Editor’s Note: The excerpt below is from an article originally published by the Observatory of University Ethics on April 17, 2026. Minding the Campus periodically republishes commentary from abroad to give readers insight into higher education debates taking place outside the United States. The article was translated into English by the Observatory and edited to conform to Minding the Campus style guidelines. It is crossposted here with permission.

Who can forget that incredible exchange two years ago between a Republican Congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, and three university presidents: Harvard, UPenn, and MIT? When asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews constituted a form of harassment that violated their university’s code of conduct, they responded in unison: “It depends on the context.” One of them even stated, “If words lead to actions, then it can constitute harassment.” This, of course, drew the response that Jews would have to be murdered to violate the university’s code of conduct. By way of apology, she clarified that “she was focused on the fact that, under the American Constitution, you cannot be punished just for words.” In American universities, calling a transgender person by their birth name can be considered an act of violence, but calling for the genocide of Jews is not, in the name of freedom of expression.

A new and extremely serious element has just been revealed in the Atlantico by Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, Director General of the American Jewish Committee, and Lina Murr Nehmé, a professor at the Lebanese University. They reveal that American universities are under the sway of major institutional corruption by a foreign country, Qatar. The sums involved amount to several billion dollars since 2005. They concern Georgetown University in Washington (a Jesuit university!), Cornell University in New York, Yale University in New Haven, Harvard University in Boston, A&M University in Texas, and dozens of other institutions that share this partially secret windfall.

“A significant portion of these funds was not declared to the Department of Education American, as required by law, which triggered a federal investigation as early as 2019,” they tell us. As always with corruption, the question is what the quid pro quo is. “This funding,” they continue, “has enabled the creation of research centers, professorships, and programs that have gradually normalized a number of positions: the delegitimization of Israel as a ‘colonial project,’ the presentation of ‘Islamophobia’ as a central analytical category—in place of the distinction between anti-Muslim racism and the critique of an ideology—and the inclusion of Islamist movements in the ‘anti-imperialist’ narrative of the Western academic left.”

The question we can ask ourselves is relatively simple: is there a link between the windfall thus distributed large man by a country that serves as a front and financier for Hamas and Islamist terrorism, and the tolerance of American university presidents toward anti-Semitism? Certainly, they were not paid to tolerate anti-Semitism, but Qatar’s presence can spread a pervasive anti-Semitism. It is also likely to influence the recruitment of faculty sympathetic to Qatar or the enrollment of students from the Middle East, who will subsequently affect the policies of the host country. Cornell University was fined $60 million by the administration for this tolerance of the intolerable; the president of this university affirms that the agreement “does not constitute an admission of guilt,” but he “welcomes the government’s commitment to applying existing laws against discrimination, while protecting our academic freedom and institutional independence.”

Read the remainder of the article here, and for more information on foreign funding of U.S. colleges and universities, read the National Association of Scholars’s report Shadows of Influence: Uncovering Hidden Foreign Funds to American Universities. You can also find more on campus anti-Semitism here.