Douglas Murray is Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion.
My colleague Robin Simcox has just produced a superb report on foreign funding of UK universities for the Centre for Social Cohesion. It highlights how university subjects designated as 'strategically
important' by the British government (including Chinese, Japanese and Islamic studies) are currently receiving large
financial injections from foreign donors, many of whom are unelected,
despotic governments notorious for regularly perpetuating wide-scale
human rights abuses. But the behaviour of some universities once they have accepted these donations is what makes the subject so troubling.
Government has been under-investing in universities for years and the result is certain even very prestigious universities effectively offering themselves to the highest bidder - in some cases, effectively acting as propaganda arms of foreign governments.
The usual suspects will doubtless try to pretend there's nothing to see here, but I hope people can judge for themselves by reading the report (free to download) here. I hope that the Conservative Party in particular will consider A Degree of Influence and decide whether on their watch the same deteriorating standards of donation-acceptance in our universities will be allowed to continue.
