Funding for U.S. universities from Arab states, institutions and donors has increased significantly in the past five years, and there isn’t enough transparency about the sources of that financial support, according to a report from Jewish Virtual Library, which the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise publishes.
Arab governments, organizations and individuals have donated some $14.6 billion to U.S. colleges and universities since 1981, with a third of that funding coming since 2020, including $1.5 billion in one year, per the report. (The Arab funding was one quarter of all foreign funding for U.S. universities, per the report.)
“Donations from Arab states have quietly flowed into American universities, steadily creating endowed chairs, research centers and academic programs that shape the intellectual environment surrounding Middle Eastern studies,” according to the report.
“These efforts have borne fruit,” the report states. “The Arab lobby has successfully cultivated significant influence over the field, ensuring that a growing number of faculty across the country promote narratives that are pro-Arab—often emphasizing the Palestinian cause—sharply critical of Israel and frequently silent on the dangers of radical Islam.”
Per the report, some 45% (almost $6.6 billion) of the Arab funding for U.S. schools has come from Qatar, which made 1,223 donations, the largest of which was more than $163 million to Cornell University.
The next biggest spenders were Saudi Arabia ($3.9 billion) and the United Arab Emirates ($1.7 billion), according to the report. The former made 7,890 donations, with the largest ($43 million) going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the latter made 1,618 donations, with the largest ($75 million) going to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
The foreign policy analyst Mitchell Bard, who authored the report and serves as executive director of the Jewish Virtual Library, told JNS that Qatar has spread its “tentacles so widely.”
“It’s part of the theme of the report that the universities that are supposed to have some sort of ethical standards really compromise when it comes to getting money from Gulf states that have these abysmal human rights records,” he told JNS. (Bard writes for the JNS opinion section.)
‘In the dark’
Bard, who has been researching Arab funding in America for two decades, told JNS that the growth of that funding in recent years surprised him. “Qatar had been a pretty minor player in the early years,” he said.
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Saudi Arabia was the largest source of funding of U.S. universities, as it sought to rehabilitate its image stateside, according to Bard.
The “continuing lack of transparency” in donations from Arab states to U.S. schools has also surprised Bard.
Of the 1,223 Qatari donations that the report addresses, about a quarter listed a purpose for the funding, per the report.
“That means the American public, and the U.S. government, remain in the dark about how nearly $5 billion from a regime that funds Al Jazeera, hosts Hamas leadership and bankrolls Islamist organizations globally is being used on U.S. campuses,” the report states.
Some 73% of Arab contributions to U.S. schools, worth about $10.7 billion, have no purpose articulated publicly, although such reporting is required by the law, according to Bard.
One of the donations did list a goal—funding to create a Palestinian studies position at Brown University, which was used to hire someone who supports boycotting Israel and who later served as president of a Ramallah school linked to Hamas, the report states.
When reasons for funding are known, many come not through legally mandated reporting but via announcements from university publicity departments. (One such example: $10 million from a Saudi sheikh for Georgetown University’s Muslim-Christian understanding center.)
A donation that raised eyebrows was $284 million—the largest payment—from Kuwait to reimburse tuition for the spring 2023 semester at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. “This is an astounding sum in any circumstance, but for a single semester’s tuition, it suggests the support for thousands of Kuwaiti students,” the report states.
“Saudi Arabia’s largest gift was $43 million, with an unspecified purpose, to MIT,” per the report. “Strangely, the two largest Saudi donations in the prior year’s report—$74 million to the University of Idaho in 2021 and $47 million for Chapman University for tuition were removed.”
Cornell received the most Arab funding at $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1.05 billion) and Georgetown and Texas A&M, each of which received more than $1 billion. The latter, based in College Station, Texas, is a public, land-grant school. Both Cornell and Texas A&M have operated campuses in Qatar.
With the exception of Cornell, Ivy League schools received just 3% of all Arab funding, per the report.
Bard told JNS that he thinks that the concealments–like more than $1 billion to Georgetown with no stated purpose—are intentional.
“The government made a deal with the universities that it would disclose details about donations, but it didn’t say that it would disclose information on how the funds are used,” he said. “That’s something that I think is not clear—whether the Department of Education has the information and they just won’t publish it, or the universities are withholding it.” (JNS sought comment from the U.S. Department of Education.)
“Under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965, universities are required to disclose foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more. The Department of Education issues public reports based on that information biannually,” per the report. “Yet for years, this requirement was widely ignored. Universities often failed to report, and the Department of Education essentially looked the other way.”
“As a result, the public only learns of many foreign contributions when institutions voluntarily publicize them, typically to announce new programs or endowed positions,” Bard wrote in the report. “A turning point came in 2019-2020, when the Department of Education began demanding more detailed disclosures.”
The department opened probes of whether schools were complying with the law in 2020, he wrote.
“It dismissed claims that the reporting burden was unreasonable, citing implausible examples, such as Yale reporting no foreign gifts for four consecutive years, or Case Western Reserve doing so for 12,” per the report. “The Department of Education argued that if institutions can track tuition payments, they can trace foreign contributions.”
Bard told JNS that the Biden administration backtracked, and the second Trump administration has not done enough to reverse course.
Universities care mainly about their image and about money, according to Bard.
“It was only when big donors started withdrawing money and universities were getting bad publicity that they started paying attention to antisemitism,” he told JNS. “I think unless the government takes steps to force them to stop taking money from these countries, they’ll just continue to.”
Pro-Hamas protests
Bard’s research has not established direct links between Arab funding at schools and anti-Israel and pro-Hamas demonstrations on those campuses since Oct. 7 or to broader Jew-hatred.
“It is challenging to determine whether Arab funding influences faculty or whether it flows to faculty whose views are already aligned with those of the donors,” he wrote in the report.
Bard offers several suggestions to lawmakers in the report, including lowering the threshold for required foreign funding reporting from $250,000 to $50,000 and mandating that the identities of donors and the purposes of their gifts be disclosed on school websites.
“Task congressional committees to investigate the impact of foreign funding on national security,” he wrote. “Consider banning or capping funding from non-democratic countries that abuse human rights or pose a security threat to the United States.”
“Qatar is very problematic, because in addition to all of the nefarious things that it does, it also is the home to a major American military base,” Bard told JNS.
“There’s a reluctance to do much to go after that,” he said. “I think the Qataris now have really ensconced themselves in Washington in a way where their influence is broad, largely by way of the amount of money they’re spending on lobbyists.”
