Indiana AG investigating Confucius Institute at Valparaiso University

(The Center Square) – Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced this week an investigation into Valparaiso University’s Confucius Institute in attempt to uncover the nature of the relationship between the institute and the Chinese Communist Party.

“Hoosiers deserve answers and transparency into the impact of these institutes on our schools and students,” Rokita said in a news release. “Our investigation seeks to uncover whether the Chinese government has attempted to exert political influence and manipulate the attitudes and beliefs of Hoosiers through their Confucius Institutes. Our office will use every tool at our disposal to protect Hoosiers and put liberty into action.”

Valparaiso University is a small private university in the northwest part of the state with a little more than 3,000 undergraduate students. Its Confucius Institute was opened in 2008. According to the institute’s web page, it is “supported by the Confucius Institute Headquarters in Beijing” and run jointly by Valparaiso University and its “partner university,” Zhejiang University of Technology.

The institute, the web page says, “aims at helping Northwest Indiana citizens learn about China and its people and culture and study the Chinese language, and promoting cultural, particularly music, exchange between the US and China in general, and between Indiana and Zhejiang Province in particular.”

A report issued by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission found China uses Confucius Institutes and other means “to co-opt and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority of its ruling Chinese Communist Party.”

More than 540 universities in 100 countries have opened Confucius Institutes, whose professors and instructors are selected, trained and paid directly by China.

“Unlike other language and cultural centers, such as the British Council or Alliance Française, CIs are integrated into their host universities, making it much easier and more efficient to influence academic discourse on campus,” a 2020 report in the Epoch Times found.

Indiana University, the largest public university system in the state, closed its Confucius Institute in 2019 so as not to lose funding for its Chinese Language Flagship program. The year before, Congress had passed a defense spending bill that included language prohibiting universities that have Confucius Institutes from receiving funding from the Department of Defense.

Many other universities around the country have also closed their Confucius Institutes in recent years, some to avoid losing Defense Department funding, but others in response to the warnings of China experts that the institutes are a threat to academic freedom.

In the spring of 2014, more than 100 professors at the University of Chicago signed a petition calling for the closure of the Confucius Institute there, saying by hosting the institute, the university was ceding control over its curriculum and faculty hiring to Beijing. The petition led to the closure of the institute later that year.

In Rokita’s announcement this week, he notes Valparaiso University reported receiving more than $1.1 million from China’s government between 2010 and 2019.

“These documents filed by Valparaiso University with the U.S. Department of Education do not indicate precisely how this funding was used, but the university’s webpages explaining the partnership make clear that not only did programs target Valparaiso University students but also younger students through sponsorship of programs at area K-12 Indiana schools.”

In 2019, the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a bipartisan report on the threat posed by Confucius Institutes and similar entities. It found Chinese directors and teachers at Confucius Institutes pledge to protect Chinese national interests and face termination if they engage in activities detrimental to China’s national interests.

It also found that since 2006, the Chinese government has spent more than $158 million on Confucius Institutes at more than 100 schools in the United States.

Indiana law allows the attorney general to demand information if the office has reasonable cause to believe the entity may be in possession of evidence relevant to an investigation.

It is unknown specifically what documents have been requested from Valparaiso, and whether the university will comply.

A message was left for Valparaiso University’s new president, Jose Padilla, but the call was not immediately returned.

The news of the investigation into Valparaiso’s Confucius Institute comes on the heels of the Indiana General Assembly passing a law last spring that will require all public universities in the state to report to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education their business arrangements with “foreign entities” and describe in detail how they are complying with federal laws that limit the access of students from China and a handful of other counties to high-tech research at their universities. The Commission for Higher Education is directed to prepare a “protection from foreign malfeasance report” to be delivered to legislators by Nov. 1, 2021.

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