Georgetown University is the epicenter of Qatari influence in American higher education. Over the past two decades, the Washington, DC, institution has received more than $971 million from Qatar through its Doha campus partnership and targeted endowments - funding that further ensconced extant Islamist influences in the university’s intellectual culture.
This financial dependence is particularly consequential at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service (SFS), the United States’ premier training ground for diplomats and foreign-policy leaders.
Qatar’s Multilayered Funding of Georgetown
Qatar has strategically funded four endowed chairs in Muslim societies, Islamic history, Indian politics, and Arab studies, elevating faculty whose work consistently advances anti-Western narratives while remaining conspicuously silent on authoritarian abuses within Qatar and the broader Middle East.
Meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS), among other academic units, including the Bridge Initiative, has increasingly functioned as a platform for anti-Israel advocacy, with Qatari-funded scholars reframing U.S. foreign policy through a post-colonial lens aligned with Doha’s geopolitical interests.
Qatar’s influence now extends into Georgetown’s governance, with Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al Thani— son of the former Emir of Qatar—a member of the university’s Board of Directors, thereby embedding Qatari interests at the highest level of institutional decision-making in America’s capital.
Documenting Qatar’s Institutional Influence at Georgetown
As documented in the Middle East Forum’s new report, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” Qatar has leveraged its nearly $1 billion in funding to embed itself deeply within Georgetown’s academic, financial, and governance structures. Drawing on federal foreign-gift disclosures, governance records, faculty appointments, and curriculum analysis, the report shows that Qatar’s tentacles reach from Doha to DC, manipulating research agendas, endowed chairs, faculty activism, exchange programs, and even key decision-making bodies. The result is less a conventional overseas partnership than a sophisticated soft-power strategy enabling a foreign government to influence how American students are taught to understand the Middle East, Islam, US foreign policy, and Israel. The degree of this influence demonstrates that Georgetown has surrendered too much control to an Islamist, Hamas-supporting foreign state with hostile geopolitical interests.
Curbing Foreign Influence in American Universities
The Department of Education and Congress must take concrete steps to curb foreign interference to reverse Qatar’s ability to undermine academic independence and national security interests. Transparency is paramount. All Qatari funding should be disclosed in real-time; foreign governments should be restricted in their financing of endowed chairs that shape curricula in sensitive fields such as international relations and Middle East studies. Recent congressional scrutiny underscores why. In 2024, Northwestern University faced questions over its Qatar campus, with President Michael Schill testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce about Qatar’s role in campus operations. While Northwestern ultimately retained its Doha campus, the hearings revealed contractual constraints that effectively prohibit criticism of the Qatari government - an obvious violation of core academic-freedom principles.
The Education Department should require publicly available audits of universities receiving substantial funds from foreign governments - including Georgetown - to determine whether such largesse affects the curriculum and faculty conduct and whether it supports contractual or informal restrictions on speech. Georgetown’s Qatar campus has received a “poor” rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for restrictive speech policies tied to local law - a lack of academic freedom that is not confined to Doha. MEF’s report documents dual-affiliated anti-US/anti-Israel faculty at the Doha campus who share teaching and governing duties at the DC campus.
Finally, Georgetown University must remove foreign government representatives from its Board of Directors and senior governance bodies. No institution charged with educating future American diplomats should permit representatives of an Islamist regime to exercise influence over academic policy, research priorities, or institutional strategy. The problem extends beyond formal board membership. The appointment of Ian Almond, a Georgetown University/Qatar professor who has publicly justified Hamas’s October 7 attacks, as a voting member of the Main Campus Executive Faculty illustrates how ideological currents associated with Qatar-funded programs now reach into Georgetown’s core academic decision-making structures.
As Campus Watch has shown for years, Georgetown graduates populate the federal institutions that shape American power and policy around the world. That their education continues to be influenced by the Islamist petrostate of Qatar is unacceptable and must end.
Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by David Bernstein.