Universities Find Foreign Donations Sometimes Carry Price

Foreign-Studies Aid Scoured for Political Strings

By Tim Golden

New York Times News Service, December 9, 1996

To the needy scholars of East Asia at the University of California campus here, the unexpected offer of a few million dollars for a new center to study ancient Chinese cultures sounded at first like a godsend.

Then they paused at the fine print: The Taiwan foundation proposing to finance the center insisted that it commemorate the foundation and its namesake, Chiang Ching-kuo, the late president of Taiwan who, long before he helped lead the island toward democracy in the 1980s, was among the Chinese Nationalist leaders who have been blamed for the repression of thousands of political dissidents.

The university's initial bid for the money has set off an uproar among some scholars and students who fear damage to the school's reputation, undue influence from the government-financed foundation, even a loss of access to the People's Republic of China for research and exchange programs.

The dispute, however, is of a sort that is growing painfully familiar as many of the nation's best colleges and universities turn to new sources of support in the developing world to replace the dwindling money for foreign area-studies programs that were a greater priority of the federal government and big American foundations during the cold war.

"There's a scramble now to find new means of support for these programs," said Daniel Okimoto, the director of the Asia/Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, which, along with Columbia University, is also considering the Taiwan foundation's offer. "You can't raise it through tuition, so it's either private like a windfall foundation or business. In that context, the availability of funds from something like the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation looks like a windfall."

At Princeton University, the controversy this year was over the endowment of a chair in Turkish studies that some scholars feared could be used by the government of Turkey to whitewash its role in the massacre of a million Armenians in World War I. At the University of Michigan, the furor followed another Taiwan institute's sudden withdrawal of a $450,000 grant after one of the university's scholars endorsed a document calling on the United States to give priority to Beijing in its policies in the region.

For scholars of Latin America, the problem is not so much one of taking money from government agencies or politically minded foundations, but of finding appropriate donors in a business elite that has become increasingly involved in that region's turbulent politics.

Some associates of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University have squirmed in private as a few of the powerful Latin American personages on the center's advisory committee have become enmeshed in controversy in their native countries. At some other institutes for Latin American research, professors said they have had to conduct informal background checks before even approaching foreign alumni and other potential donors abroad.

"Everybody feels their programs at risk," said Gilbert Merkx, who directs the Latin American Research Institute at the University of New Mexico.

"The gods are no longer smiling on us in Washington and New York, and along comes some foreign businessman who says he'll drop $1 million on a center or an endowed chair," Merkx added. "The money doesn't have to come with strings, but there is always a natural inclination to be grateful to the donor."

Polemics over the sources of foreign support for American higher education are by no means new. After World War II, the perceived villains were powerful patrons of European-studies programs who had been on or associated with the Axis side. In 1978, a furor erupted at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government over a $1 million gift in the name of an American businessman who made a fortune in mining in South Africa under the country's apartheid regime. And over the last two decades, governmental and private agencies in Japan have been especially aggressive about using grants to American colleges and universities to improve the perceptions and understanding of their country in the United States.

Part of what has shifted of late has been the areas of the world that are the hottest subjects of international studies in the United States; Asia and Latin America, in particular, are riding a new boom in popularity fueled by both their importance in the global economy and the rising number of American students who trace their roots to those regions.

As the economic ties of those areas to the United States have deepened, academic experts said, businessmen and others from countries like South Korea, Singapore and Mexico have also had a greater ability and incentive to turn to American educational institutions in order to extend their influence here.

The universities, for their part, have looked to the same sort of upwardly mobile alumni, government agencies and influential foundations that have dotted their campuses with shiny new buildings and plush endowed professorships in the past. But now, university officials said, a growing number of those alumni might be prominent business and political figures abroad. And they, like the governments and foundations, have often found themselves coming under greater political scrutiny in the United States.

Programs in Korean studies have been a notable case in point. After struggling for years in relative penury, such programs found an important new source of help in the early 1990s. The Korea Foundation, a creation of the South Korean government, began spending millions of dollars to expand academic programs, endow professorships and sponsor conferences in the United States. But what the Koreans who dole out the grants might be seeking in return has become a question of growing controversy.

"These are not academic organizations," said Chalmers Johnson, an emeritus professor of political science at Berkeley who formerly headed the university's Center for Chinese Studies. "They are out to get over a point of view. They are paying to win support for their government."

The Korea Foundation has drawn American criticism, among other reasons, because of its steadfast refusal to follow the Japan Foundation's lead and establish a process by which grant requests are reviewed by a panel of scholars in the United States. Instead, decisions are made by a board controlled by South Korean businessmen tied to the government, and the new head of the foundation, Joung won Kim, is a former senior official of the government's intelligence agency.

Academic experts trace the struggle to finance area-studies programs and centers to cuts and changes that both the government and private foundations have made over the last decade or so. While the overall contribution of major foundations to international studies may not have fallen, foundation officials said much of that money has been channeled away from traditional area-studies programs to research that is more thematically oriented, examines problems in a comparative perspective, or emphasizes issues of American policy.

"We are still concerned with the study of foreign cultures, but we are doing it in a different way than we did before," said Richard Ekman, secretary of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York. "We made a judgment in the late 1980s that it was no longer possible to fund every area-studies program. Relative to other areas, there are more foreign sources available to East Asian studies programs, and our funding can be more effective elsewhere."

Although the Mellon Foundation and some others have placed a greater emphasis on Latin America since the 1980s, administrators of some of the most prestigious academic programs on the region said their competition for resources has grown steadily more intense. And even Harvard's Rockefeller Center, with its relatively spectacular success in trying to build a $30 million endowment, has highlighted the delicacy of looking abroad for help.

One of the 34 members of the center's advisory committee, a powerful industrialist from Colombia, has been in the news lately as a pillar of support for that country's embattled president, Ernesto Samper, following accusations by Colombian and American officials that Samper took millions of dollars from the Cali cocaine cartel. Other committee members are politically connected Mexican businessmen who have been criticized at home for their ties to that country's widely attacked former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Just as Harvard and Yale and other American universities have for the most part relished their ties to the political and business elite in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, the University of California at Berkeley has cherished the strength of ties to Taiwan's ruling class.

The island's first elected governor, James Soong, who is on the board of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, won the university's highest award for foreign alumni last year. But as the commotion continued this week over the foundation's offer, the university's Taiwan-educated chancellor, Chang-Lin Tien, was back in Taipei on what several faculty members described as something of a damage-control mission. Through an assistant, Tien declined to comment.

The director of the foundation's North American office in McLean, Va., Hsingwei Lee, said that while it was founded in 1989 with government as well as private money, it has never applied political criteria in dispensing the roughly $23 million it has spent on American scholarship.

The head of the University of California's Center for Chinese Studies, Wen-hsin Yeh, said faculty members had put aside their draft proposal for the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation's money while they discussed the question more fully. But like her counterparts at Columbia and Stanford, she also argued that the uproar over the offer had little to do with how the foundation had spent its money, and seemed to have been stoked as much as anything by the controversy over Asian fund raising for the Democratic Party.

The director of the East Asian Institute at Columbia, Madeline Zelin, said the university would in principle have no problem naming a center or program after the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. But that issue may be more sensitive in the San Francisco Bay area, where a Chinese-American journalist, Henry Yi Liu, was murdered in 1984 on orders from Chiang's military intelligence chief.

"It seems to me that it's very simple and very straightforward," Yeh said. "We have our own ideas about the kind of research we want to do. We write up the proposal in ways that make us happy and we submit it."