Time to Deal with Qatar’s Ongoing Hijack of American Higher Education

Qatar is now the single largest foreign donor to American higher education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the tiny petro-rich state with deep ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood – among other things, it harbors many of their leaders – poured over $1.1 billion into U.S. colleges and universities in 2025 and $6 billion since 2001!

And it’s time to stop rationalizing that there are no strings attached to the largesse. The evidence is now overwhelming that its massive funding of elite institutions like Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Texas A&M is not philanthropy. It is an influence operation designed to reshape the thinking of future American leaders.

By funding massive “education City” satellite campuses and underwriting departments of Middle East studies, Qatar has effectively purchased the curriculum. They have virtually ensured that the academic lens through which students view the region will be heavily informed by Qatar. After all, Qatar is a place where dissent is criminalized.

At all events, how can a university like Georgetown honestly teach the history of the Middle East or the geopolitics of terrorism when its bills are largely paid by the very regime that funds the Muslim Brotherhood? How can a generation view Hamas as the terrorist proxy of Iran that it is, rather than as a liberation group, as their university’s benefactors would have it?

In fact, we are seeing the results in the explosion of virulent anti-Western and anti-Israel activism on these very same campuses. A 2025 report by the Institute for the Global Study of Antisemitism and Policy found a direct, statistical correlation: campuses that accept money from Qatar are significantly more likely to host groups that harass Jewish students and promote the dismantling of America’s place in the world order.

Can it really be just a coincidence that the universities most financially tethered to Qatar – including Northwestern, Georgetown, and Cornell – have become hotbeds of the most virulent anti-Western and anti-Israel activism in half a century?

Nor does the ideological rot stop at the educational door. The huge influx of funds into institutions engaged in nuclear, advanced engineering, and sensitive intellectual property research, like Texas A&M, raises grave national security concerns as well. Indeed, why would nations that protect the leadership of Hamas and which recently joined with Turkey and Saudi Arabia to block American foreign policy be interested in supporting such sophisticated research in Texas? And let’s not forget about the plethora of government research contracts these schools hold. Do we want to allow a nation actively at odds with the U.S. to have a seat at the table of our most advanced research?

Plainly, we can no longer rely on university presidents to police themselves. It is time for Congress to act. And there are some suggested remedies going forward.

First, the Department of Education must close the loopholes in the reporting requirements in the federal higher education law. Every single dollar from a foreign government must be disclosed along with the full texts of all contracts. There must be no more “confidential” side deals.

Second, if a school accepts funding from a nation designated as a state sponsor of terrorism or a “country of concern,” it should lose eligibility for American federal research grants. For example, a university should not be able to take money from the Pentagon to build drones while taking money from Qatar to teach students that the U.S. is an empire of evil.

American higher education cannot be for sale. It’s time to reclaim our institutions from foreign, ideological, and financial hijacking.