Yale Law School. (Courtesy photo)

A $30 million donation from an executive at Chinese online retailer Alibaba to Yale Law School in 2016 appears to have helped spur a U.S. Department of Education investigation into the wider campus' disclosure of foreign gifts.

The Education Department announced Wednesday that it is investigating Yale and Harvard University's disclosure of contracts and donations from foreign entities—federal law requires colleges to report any such gift in excess of $250,000.

Department officials said this week that they believe Yale may have failed to report at least $375 million in foreign gifts and contracts in recent years, and that Harvard has also failed to fully disclose foreign gifts.

One point of inquiry for the department is Yale Law's Paul Tsai China Center, which received $30 million from Joseph Tsai, executive vice chairman of the Alibaba Group Services Ltd.

"This is about transparency," said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in an announcement of the administrative investigations. "If colleges and universities are accepting foreign money and gifts, their students, donors, and taxpayers deserve to know how much and from whom. Moreover, it's what the law requires. Unfortunately, the more we dig, the more we find that too many are underreporting or not reporting at all."

A Yale law school spokeswoman referred questions about the investigation to the university's director of media relations, who released a statement that confirmed the Education Department's claim that it failed to disclose any foreign funding from 2014 to 2017—which the university called an oversight. Yale submitted disclosures for those missing years in November, and its reporting is now up to date, according to the statement.

Education officials are zeroing in on donations and contracts tied to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Iran and China, as well as from prominent foreign companies including Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE, and Kaspersky Lab, a Russian computer security company.

While the Harvard investigation does not appear to be linked specifically to any initiatives within the law school, Education Department officials have requested a list of all gifts and contracts tied to Yale Law's Paul Tsai Center—one of three programs across the New Haven campus singled out in a Feb. 11 letter from the department to Yale president Peter Salovey. (The other two programs named in the letter are the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the Kerry Initiative—an interdisciplinary program focused on global challenges.)

Yale Law launched its China Center in 1999, but it got a boost and a rebrand in 2016 when Joseph Tsai donated $30 million in honor of his later father, Paul Tsai. (Alibaba is often referred to as the Chinese Amazon.) Both Tsais are Yale Law alumni. Paul Tsai obtained both a master's and doctorate from the school in the 1950s, while Joseph Tsai graduated with his J.D. in 1990.

"Yale takes very seriously the importance of ensuring that funding from foreign sources does not in any way compromise American interests, and it respects the Education Department's requirements about reporting of such funding," said the statement from Yale.