On July 9, 2025, the House Education & Workforce Taskforce Committee will hold a session on “Antisemitism in Higher Education: Examining the Role of Faculty, Funding, and Ideology.” This is another meeting about ongoing Jew hatred on American campuses and the factors that drive it.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), the chairman of the 45-person committee, said the “hearing will focus on the underlying factors instigating antisemitic upheaval and hatred on campus. Until these factors — such as foreign funding and antisemitic student and faculty groups — are addressed, antisemitism will persist on college campuses. Our committee is building on its promise to protect Jewish students and faculty while many university leaders refuse to hold agitators of this bigotry, hatred, and discrimination accountable.”
This Republican-led hearing will have the following witnesses:
- Dr. Robert M. Groves, Interim President, Georgetown University
- Dr. Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, Chancellor, The City University of New York
- Dr. Rich Lyons, Chancellor, University of California, Berkeley
Here we will review foreign funding of universities.
Foreign Funding
Americans for Public Trust (APT) produced a report in March 2025 focused on foreign funding to universities. It found that “$60 billion in foreign gifts and contracts have been funneled into American colleges and universities over decades.” In particular, $20 billion went to ten elite schools with transparency laws being “lightly enforced” leading many universities to not report. Alarmingly, “many of the countries that top the list of foreign gifts… are long-standing adversaries and enemies of the U.S..”
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) noted in February 2025 that “a key culprit [for so much foreign money coming into universities] is universities’ failure to comply with the provisions of Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires US institutions of higher education to report income from foreign countries valued at over $250,000, such as gifts or research contracts. But American universities have failed to report billions in foreign funding, which drove the first Trump administration to launch several investigations into Section 117 noncompliance.”
The databases from the Education Department Office of Federal Student Aid Section 117 compliance can be found here.
AEI found “US schools reported over $4 billion in Qatari funding, making it easily the largest foreign donor to American universities. Looking at Qatari money together with China and Saudi Arabia further highlights how entangled these sources are with US higher education—seven of the universities investigated under Section 117 received most of their foreign funding from these three countries alone.”
APT reported that several “foreign adversaries” have donated to U.S. education, with “China, Russia, Iran, Qatar, Venezuela and Yemen have collectively syphoned billions into American schools.”
APT raised a red flag on the number of university researchers who have been arrested for illegally collaborating with China, including the chair of Harvard’s chemistry department. AEI was alarmed by the association of these foreign funders to universities doing work in artificial intelligence (AI). The COVID pandemic and risks from AI to society are reasons enough to clamp down on this funding, before even approaching foreign money stoking antisemitism.
University Antisemitism
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) produced a 135-page report in June 2025 called “FOREIGN INFILTRATION: GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY, QATAR, AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD.” The study concluded that Qatar’s huge donations – to Georgetown in particular:
- “influenced… the academic environment, research priorities, and faculty recruitment, particularly within the School of Foreign Service (SFS), the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).”
- created centers that mainstreamed “political Islam, minimizing the threat of Islamist extremism, and advancing anti-Israel narratives.”
Georgetown, based in the nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., thereby produced a large cohort of alumni who “occupy prominent positions in the U.S. State Department, intelligence
agencies, media, and NGOs, effectively introducing and reinforcing these
ideological perspectives within American foreign policy-making processes.” It has also led to a spike of anti-Jewish actions on campus.
The ISGAP report specifically called out Qatar, “from being a major funder of the Muslim
Brotherhood’s global operations to providing resources to Hamas—the Palestinian
branch of the Muslim Brotherhood—and harboring the remnants of its leadership,
Qatar has consistently positioned itself as both an ideological incubator and
logistical facilitator of Islamist extremism. The Muslim Brotherhood is committed
to destroying democracies, including the United States and Israel, and to replacing
them with a distorted version of an Islamist caliphate.”
The funding works two ways – monies flowing onto American campuses as well as building campuses of American schools in foreign countries. Six American universities maintain campuses in Doha’s Education City: Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth, Cornell, Northwestern, and Texas A&M, although Texas A&M is scheduled to close in 2028 (bolded countries in top 10 receiving foreign money). The state-run Qatar Foundation finances the campuses and personnel in Doha.
