Time to end branch campuses in Qatar

The post-October 7 backlash against campus antisemitism has taken its next casualty: Texas A&M’s Qatar branch campus. The Texas A&M System’s Board of Regents voted 7-1 on February 8 to close its overseas campus in Qatar by 2028. This makes Texas A&M the first American university to end its deal with the Gulf State after two decades in operation and more than $600 million in Qatari funds. And while it’s a victory on several fronts, including combating global support for terrorism and improving national security, this is only the beginning: there are five other American universities that should follow Texas A&M’s lead by closing their branch campuses in Qatar. 

The Board began to reassess Texas A&M’s branch campus in fall 2023, motivated by the “heightened instability in the Middle East.” In general, public scrutiny of universities heightened as leaders struggled to condemn the Hamas attacks. For universities like Texas A&M, it sparked renewed interest in their controversial relationship with Qatar. 

But opposition to Texas A&M’s branch campus had actually been building for years. Public criticisms of Texas A&M’s close relationship with Qatar focused on transparency problems. In 2016, the Washington Post tried to obtain the latest agreement between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation, the Qatar government-owned non-profit organization that oversees the branch campuses. The Qatar Foundation petitioned the Texas attorney general to keep the document secret, though it was later disclosed. In 2018, Zachor Legal Institute struggled to obtain records regarding Qatar’s funding of the branch campus. Zachor, in tandem with Judicial Watch, engaged in a lengthy legal battle and finally obtained the documents in 2023. Notably, the Qatar Foundation also fought against disclosure of these contracts, citing confidentiality of private donor information and trade secrets.  

A recent analysis of the Texas A&M agreement showed that Qatar owned all the intellectual property generated at Texas A&M’s Qatar campus. This poses a serious security risk because Texas A&M’s focus in Qatar is engineering. Many of the projects conducted by researchers in Doha have potential military applications. Additionally, researchers must demonstrate in proposals how their work would support Qatar’s national objectives. 

Texas A&M was one of six American universities to open branch campuses in Education City, Qatar’s education hub in the capital city of Doha. Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern and Virginia Commonwealth University are the other five American universities. Qatar recruited these universities starting in the late 1990s to develop its workforce. Each university focuses on a particular subject. Since 2003, Texas A&M-Qatar has taught Qatari students engineering. It also conducts research through the Texas A&M’s Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) division in Qatar. 

Universities that operate in Qatar have received a staggering amount of money. A National Association of Scholars report estimates that American universities received at least $4.7 billion between 2001 and 2021. Not all of this money is pure profit for the universities. The majority of the funds reimburse each university’s operating expenses to run the branch campuses. But that doesn’t mean these campuses aren’t profitable. 

American universities with Qatar branch campuses are the only ones that can apply for highly lucrative research grants from the Qatar Foundation. For instance, TEES received at least $100 million in such grants over the past decade, much of it unreported to the federal government. So shutting these campuses down also cuts off a valuable source of research funds for universities.

Despite the money, these campuses are more trouble than they’re worth. The authoritarian regime in Qatar does not allow for the same academic freedom and free speech rights that underlie the American higher education system. Former Northwestern faculty senate president Stephen Eisenman raised these concerns in a report after visiting Northwestern-Qatar in 2015. He requested Northwestern to condition its operations on Qatar relaxing its speech restrictions. Northwestern did not listen. Later, in 2020, the Qatar Foundation canceled an event at Northwestern’s Qatar campus that featured a lesbian singer because it did not adhere to Qatari social customs. 

Even worse, there is the uncomfortably cozy relationship between Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Especially in the wake of the brutal October 7 attacks, American universities should distance themselves from regimes that support terrorist organizations. The five other universities can demonstrate moral clarity in the face of Qatar’s complacency by removing their branch campuses. It’s time for this ugly chapter in higher education to end.