Academia can usually be relied upon to have a passive disloyalty to the Republic, but Professor Xiaoxing Xi was fairly assertive.

The chairman of Temple University's physics department was charged Thursday in an alleged scheme to provide sensitive U.S. defense technology to entities in China, including its government.

Federal prosecutors allege Xiaoxing Xi, a world-renowned expert in the field of superconductivity, sought prestigious appointments in China in exchange for sharing information on a device invented by a private company in the United States.

Xi, a 47-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Penn Valley, made his initial appearance in U.S. District Court on Thursday on four counts of wire fraud and was released on a $100,000 bond. He had not retained a lawyer and did not return calls for comment.
http://articles.philly.com/2015-05-2...s-china-device


Hackers apparently based in China have had access to Pennsylvania State University’s engineering school computers for over two years, the university disclosed on Friday after a lengthy analysis by federal and private investigators.

The breach potentially has exposed research pertaining to technology for the U.S. Defense Department.

The university said it would take the affected computer network offline for several days to root out the hackers.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/penn-sta...ked-1431804110

From 2014 -

A prominent Beijing scholar who recently fled to the United States has warned that China was sending "spies" to American universities, and urged US institutions to tread carefully on academic co-operation.

Xia Yeliang is one of the original signatories of Charter 08, a petition for reform whose Nobel Prize-winning lead author Liu Xiaobo is in prison.

Xia, an economist, was fired in October from Peking University. In his first public event since moving to the US last month, Xia said on Thursday he was mindful of the 1950s McCarthy era, when smears of alleged communist sympathies hit the reputations of Americans in government, entertainment and academia.

But Xia, who has been a visiting scholar at several US universities, said he was aware of "real spies" sent by Beijing to the US to carry out surveillance under the guise of academic exchange.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic...over-educating

From 2012 -

While overshadowed by espionage against corporations, efforts by foreign countries to penetrate universities have increased in the past five years, Figliuzzi said. The FBI and academia, which have often been at loggerheads, are working together to combat the threat, he said.

Attempts by countries in East Asia, including China, to obtain classified or proprietary information by “academic solicitation,” such as requests to review academic papers or study with professors, jumped eightfold in 2010 from a year earlier, according to a 2011 U.S. Defense Department report. Such approaches from the Middle East doubled, it said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...etected-by-fbi