Bari Weiss Talks to Mike Pompeo [about Universities’ Connectivity to China]
Honestly Podcast | Bari Weiss and Mike Pompeo
Bari Weiss and former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo engage in a wide-ranging conversation. Their discussion of China’s influence on American universities is of most interest as a bipartisan issue inextricable from concerns around academic freedom and foreign influence. “Our colleges and universities are deeply dependent on the Chinese Communist Party,” Pompeo says. “They have enormous influence because of the resources they’re providing…there’s no doubt about that.” With the recent investigative piece involving HMS, the issues discussed are of utmost importance to Harvard and universities across the United States. We’ve highlighted relevant parts of the conversation below:
43:36: MP— “Our colleges and universities are deeply dependent on the Chinese Communist Party… 360,000 Chinese students studying in United States of America pre-Covid.”
43:52: MP—“I tried to give a speech on a major American campus and was told that I could not because they feared that they would lose Chinese grant money for their research… It was at MIT, we were all set to go… I was talking about Chinese connectivity to American institutions of higher learning. We got a call that said ‘nope, can’t do it.’ And when asked, they were at least candid, they were honest—’we’re afraid of reprisals from the Chinese Communist Party.’” Pompeo ultimately gave the speech at Georgia Tech, “and to the best of my knowledge, there have not been reprisals,” he says.
44:41: MP—“The Elites are loathe or at least slow to see this risk, but those of us who can see it… [see that] we’ve allowed this one to get inside the gates and it’s time to respond.”
44:58: Weiss mentions the Mark Rubio Letter to Harvard President Bacow and the alleged “agreement where officials from this real estate company called Evergrande, which has close ties to the CCP, donated more than $100 million to Harvard Medical School in exchange for access to people including Fauci who were studying the origins of Covid-19. Days after Harvard received the donation…Harvard-linked virology experts privately and publicly condemned the idea that the virus might have emanated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology… How typical is [this]?” she asks.
46:10: MP— “I am familiar with this particular story… and this is common… There are but a handful of universities inside the United States of America that if they were cut off from Chinese Communist Party grant money and cut off from Chinese students attending their schools, paying full freight…there are few universities that wouldn’t have to make significant budget cuts.”
46:41: MP— “The Chinese are very, very good a coming in and saying, ‘Hey, I have this $10 million grant money for you, I have this $50 million grant money, wouldn’t it be great if you’…and finish this sentence in different ways.”
47:24: MP— “It is a concerted effort, it is inside the gates, it is not easy to get at, it is like a cancer… [and] it is time that we address this in a serious way… This is not political…this is bipartisan.”
4815: Weiss— “So you are saying the CCP is effectively buying off our universities and that’s influencing the way that these universities talk about things, research things, put their thumb on the scale of important public debates including most recently the origins of Covid-19?”
48:30: MP—“They have enormous influence because of the resources they’re providing…there’s no doubt about that.”
48:46: Weiss— “So the people that are running these schools, you mentioned MIT barring your talk because of fear of Chinese reprisal…are they traitors to America?”
48:57: MP— “That’s too harsh, at least for the moment, because we owe it to them to make sure that they know what it is they’re doing and we give them alternatives to that… What I do demand is that they begin to lay out strategies to fundamentally reshape their connectivity to the Chinese Communist Party and over a period of time…recognize this risk to the United States, and then take actions that decouple them from helping create that risk. If in 10 years, or 5 years, it’s still the case that they’re still as connected and they’re still as leaning in and they’re still as wedded to Chinese money then, yes, then I’d be prepared to say much harsher things about them than I am today.”
50:27: Weiss— “Why should it be legal for MIT…to do business with the CCP? Why don’t we simply pass a law and say ‘sorry, not happening anymore?’”
51:50: MP— “We need to begin to make them not legal…we ought to make these rules reciprocal [with China].”
Related:
The Harvard Connection (Spectator World, 5/26/22)
— Mark Rubio Letter to Harvard President Bacow (U.S. Senate, 6/15/22)
— Rubio questions Harvard on Fauci-China cover-up (Spectator World, 6/15/22)
Harvard and the Fight for Foreign Collaboration (Crimson, 5/26/22)
Harvard Leads U.S. Colleges That Received $1B from China (Bloomberg, February 2020)
After Confucius Institutes (American Association of Scholars, 6/15/22)
