Jack Armstrong Says Qatar, China Are Top Foreign Donors to U.S. Colleges, Cites Ignored Disclosure Law

On the September 18 episode of The Armstrong & Getty Show, titled "Oh God! I'm Going Home!," co-host Jack Armstrong argued that foreign money is a major reason American universities resist common-sense reform, citing a Wall Street Journal piece by Craig Singleton.

Armstrong said federal law has for decades required universities that receive federal funds to report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more annually. He said schools routinely ignore that requirement, which he said has allowed billions of dollars to flow in from Qatar and China unreported. Armstrong identified those two countries as what he called the top two foreign donors to U.S. universities, tying Qatar to Islamism and China to communism.

"Islamists and communists. It's incredible," Armstrong said on the broadcast.

Armstrong framed the fix as straightforward: enforce the disclosure law already on the books. "Follow the damn law. Enforce the law," he said, adding that this is one thing the Trump administration could do. He did not cite additional data beyond the Singleton piece to support the ranking of Qatar and China as the largest sources of foreign university funding, and the source material provided here does not include the underlying Wall Street Journal article or Education Department disclosure data.

The comments came during a broader segment on higher-education accountability. Earlier in the show, Armstrong and co-host Joe Getty discussed a New York Times op-ed defending the University of California's decision to drop the SAT. Armstrong disputed the op-ed's claim that the system has not sacrificed academic standards, while Getty invoked Goodhart's Law — the idea that once a measurement becomes a target, it stops functioning as a reliable measurement — to explain why rising graduation rates don't necessarily reflect better outcomes.

Armstrong then turned to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, which released its 2027 college free speech rankings. He said 121 of 261 ranked schools received an F for their speech climate. Armstrong also cited FIRE polling data indicating that 30% of students said using violence to stop a campus speaker is acceptable in at least rare cases, and that 69% said shouting down a speaker is acceptable under similar circumstances.

None of the figures cited on air by Armstrong — the foreign-donor disclosure threshold, the FIRE grades, or the student polling numbers — were independently verified in the material reviewed for this report. Readers seeking the underlying data should consult the Journal's reporting by Craig Singleton and FIRE's published 2027 rankings directly.

Enforcement of federal disclosure law falls to the U.S. Department of Education, not state officials, though several states have their own reporting requirements for public university foreign gifts that operate independently of the federal statute Armstrong referenced.

Heard on The Armstrong & Getty Show — Oh God! I'm Going Home! (2026-09-18).