Why would one of America’s premier journalism schools partner with a regime that jails dissidents, censors speech and bankrolls Al Jazeera—a network infamous for anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda?
The answer is simple: money, and lots of it.
Northwestern is the fifth-largest recipient of Arab funding in the United States since 1981, having received more than $770 million, according to the U.S. Department of Education. At least $221 million is tied to its Doha campus, which was launched in 2008; however, Northwestern’s student newspaper pegs the total at more than $500 million. Officially, the Qatar Foundation (QF) intended for the campus to train journalists and media professionals, offering undergraduate degrees in journalism and communication. NU-Q’s role has extended far beyond education.
The school became a development program for the authoritarian state’s propaganda machine.
In 2013, NU-Q signed a formal agreement with Al Jazeera, offering student training, exchanges and assistance in expanding into the U.S. market—first with the ill-fated Al Jazeera America, and then with AJ+, both of which were criticized for biased, anti-Western content.
The influence runs much deeper. NU-Q faculty have conducted research projects promoting Qatar’s domestic and international narratives.
These include one $800,521 grant for “National Museums and the Public Imagination: A Longitudinal Study of the National Museum of Qatar,” $482,986 for “Assessing Qatari Emerging Media Engagement,” $150,000 for “Qatari Women: Engagement and Empowerment” and $99,836 for a study on Qatar’s participation in the World Values Survey. A $30,000 project titled “Hashtag Blockade” examined the online discourse during the Gulf Crisis. Other grants lack disclosed amounts.
When professor Stephen Eisenman, then-president of the Faculty Senate, visited NU-Q in 2015, he was told NU-Q operated at no cost to Northwestern and even generated revenue—though the university president at the time, Morton Schapiro, who is Jewish, minimized its impact on the school’s finances, calling it little more than “a rounding error.” Eisenman noted that the QF had funded five new endowed professorships at the home campus (none of which appeared in the Education Department’s foreign gift disclosures).
More troubling were Eisenman’s findings on academic freedom. He wrote that NU-Q faculty enjoyed only “limited” academic freedom and that students internalized censorship. The QF’s suppression of a Lebanese band with an openly gay singer and the dismissal of a professor for expressing pro-Israel views highlight the chilling of freedom of expression in environments beholden to oppressive regimes.
In fact, as the House Education and Workforce Committee revealed, NU-Q signed a contract with QF that “NU, NU-Q, and their respective employees, students, faculty, families, contractors and agents, shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar.”
Eisenman proposed several reforms: instituting shared governance for NU-Q faculty and conditioning continued partnership on Qatar’s progress toward greater intellectual and press freedom. “Lack of free speech protection cannot be legitimated as a matter of cultural difference,” he wrote. “It is the exercise of power by a repressive government over its people.”
As of 2021, Eisenman reported that none of his recommendations had been implemented. His report no longer appears on the university website.
He was not the only one to raise alarms. In 2021, students at the NU-Q campus protested discrimination against the university’s South Asian, East Asian and black students, as well as low student wages.
The most recent NU-Q annual report (2022-23) offers no financial transparency. It discloses only a $350,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, while touting additional grants from the Qatar National Research Fund and the QF’s Education City Innovation in Teaching program—with no amounts listed. The university’s 2023 tax return lists $63 million in expenses for maintaining NU-Q. It also receives about $6 million in annual management fees.
Northwestern president Michael Schill was specifically asked about ties to Qatar during a 2024 hearing of the House Education and Workforce Committee and was unable to answer how much money the university had received for the Doha campus. Later, Francisco Marmolejo, the president of Higher Education at QF, issued a statement that said: “Qatar Foundation is not in the business of buying, or attempting to buy, influence in U.S. higher education institutions.”
Schill could be excused for evasiveness to avoid risking tens of millions of dollars, much of it unreported, for its campus in Evanston, Ill.
He was interviewed again by the House committee in 2025 and asked whether Northwestern complies with the stipulation in the contract with the QF that NU-Q “shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar.”
Schill responded, “I believe it has to.”
When pressed on whether that included Qatar’s censorship laws, he seemed shifty, saying it was a “legal matter” but that he believed NU-Q had the same academic freedom and free speech as its U.S. campus.
A few weeks later, Schill resigned.
Despite a federal requirement that all foreign contributions of $250,000 or more be disclosed to the public, several made to Northwestern are missing from the DoE report. For example, in 2012, Northwestern received two research grants, each worth $1.05 million, from the Qatar National Research Fund. The Daily Northwestern reported that QF awarded 17 grants between 2012 and 2018 to faculty who partner with Qatari institutions, ranging from $650,000 to $5 million, and that these grants are also missing from the DoE listing.
Neetu Arnold, a research fellow with the National Association of Scholars, observed that universities like Northwestern demand “nothing of Qatar beyond its money: The nation can preserve its illiberal quasi-absolute monarchy and traditional Islamic mores and still escape criticism.”
Universities like Northwestern help human-rights abusers launder their reputations. For example, after questions were raised about the school accepting nearly $22 million from Saudi Arabia after revelations about Crown Prince bin Mohammed Salman’s alleged involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the administration insisted that most funds went to faculty grants for “basic science research” that would have global benefits. It took no action but asked faculty to “assess their relationships with Saudi Arabia.” Since then, Northwestern has received an additional $13 million from Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, the university remains under contract to operate NU-Q through at least 2028. If Northwestern really believes in the values it teaches—free press, transparency and accountability—then it should start by answering a simple question: How much is your integrity worth?
