Georgetown’s $900m sellout to terror
Its entanglement with Qatar, where it has a campus in Doha, is deep, longstanding and influential. And that’s a problem.
By Mitchell Bard
JNS
Jul 9, 2025
There may be no more damning indictment of higher education’s moral collapse than its willingness to accept vast sums of money from authoritarian regimes and terror sponsors. For all their lofty rhetoric about social justice, human rights, free speech and academic freedom, universities are proving that their true allegiance is to cash. Georgetown University—one of the nation’s most prestigious Jesuit institutions—is a glaring case in point.
Georgetown proclaims its mission is to promote justice, compassion and the common good. Yet it has accepted nearly $887 million from the government of Qatar, an autocracy that bans political opposition, criminalizes dissent, silences women and LGBTQ citizens, disregards human trafficking and funds and hosts terrorist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS.
Anyone familiar with the school’s history shouldn’t be surprised. When Georgetown received a $750,000 donation from Libya for an endowed chair in 1977, Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald chastised it for accepting “blood money from one of the most notorious regimes in the world today” and suggested the university also consider establishing a “Brezhnev Studies Program in Human Rights or an Idi Amin Chair in Genocide.” Center director Michael Hudson’s laughable response was that “the Libyans say they are just as anti-terrorist as anyone else.”
The person who led Georgetown’s fundraising effort in Libya and defended the grant was Peter Krogh, the dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and founder of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, who was a member of a coalition trying to cut U.S. aid to Israel. Krogh solicited all the Arab embassies and missions in Washington. “I went to all of them,” he said, “whether they had diplomatic relations with the United States or not, whether they were moderate or radical, whatever their stripe.”
After nearly five years of defending the decision to accept the “blood money,” university president Rev. Timothy Healy returned the money to Libya with interest because it supported terrorism. Hisham Sharabi, the person who was supposed to hold the chair (he still got one under a different endowment), responded by calling Healy a “Jesuit Zionist.”
In 2014, the university received $59.5 million from Qatar to build a campus in Doha. In 2018, the editorial board of the Georgetown Voice called on the academic institution in the nation’s capital to close its Qatar campus because it represented an endorsement of many government policies that “are antithetical to Georgetown’s mission as a Jesuit institution.” It singled out limits on the human rights of women and members of the LGBTQ community and its slave labor system. Concluding that the financial cost should not deter shutting the school, the board said that “the integrity of our school is at stake.”
Well, integrity can easily be bought for nearly $900 million.
This was evident in April when Georgetown held a gala celebrating 20 years of partnership with the Qatar Foundation (QF)—a regime-linked body that controls education and ideology in the emirate—and renewed its contract for another decade. As if to underscore its abdication of moral responsibility, the university awarded Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser—mother of the emir and chair of QF—its President’s Medal, one of the highest honors it bestows. Her Highness said, “Qatar Foundation is committed to forging a path that leads to cross-cultural understanding, respect and collaboration, a commitment that is shared by Georgetown University. Together, we will inspire and nurture those who will have the courage to build bridges between nations and lead our world into a better future.”
If this isn’t nauseating enough, interim president Robert Groves gushed that Moza’s work reflects the university’s “deepest commitments” to knowledge, peace and justice. She leads an organization from a country that enforces speech restrictions, partners with U.S.-designated terrorist entities and systematically abuses migrant workers who labor under what human-rights groups call “modern slavery.”
QF has opened an academic center named after Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, invited a cleric who called for Jews and their helpers to be destroyed, and hosts other Muslim extremist preachers at its mosque in Education City where the Georgetown campus is located.
In 2019, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) named Georgetown University-Qatar one of the 10 worst colleges for free speech. Georgetown admitted that student speech is only permitted if it complies with Qatari law.
Georgetown isn’t alone. But its entanglement with Qatar is uniquely deep, longstanding and influential. Consider this: Many U.S. diplomats at the U.S. State Department are trained by the School of Foreign Service, which also operates a campus in Qatar. Is it any wonder that so many in Foggy Bottom are hostile to Israel and timid toward Gulf state abuses?
Federal law requires universities to report all foreign donations more than $250,000 to the U.S. Department of Education. Georgetown has reported 96 such gifts since 1993, totaling more than $933 million, with the majority coming from Qatar. Yet not one entry specifies how the money is used. Unless the university voluntarily discloses details, the American public has no way of knowing whether these funds support benign academic programs or subsidize departments that promote anti-American, anti-Israel or even antisemitic agendas.
This month, we got a revealing glimpse. Jonathan Brown, a professor known for his hostility toward Israel, holds the chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service—a position funded by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. After the United States bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, he tweeted: “I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops.”
When Talal gave $20 million to create Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding—a gift never listed in the Department of Education’s database—Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) asked if the center had ever criticized Saudi Arabia’s human-rights abuses or examined its ties to extremism. He never received an answer. There’s been no accountability since.
It’s hard to know whether professors like Brown are chosen because their views align with foreign donors or whether the funding helps shape those views. But that’s precisely why hard questions must be asked. As long as Georgetown and the Education Department conceal the purposes behind these massive gifts, we cannot assess the depth of foreign influence on American academia.
What is clear is this: Georgetown has rented out its reputation to autocratic regimes that bankroll terrorism and suppress free expression. The cost of that partnership isn’t just the university’s integrity. It’s the erosion of our democratic values and national security.
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