Qatar has used its wealth to persuade six universities to open campuses in Doha. These partnerships raise urgent questions about financial transparency, academic freedom, institutional independence and the price of access to authoritarian funding.
Doha insists that these universities operate with “complete independence.” The record suggests otherwise. The campuses must operate in accordance with Qatari law and social norms, while many financial arrangements remain opaque. Virginia Commonwealth University, Cornell University, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon University and Texas A&M University have all accepted substantial sums tied to their Doha operations, often with limited public disclosure of the purpose, conditions or broader consequences of the funding.
In 1997, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Qatar (VCUarts Qatar) became the first American university to establish a presence in Doha’s Education City. It offers bachelor’s degrees in art history and fine arts.
Of VCU’s $434 million in Arab donations reported to the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) since 1986, $383 million came from Qatar. None are explicitly attributed to the Qatar campus; however, the largest contracts—totaling more than $379 million between 2002 and 2024—were almost certainly tied to its operation. More concerning, the Qatar Foundation (QF) retains a 50% share of any intellectual property developed on campus and a say in curriculum changes if they pose “a significant budgetary or academic impact,” without infringing on “the academic freedom of faculty regarding curricular decisions.”
Qatar’s largest investment in an American university has been at Cornell. In 2001, the school agreed to establish Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, backed by a Qatari commitment of $750 million over 11 years. Since then, Cornell has reported $915 million in funding for the campus, but when contracts with no stated purpose are included, Qatar’s support likely approaches $2.2 billion.
Georgetown has also faced criticism for its campus in Qatar. Founded in 2005 as the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar (now known as Georgetown University in Qatar), the institution offers a four-year liberal arts program that provides students with a multidisciplinary education in international affairs.
In 2018, the Georgetown Voice editorial board called for closing the Qatar campus, arguing that Qatar’s abuses against women, LGBTQ individuals and migrant workers were “antithetical to Georgetown’s mission as a Jesuit institution.” It concluded that “the integrity of our school is at stake.”
Integrity, however, appears to have a price: More than $1 billion in Qatari funding, none of it accounted for in the DoE report.
In 2025, Georgetown held a gala celebrating 20 years of partnership with the QF and renewed its contract for an additional decade. As if to underscore its abdication of moral responsibility, the university awarded Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser—mother of the Emir and Chair of QF—its President’s Medal, one of the highest honors it bestows. Interim President Robert Groves gushed that Moza’s work reflects the University’s “deepest commitments” to knowledge, peace, and justice.
Lenny Ben-David, a political and strategic consultant in Israel, highlighted the Sheikha’s hostility toward Israel, characterizing it as antisemitic. As an example, he cited her 2023 speech in Turkey, where she declared:
The first indication that Qatar’s influence might be turning toxic came in 2024, when Texas A&M announced it would close its Qatar campus after 21 years—just three years into a renewed 10-year contract.
The move was expensive: The DoE recorded 10 payments to the campus totaling $329 million. According to a 2024 investigation by the Daily Northwestern, A&M received a $7 million annual fee and an additional $3 million if it met certain thresholds for faculty hiring, Qatari student enrollment and collaboration with institutions in Qatar. Even after announcing plans to close the campus, the university reported receiving an additional $25 million in January 2025.
Officially, the university cited regional instability and shifting priorities for its decision. Unofficially, some pointed to a report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) warning that Qatar had full ownership of all intellectual property from Texas A&M’s Qatar operations, including innovative nuclear research with potential weapons applications, as well as advanced work in biotechnology, cybersecurity, robotics and AI. The report questioned whether this access could enable Qatar to pass sensitive technologies to Iran or “other dangerous regional actors.”
Inside Higher Education reported that the campus faced controversy and scrutiny before. In 2021, Joseph Ura, the former chair of the Qatar campus’s liberal arts program, stated that he was removed from his position for defending a professor whose contract was not renewed after she tweeted pro-Israel sentiments.
According to the Daily Northwestern, Northwestern University has received more than $500 million from Qatar since 2007 to train journalists and media professionals. In 2013, NU-Q signed a formal agreement with Al Jazeera, the Qatari state-controlled broadcaster, to train journalists for the outlet. NU-Q also committed to supporting Al Jazeera’s expansion into the U.S. market through its short-lived cable channel, Al Jazeera America (AJA), and later through the digital platform AJ+, both of which have been criticized for biased, anti-Western content.
In 2015, professor Stephen Eisenman, then-president of Northwestern’s Faculty Senate, visited the Doha campus and reported that NU-Q faculty enjoyed only “limited” academic freedom, not just due to Qatar’s strict censorship laws but also because many were untenured. He observed that students “appear to have internalized many speech restrictions and willingly operate within them.”
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.
The 2022-23 NU-Q annual report touts 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 approximately $6 million annually as a management fee.
Northwestern president Michael Schill’s evasions underscored the arrangement’s opacity. At a 2024 congressional hearing, he could not say how much Qatar had paid the university for its Doha campus. A year later, when asked whether the school complies with the QF contract requiring Northwestern, NU-Q and their employees, students, families, contractors and agents to obey Qatari law and respect the country’s “cultural, religious and social customs,” Schill replied, “I believe it has to.”
The university remains under contract to operate NU-Q through at least 2028.
Carnegie Mellon celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Qatar campus in 2025 by announcing the third 10-year extension of its partnership with the QF. No funds for the campus are identified in the DoE report. However, in May 2025, it received the largest foreign donation ever to a university: $936 million, which the Free Press identified as funds for the Doha campus. Earlier contributions totaling $903 million also appear linked to the Qatar program.
In 2026, QF announced three new partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The agreements with Hampton University in Virginia, Xavier University of Louisiana and Prairie View A&M University in Texas will allow students from these universities to spend a semester at institutions in Qatar’s Education City. Representatives from the universities described the agreements as opportunities to enhance global education, cultural awareness, academic excellence and leadership development in an increasingly interconnected world.
The announcement did not say how much Qatar would pay the universities to participate.
Neetu Arnold, a research fellow with the National Association of Scholars, noted that universities demand “nothing of Qatar beyond its money: the nation can preserve its illiberal quasi-absolute monarchy and traditional Islamic mores and still escape criticism.” Meanwhile, “the university gains the potential to rake in cash through initiatives that extend well beyond the walls of the original branch campus.”
None of this is to say that international academic partnerships are inherently wrong or that American universities should retreat from global engagement. The question is not whether to engage; it is with whom and on whose terms.
The terms Qatar demands are clear: Accept the money, follow our laws, protect our narratives and trust us when we say that academic freedom is being respected. American universities have been accepting those terms for nearly three decades, producing graduates, intellectual property and institutional prestige that serve Qatari interests while insulating Qatari leaders from the accountability their conduct warrants.
