeguards to ensure that foreign funding and partnerships do not undermine the national interests of the United States.

The fundamental problem is that America’s educational institutions no longer pursue the nation’s interests—and no longer much want to.

Over the past half-century, America’s educational institutions have steadily forfeited public goodwill by drifting away from their commitment to the nation’s interests and the welfare of its citizens. Politicization has narrowed their mission from serving the country as a whole to advancing the agenda of a small, radical faction. Equally damaging has been their growing financial dependence on foreign governments and students, whose tuition now sustains many struggling institutions. Some, such as those hosting Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes, have traded independence for money, becoming conduits of foreign influence. Their unwillingness to confront the wave of anti-Jewish intimidation following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre stems in no small part from this same dependence on tuition from foreign students and donations from governments hostile to Jews and to Israel.

There is a sad irony in this development.

In the optimistic decades after World War II, America opened its colleges and universities to foreign students, confident that exposure to our higher education would spread American values and foster goodwill abroad. For a time, it worked. But foreign governments soon recognized that higher education also could serve as a tool of their own soft power—and they began using American institutions to influence America itself. Policymakers and citizens must no longer ignore how deeply foreign influence has deformed our universities. To restore their integrity, these institutions must be reoriented toward serving the American national interest. Academia should pursue this reorientation willingly. If it refuses, policymakers must act on behalf of the American people to ensure that it does.

Our national interest is the pursuit of the principles in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution to maximize American citizens’ security, prosperity, and liberty. Our national interest, of course, includes taking account of the interests and intentions of other nations and understanding the civilizations and cultures of America’s fellow nations, especially those of its Great Power peers. America’s national interest includes generous goodwill to the peoples of the West and the peoples of the world.

Yet, the American national interest is not identical with the interests of different nations and should not be subsumed under the pursuit of “global interest,” “global welfare,” or any other loosely defined abstraction that disguises the subordination of America’s welfare to benefit foreigners. Higher education is an indispensable means by which to educate citizens to sustain America’s national interest, to pursue their own vocations and well-being, and to pursue wisdom and truth. American higher education should serve the highest ideals of the West and of humanity, but as a complement to its foundational mission to serve American national interest and American citizens.

NAS’s new White Paper: Higher Education & the National Interest provides a catalogue of linked federal and state policy reforms that policymakers should enact to reorient American higher education toward the national interest and American citizens’ welfare. These policies include:

• Mandate Transparency on Foreign Gifts
• Prevent Espionage by Administrative Reform
• Reduce Chinese Influence
• Reform Title VI Area Studies Grants
• End Lawbreaking by Foreign Students
• Close International Branch Campuses in Foreign Tyrannies
• Limit College Dependence on Foreign Student Admissions
• Limit College Dependence on Foreign Faculty and Administrators
• End Higher Education Defiance of Immigration Law
• Establish an Office of National Security in the Education Department

All these reforms will help ensure that American higher education once more serves the American national interest and American citizens. Each of them is a worthy goal in and of itself. Colleges and universities should focus on the undergraduate and graduate education of American citizens and reduce their dependence on foreign sources for tuition and staffing. They should also protect American intellectual property and national security, and ensure that they do not facilitate espionage by China and other rival nations directed toward economically and militarily valuable technology and research by welcoming foreign students and researchers. Colleges should prevent lawbreaking by foreign students and not engage in lawless conduct themselves by acting as “sanctuary campuses” for illegal aliens.

All this should be done—without abandoning America’s larger commitment to know and to engage in friendly relations with the brotherhood of nations. Our colleges and universities will continue to play an essential role in that fundamental American goal. The reforms NAS proposes will reunite American academia with the American nation, so that both may participate properly in the intellectual and spiritual communications of the West and the world. An American academy united with America’s people will have something unique to say when it speaks to the world.

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