There have been numerous studies which analyze whether funding from foreign institutions – and those from countries which might be viewed as hostile to the U.S. – have an increased level of anti-American and antisemitic activity. A comprehensive statistical study showed “consistently strong evidence that institutions that received Section 117 funding from OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation) member countries or authoritarian countries had much higher levels of antisemitic/anti-Zionist activity.” Interestingly – and counter to the argument of liberals – the study added “that there is minimal evidence here that foreign funding, per se, is associated with erosion of liberal democratic norms around campus speech.”
The Jew hatred was not confined to the universities’ campuses. In additional analyses, the study found “that as campus antisemitism goes up or down, so does antisemitism in the surrounding communities.”
While the study cautioned about drawing direct conclusions about the direction of antisemitism (perhaps society has caused antisemitism to spike in schools rather than vice versa), it was clear with its conclusion:
“The present research highlights two troubling possibilities that deserve further investigation. The first is that receipt of Section 117 funding from foreign sources, especially authoritarian ones, has contributed to these [antisemitic] developments. The second is that providing massive financial support to campuses with ascendant illiberalism serves the interests of foreign actors hostile to the U.S. in particular or liberal democracy in general.”
These are profound concerns not just for American Jews but America.
Biased Think Tank Fig Leaves: Brookings Institute
There are a number of “think tanks” that offer opinions and research papers about a variety of issues, including antisemitism at universities and the impact from foreign funding. Many are deeply conflicted. For example, the Brookings Institute had a center in Doha for 14 years, until it was closed in 2021. It often works in partnership with Georgetown University which takes significant money from Qatar. It is therefore not surprising that Brookings publishes defensive reports on Qatar which paint the sponsor of terrorist groups as a partner for the United States against bad actors in the Middle East, rather than a fountain of funding for evil: “a window may still be apparent whereby Qatari policymakers would welcome inventive U.S. suggestions as to ways that they could make themselves useful to American counterparts, all in the name of firming up their U.S. partnership in the face of hostile local states.”
Considering the Brookings-Qatar-Georgetown dynamic, it is not surprising that the group published a study that the Trump administration’s efforts to root out antisemitism at universities was really about Trump attacking his critics, not combatting Jew hatred.
Recommendations
AEI recommended that the government “move the enforcement of Section 117 out of the Office of Federal Student Aid (the office that gave us the FAFSA debacle) and return it to the Office of the General Counsel, which is better equipped to investigate and address non-compliance with federal statutes. The Education Department should also audit far more universities to ensure adequate reporting of foreign funds. Finally, department investigators should work closely with their counterparts in the Department of Justice and FBI to tackle this issue—especially when foreign funding could be linked to influence campaigns, technological espionage, or other efforts to undermine national security.”
The Senate should pass the DETERRENT Act (Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act) which seeks greater transparency of foreign funding in universities, especially from a “foreign country of concern.” It was passed by the House on March 27, 2025 with a vote of 241 to 169 (with 20 abstentions). Nearly 97% of Republicans voted for the measure while fewer than 15% of Democrats voted for the bill. It is before the Senate as S. 1296, sponsored by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) with 13 Republican co-sponsors.
Conclusion
Billions of dollars are seeping into American universities from countries which are undermining American society and values. Qatar and China are particular actors which deserve heightened scrutiny regarding their potential nefarious efforts in artificial intelligence, biochemical research and promoting antisemitism.
ACTION ITEM
Call Rep. Tim Walberg’s office at (202) 225-6276 to thank him for holding the session on this important matter.
Call your senator to support the DETERRENT Act and call Sen. Thom Tillis’s office at (202) 224-6342 to thank him for sponsoring the bill.
Related:
A Fever Called Antisemitism Hatched In Schools (June 2025)
Ignoring Columbia’s – And The Education Industry’s – Systemic Antisemitism (July 2024)
The Problem With Antisemitism On College Campuses Stems From Where Jews And Arabs Focused Their Donations (October 2023)
Saudi Students In United States (September 2023)
Hamas And Harvard Proudly Declare Their Anti-Semitism And Anti-Zionism (May 2022)
Follow the Money: Democrats and the Education Industry (November 2020)
On Accepting and Rejecting Donations (September 2019)
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