Weaving the Threads: Someone Else’s Answer to the Sixth Question (and Maybe the First and Second Too)

Two House committees have now written a research-security program for one leading American research university. Every other institution has until year-end to write its own.

The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce have released the findings of their joint investigation into a leading research university’s research and education apparatus.¹ The report makes nine findings on a record that extends into June 2026 and closes with six recommendations. Two of those ask Congress to act, by passing the DETERRENT Act and the Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries Act. The remaining four are addressed to the university and require no legislation whatever. They also specify conduct rather than principle, which makes them a usable description of some elements of what the Committees consider an adequate research-security program:

• Consolidate research security under a single centralized authority with institution-wide enforcement power and mandatory pre-award and post-award review.
• Replace exact-name sanctions screening with multilingual protocols that can catch transliteration variants, subsidiary relationships, and defense affiliations, and extend that screening beyond research projects to conferences, executive education, visiting scholars, and anything else done under the institution’s name.
• Staff the function with people who can assess dual-use technologies, export-control exposure, and foreign military linkages.
• Eliminate affiliated entities that can route foreign funding outside ordinary disclosure and review.

What unifies the four recommendations appears at page 30, in the report’s own emphasis. The Committees wrote critically of a research compliance approach that treats “legality as the ceiling rather than the floor,” permitting collaborations to go forward where the national-security risks are apparent.² The surrounding passage is equally direct: research security was never meant to be a narrow, check-the-box exercise aimed at the minimum the law requires. A functioning framework obligates an institution to assess risk holistically, exercise judgment, and decline engagements that advance foreign defense capabilities even where nothing prohibits them.

The first installment of this series read the same posture out of two NIH guidance documents and the Department of War’s suspension of CMMC Phase 2, where the Department’s chief information officer wrote that adversaries would not be defeated with compliance checklists.³ Two congressional committees have now applied that standard to a university, on a record that includes a document production and transcribed interviews. It is no longer one agency’s enforcement posture or one administration’s preference. The same standard is being articulated across the government, has held across two administrations, and has been adopted by two congressional committees as a measure of institutional adequacy.

The report is careful about where it assigns responsibility. It credits the professor at the center of its executive-education findings, expressly declines to fault the research official whose transcribed testimony it reproduces at length, and locates the failure in institutional design, observing that the university set that official up to fail. That framing determines the remedy. Architecture, screening methodology, staffing qualifications, and entity structure are not problems a personnel action or a revised policy statement can solve.

The Sixth Question

On August 3, 2026, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon issued A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards (referred to by some as “Compact 2.0”).⁴ It asks every institution to post a public statement before the end of 2026 describing its commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service, organized around seven questions. The sixth asks how the institution will protect academic programs from foreign influence and safeguard the integrity of the research enterprise.

It would be reasonable to read the four congressional committee recommendations as aspirational, and the Committees partly invite that (at one’s own peril). They concede that many of the relationships described in their report remain lawful, that the export control regime’s fundamental research exclusion reaches many of these collaborations and so limits the applicability of traditional restrictions, and that some defense-linked Chinese universities carry no U.S. restrictions at all. The central request — that institutions decline engagement with entities tied to foreign defense and intelligence ecosystems whether or not the engagement is permissible — is openly a request to go beyond what the law requires (right now).

Less of that request is beyond the law than it was in May. On May 29, 2026, the Office of Management and Budget, joined by dozens of federal grantmaking agencies and entities, published a proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance that would materially rewrite the rules governing federal financial assistance, including a new § 200.220 barring the use of federal award funds to support collaborations with covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities — a term defined to reach entities affiliated with the military, intelligence, or security services of a covered foreign country.⁵ OMB proposed that its final rule take effect by October 1, 2026, to align with fiscal year 2027. That date is now uncertain.⁶

The First Question

The Committees’ report also bears on the first and second questions.⁷

Two weeks before the Secretary’s letter, on July 20, 2026, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division opened a compliance review of the same research university that begins in its Section 117 filings.⁸ The Civil Rights Division — not the agency to whom the filings were submitted — audited the disclosures. The university had reported nearly $4.5 billion in foreign funding, more than $630 million of it from China-based sources. The audit surfaced that certain of those sources restricted the university’s use of their funds and required it to support or establish financial aid programs favoring students from particular countries. The Division’s stated concern is that the university took the money, honored the restriction, and awarded aid on the basis of national origin, to the potential detriment of American citizens and others. It has reached no conclusions.

The Division did not need a whistleblower, a subpoena, or an interview to get there. It read filings the university submitted itself, which have been publicly posted since January 2026. And a disclosure obligation belongs to the sixth question, while what the audit produced is a first-question problem: whether financial aid is awarded on merit, achievement, and educational purpose, or on a characteristic the institution may not use.

The Second Question

The Committees supply a record for Compact 2.0’s second question too.⁹ Their report opens not with research security but with a lecture: the PRC ambassador speaking on campus in April 2024, protesters holding signs, one of them seized by the arm and pulled from the room. A dean later wrote to the person who did it, acknowledging an intention to keep the event from being further disrupted and guidance from organizers to intervene. No action followed against the assailant. The protester was placed on academic probation.¹⁰

Executive Order 13864, in place since March 2019, directs the heads of a dozen covered agencies, coordinating with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, to take appropriate steps to ensure that institutions receiving federal research or education grants promote free inquiry.¹¹ For public institutions the measure is the First Amendment. For private institutions it is compliance with their own stated policies on freedom of speech. Proposed § 200.219 would add a related award term barring viewpoint-, content-, or subject-matter-based discrimination in event services — security, crowd management, facilities access, fees — while preserving viewpoint-neutral time, place, and manner rules.

