Anti-Israel academics are following the money
That’s precisely what the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has been laser-focused on since 2012, when it issued its first “Follow the Money” report examining the illicit funding universities receive from foreign entities that promote anti-Semitic, anti-democratic ideologies. ISGAP released its latest update two weeks ago, focusing on Qatar, whose ruling family established a foundation in 2006 that has funneled close to $3 billion to more than 40 elite universities, including Ivy League schools.
While universities are allowed to accept foreign donations, the funding becomes illicit when they fail to report foreign gifts or contracts as required by Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. In a July 2021 article in the Medium blog, Daniel Currell, a visiting fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University, singled out Yale, writing that they “apparently forgot to do any reporting for four consecutive years,” even though they received between $50 million and $150 million during that period.
ISGAP’s latest report cites a ten-year, $1 billion agreement between the Qatar Foundation and Texas A&M, one of the nation’s top aerospace and engineering schools, to establish a campus in Qatar that “appears to grant Qatar ultimate control over academic standards, faculty, students, curriculum, and budgets — thus subordinating educational priorities to Qatar’s national interests and severely compromising institutional autonomy.”
Taking that one step further, Judicial Watch, a Washington–based watchdog that describes itself as a conservative, nonpartisan educational foundation, noted “discrepancies” between what Texas A&M reported in donations from Qatar from 2013 to 2018 ($69,844) and the US Department of Education’s database, which recorded more than $47 million for the same period.
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