The exiled Institute valued Wittfogel mainly as a bridge to American academia.

Evidence

Although sponsored in his research by the Institut, he also received support from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute of Pacific Relations. In the forties Wittfogel became increasingly independent of the Institut, both ideologically and financially. But in the several years after his return from China, his connection was prized as a link to the American academic world. The Institut’s short historical accounts of those years always included extensive mention of his work, and he was prominently featured in the Institut’s lecture series at Columbia’s Extension Division. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 435