Mr. Harris, the universities aren't relying on Confucius Institutes, although some universities that don't have the resources to fund language training have used them.
At the University of British Columbia, we decided not to partner with the Confucius Institutes. This was partly because they were, as we saw, too connected to the propaganda side of the Chinese government, but it was also because we teach Chinese language in a different way.
That said, most of the studies done on the Confucius Institutes are in the United States, and most of those studies suggest that what the Confucius Institutes actually do is pretty innocuous . They don't influence people's political views.
One can dislike the Confucius Institutes. I think what we should do for those institutions that want to have them is provide complete transparency. Go in, investigate, look. There's a whole side to Han nationalism that plays through in their curriculum. We'd have to look at that carefully, but in and of themselves, they are not an evil. They are not an outreach location for deep subversion. They're just, I think, a foolishly considered Chinese way of trying to get the world to learn Chinese language and culture.