Qatar’s War for Young American Minds

The same country now protecting Hamas’s senior leaders has donated billions to American universities. Here’s why.

By Eli Lake October 24, 2023

The numbers are staggering. According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities:

• Since 1997, Qatar has donated more than $103 million to Virginia Commonwealth University for a fine arts campus.

• Since 2001, Qatar has donated $1.8 billion to Cornell for a medical school.

• Since 2003, Qatar has donated nearly $700 million to Texas A&M for an engineering campus.

• Since 2004, Qatar has donated $740 million to Carnegie Mellon University for a computer science campus.

• Since 2005, Qatar has donated $760 million to Georgetown University for a school of politics.

• Since 2008, Qatar has donated nearly $602 million to Northwestern University for a school of journalism.

One might expect that scholarly institutions that have benefited from this autocracy’s money would rethink their partnership after Qatar’s foreign minister said that “Israel alone is responsible” for the pogrom perpetrated by Hamas terrorists. Or after Qatar’s prime minister on Friday declined to close the office Hamas maintains in its capital. But these universities have given no indication that they will end their profitable partnership with Qatar. 

All but one university on the list declined to comment on the future of their Doha campuses when contacted by The Free Press. Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, gave the following statement:

Maintaining relationships with countries like Qatar serve a broader purpose, including fostering international dialogue and cooperation. Texas A&M’s relationship with Qatar is focused on educational and research activities, which contribute to the academic and intellectual development of both countries. That, in turn, hopefully will one day lead to peaceful resolutions rather than conflict.

She added that Texas A&M has clear and transparent agreements with Qatar that accord with U.S. and international laws. “No public funds are spent toward the Qatar campus,” she said.

 

In the last 25 years the universities have justified these joint ventures with Qatar as a way to liberalize an autocratic society and bring American soft power to the Middle East. Indeed, Qatari officials have themselves given lip service to this goal.

In 2015, Hunter R. Rawlings III, who was Cornell’s president when it opened its medical school in “education city,” told The Washington Post: “Part of our thinking was, most American involvement in the Middle East has to do with guns and oil. This project seems to have to do with medicine and education. It’s such a different message. Why don’t we try it?”

The reality, though, is much different. Many of these schools have had to compromise their values on their campuses in Doha. For example, in 2014 Qatar censored Love Comes Later, a romance novel set in London and Qatar written by Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Doha campus.

In some cases, the universities cooperated with Qatar’s strategic interests. The Qatar campus of Northwestern, whose U.S. journalism school is ranked as one of the best in the world, signed a memorandum of understanding with Al Jazeera, the Qatari-funded news channel that has provided a sympathetic platform for Hamas and other Islamist groups over the years, to help train its reporters.

In 2013, Sheikh Ahmed bin Jassim al-Thani, then director general of Al Jazeera, said of the new partnership: “Al Jazeera Network places the development of its team’s skills at the top of its priorities, to stay par with the great media-related feats Qatar has accomplished regionally and internationally.”

But are Northwestern’s interests really aligned with Qatar? Al Jazeera aired a weekly program hosted by Muslim Brotherhood cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi between 1996 and 2013. Al-Qaradawi was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League in 2013—the same year that Northwestern signed its agreement with Al Jazeera—as the “theologian of terror.” In one 2009 sermon aired on the network, he said: “I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus I will seal my life with martyrdom.”

In 2015, Stephen Eisenman, who was then president of Northwestern’s faculty senate, concluded in a report on his school’s Doha campus that professors there enjoyed only “limited academic freedom.” He said this was not so much because professors feared the state’s strict censorship regime, but because they lacked tenure and were answerable only to the dean of Northwestern’s Qatar campus.

Eisenman also acknowledged that “the ethics of establishing a campus in an authoritarian country are murky, especially when it inhibits free expression, and counts among its allies several oppressive regimes or groups.”

That glancing reference to Qatar’s alliance with Hamas and Iran is the only mention of the state’s funding and support for political Islam. Eisenman concludes that countries that export oil and natural gas are bad for the environment and are often marred by “social and racial inequality.” Not to worry. Eisenman notes, “those characteristics describe the United States no less than Qatar and don’t prevent Northwestern from maintaining campuses in Evanston and Chicago.”