Northwestern University president Michael Schill is set to testify in front of the House Education and Workforce Committee Thursday in a hearing focused on his handling of campus antisemitism and his concessions to encampment organizers that included items like establishing full-ride scholarships for Palestinian students and faculty positions for Palestinian academics.
One subject sure to be mentioned in the hearing is Northwestern’s acceptance of large sums of foreign money, particularly from Qatar. The oil-rich Gulf state, which has sheltered senior Hamas leaders even after the terrorist organization’s October 7 attack against Israel, has donated nearly $690 million to Northwestern since 2007, a new report from nonprofit watchdog Open the Books shows. Some of the money goes toward the tuition of Qatari students who attend university, but the most notable beneficiary is Northwestern’s school in Education City, the Qatari development that houses satellite campuses for American colleges and universities.
NU-Q, as the satellite campus is known, offers bachelor’s degrees in journalism and communication and maintains an institutional partnership with Qatari state-owned media outlet Al Jazeera, which the school describes as providing opportunities for “students to engage regularly with leading media industry professionals” and “gain an insider’s perspective on the media industry.” Northwestern in Qatar often places journalism students in internship programs with Al Jazeera and Al Jazeera Plus, the outlet’s Western-facing arm. In 2013, Northwestern in Qatar and the Al Jazeera Network signed a memorandum of understanding to “further facilitate collaboration and knowledge transfer between two of Qatar’s foremost media organizations” and “conduct consultations with Al Jazeera leadership based on its faculty research interests and expertise in the American media industry.”
Those “faculty research interests,” it appears, include demonization of Israel and support for Palestinian terrorism. Khaled AL-Hroub, for instance, is a professor of Middle Eastern studies and politics at the Qatar campus who said on an NPR program that he had not seen “any credible media reporting” to indicate that Hamas had killed women and children in its October 7 attack. Northwestern initially issued a statement saying that “while Northwestern firmly supports academic freedom and freedom of expression, we condemn Khaled AL-Hroub’s attempt to minimize or misrepresent the horrific killing of Israeli civilians by Hamas.” Soon after, the university revised the statement, removing AL-Hroub’s name, clarifying that the sentiments did not represent Northwestern’s official position.
Rami Khouri, a member of Northwestern in Qatar’s joint advisory board, wrote a piece in 2015 in which he defended Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israeli civilians and has previously characterized Hamas terrorist tactics as emanating “from the bottomless arsenal of the human spirit.” On October 7, he compared Hamas brutality to the ways in which Jews “also fought back during their centuries of victimization in the West.”
One professor at Northwestern in Qatar, Ibrahim Abusharif, has not just made suspect statements but actually has ties to organizations found responsible for financing terrorism. From 1990 to 1998, Abusharif served as treasurer of the Quranic Literacy Institute, a nonprofit organization that purported to translate Islamic texts into English. However, in 1999, the United States government filed a civil forfeiture action against the Quranic Literacy Institute, alleging that the nonprofit served as a conduit through which supporters of terrorism could funnel money to Hamas. The U.S. government ultimately seized $1.4 million in assets from the organization as a result. Included in the seized assets was a loan from a man named Yassin Kadi, a Saudi businessman and terrorism financier who provided $3 million to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As the Chicago Tribune reported at the time, Kadi wired money from a Swiss bank account to a Chicago-area real-estate developer to purchase property in a development controlled by the Quranic Literacy Institute, and the organization gave the rent income to Mohammed Salah, a Hamas operative and a designated terrorist according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The Quranic Literacy Institute was also found liable for aiding and abetting Hamas terrorism in a $156 million lawsuit filed in 2004 and re-affirmed in 2008.
As the Washington Free Beacon reported Tuesday, the House Education and Workforce Committee has requested information related to Northwestern’s partnership with Al Jazeera, noting that a group of Jewish Northwestern alumni and parents wrote a letter to the school’s board of trustees arguing that — because Al Jazeera journalists have also worked as Hamas operatives — the partnership could violate a clause in the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, which stipulates that American entities may not offer “training, expert advice, or assistance” to foreign terrorist organizations.
It is not just Qatar that has funded Northwestern. Saudi Arabia — which the Federal Bureau of Investigation has probed over potential connections to the 9/11 attacks — gave about $24 million to the university, with at least $2.2 million earmarked for Saudi student tuition.
American taxpayers have also contributed to Northwestern. The report shows that the United States Health and Human Services Department has contributed $2.6 billion since 2018, while the next-largest funders were the National Science Foundation, with $361 million, the Department of Defense, with $256 million, the Department of Education, with $136 million, and the Department of Energy, with $125 million.
Over that period, Northwestern’s endowment increased by $3.3 billion, growing from $11.1 billion in 2018 to $14.4 billion in 2022, making it the eighth-largest endowment held by any private American institution of higher education. Since 2017, the university has paid only a 1.4-percent tax on the amount of its endowment that exceeds $500,000 per student.