An active case opened late last year involving a leading public university shows how that gets enforced. Two federal offices opened separate matters over the same campus event, two weeks apart, and only one of them concerned speech.

On November 11, 2025, the day after a Turning Point USA event and related protests, the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights wrote to the university’s president and board.¹² The first authority the letter invokes is not a statute but the university’s own commitment to provide adequate security under a prior settlement agreement. The letter notes that Title VI and Title VII investigations of the university system were already open on other events, that the Division would determine whether the November 10 events should be folded into them, and that it was assessing whether those events supported further investigation of First and Fourteenth Amendment violations.

On November 25, the Department of Education’s office of Federal Student Aid opened a separate focused review of the same protests, not under the civil rights laws and not tied to research funding, but under the Clery Act, which conditions federal student aid on campus safety and reporting obligations.¹³ The Secretary’s statement is explicit that the review is not about students’ First Amendment rights to protest peacefully but about accurate crime-statistic reporting and whether every student can safely participate in campus programs.

The Intersections Between Questions

The Committees’ report, along with the active investigations described above, shows the same movement: an inquiry opens related to one legal discipline, operational line, or enforcement area and then expands into others. Other examples abound. The lesson they teach is uniform: institutions that answer the federal government’s questions, such as the ones set forth in Secretary McMahon’s Compact 2.0, one at a time, by assigning each to the office and legal practice group that has traditionally owned the subject matter, may write doctrinally defensible answers but invite disaster.

The underlying condition is structural. As the Committees observed, a “decentralized … approach to research security, compliance, and due diligence creates inconsistent standards, fragmented oversight, and uneven risk tolerance” across a university.¹⁴ One immediate consequence of that is a blistering 50+ page report. The more consequential test is whether the statements due by year-end treat the seven questions as one institutional problem or as seven separate ones.

AJM Institutional Counsel and Strategy advises universities, colleges, and health systems on developing governance structures and decision-making frameworks to exercise integrated institutional judgment.

 

NOTES

1. H. Select Comm. on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party & H. Comm. on Educ. & the Workforce, Compromised Independence: CCP Influence at Harvard University (August 13, 2026).
   https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/press-releases/select-committee-investigation-exposing-ccp-influence-at-harvard-university
2. Id. at 30.
3. Andreas J. Meyer, “Weaving the Threads: What the Checklist Can’t Answer,” AJM Institutional Counsel and Strategy (July 15, 2026).
4. U.S. Dep’t of Educ., A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards (Aug. 3, 2026).
   https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-secretary-of-education-linda-mcmahon-issues-national-call-action-university-presidents-and-governing-boards
5. Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance, 91 Fed. Reg. 32198 (proposed May 29, 2026).
6. H.R. 9770, 119th Cong. § 157 (as passed by Senate Aug. 8, 2026); Continuing Appropriations Act, 2027, H.R. 9770, 119th Cong. (as passed by House July 21, 2026). The Senate-passed measure funds the government through December 11 and bars implementation of the proposed Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance for the duration of the continuing resolution. The Senate passed the amended measure 90–6; the House had earlier passed H.R. 9770 through December 4 and must act on the Senate amendment after returning from recess.
7. See Call to Action, supra note 4, question 1 (asking how the institution will ensure admissions criteria are transparent and wholly described to prospective applicants, and how it will ensure admissions decisions are based on merit, achievement, and the institution’s educational purpose).
8. Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Justice Department Launches Investigation to Determine Whether Harvard’s China-Based Financial Aid Programs Discriminate Against American Students, No. 26-813 (July 20, 2026).
   https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-launches-investigation-determine-whether-harvards-china-based-financial
9. See Call to Action, supra note 4, question 2 (asking how the institution will protect the free exchange of ideas, wide-ranging debate, and open-minded campus discourse, and how it will guarantee that unruly and violent protestors do not harass students or disrupt classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations).
10. Compromised Independence, supra note 1, at 4–5, 11.
11. Exec. Order No. 13864, Improving Free Inquiry, Transparency, and Accountability at Colleges and Universities, §§ 2(a), 3, 84 Fed. Reg. 11401 (Mar. 26, 2019).
12. Letter from Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Att’y Gen., Civil Rights Div., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, to James B. Milliken, President, Univ. of California, and the UC Bd. of Regents (Nov. 11, 2025) (re: TPUSA Protests); see also Harmeet Dhillon (@AAGDhillon), X post (Nov. 11, 2025).
    https://x.com/AAGDhillon/status/1988361125684007147
13. Press Release, U.S. Dep’t of Educ., U.S. Department of Education Initiates Review of University of California, Berkeley for Potential Clery Act Violations (Nov. 25, 2025).
    https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-initiates-review-of-university-of-california-berkeley-potential-clery-act-violations
14. Compromised Independence, supra note 1, at 51.