How Arab state donations may be shaping American education and discourse on Israel

Since 1981, American universities and colleges have received more than $62 billion from foreign governments, with nearly a quarter of that sum coming from Arab sources.

Fourteen Arab countries, as well as the Palestinian Authority, have cumulatively given almost $15 billion to institutes of higher education in the U.S., through almost 14,000 contributions to 290 schools in 49 states — the exception being Alaska.

Is all this funding connected to the rise of antisemitic activity on college campuses? Possibly, but there’s a lack of hard evidence to conclusively prove the link, said Mitchell Bard, the executive director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library, at ZOA Pittsburgh’s Kandy Ehrenwerth Memorial Lecture on July 28. The biennial lecture honors the memory of Ehrenwerth, a dedicated Zionist and a champion of human rights.

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About 100 people turned out to the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh’s Levinson Hall to hear Bard, a foreign policy analyst and frequent contributor to the Jewish News Syndicate, discuss Arab funding of American universities and its impact.

“The topic has become very interesting to a lot of people, as they’ve learned that Arab states are giving a lot of money to American universities, and they’re starting to express concerns and ask questions about what kind of impact this may be having on our universities — and in particular, Jewish students — and whether it is contributing to anti-Israel activity on the campuses and antisemitism,” Bard said.

There are several motivators for Arab states to send funds to American universities, he said.

“Some of it is propaganda. They want people to better understand, from their point of view, Arabic Islamic causes. In some cases, they’re trying to help their own citizens get into universities that they really have no qualifications to get into. And they want to get university faculty to publish things that are sympathetic to their views and will help influence the attitudes of Americans.”

Other reasons include the desire to “enhance their own image. They want the rulers of the Middle East, who aren’t very well known or understood, to be better known here in the United States. Particularly after 9/11, the Saudis began to give a lot of money because they had acquired this reputation — because all of the 9/11 terrorists had come from Saudi Arabia, people started to see it as a source of terror.”

There’s also a desire to have Americans not see Islam as a threat, he said, and to “whitewash their own human rights abuses.”

Other motivators, Bard said, include “influencing U.S. Middle East policy,” opening the doors of admission to American schools for their own students and shaping curriculum.

There are also “benign goals,” such as advancing medical research, he added.

While almost 300 schools receive funding from Arab nations, 12 schools “get most of it,” Bard said. And “73% of all the money is unaccounted for.”

“This is a big thing, that all this money, $10.7 billion, is going into American universities and we don’t know what it’s being used for,” he said.

U.S. law requires American universities that receive $250,000 or more from a foreign donation to report it to the Department of Education, he said. They are also required to report the purpose of the donation, but most schools do not disclose the purpose.

“So we don’t know where all this money is going,” he said.

While there is some concern that the funds may be used for “political purposes to influence the universities,” Bard said, he is aware of only one documented case evidencing that. Brown University, he said, received a few donations to “create a professorship in Palestinian Studies,” with the funding coming from “the state of Palestine.” That designation was eventually changed to “the Palestinian territories.”

After researching the donation, Bard said he discovered the money came from a Palestinian foundation in the West Bank, funded by a wealthy Palestinian who “is virulently anti-Israel and supports the boycott of Israel.”

Brown then “hired a professor who is virulently anti-Israel and favors the boycott against Israel,” Bard said.

“This is sort of the poster child, so to speak, for what most of us are afraid of — that Arab money was all going for creating professorships, and it would be like this, but this is the only case we know of from the published statistics,” he said.

The main problem with the donations by foreign governments to American universities is “the lack of transparency,” Bard stressed. “We don’t know where the money’s going. The U.S. government is not paying attention.”

Moreover, he said, one group of researchers found that more than $3 billion from Arab states hasn’t even been reported to the DOE.

Bard said one potential issue with foreign funding is the influence of faculty supported by that funding.

“Faculty indoctrinate students,” he said. “They’re getting money from these Arab states. Faculty are like Supreme Court justices. They live and work almost forever. So we worry a lot about the students, student protests and the campaigns and all of that. But students come and go. But faculty, they’re there forever, some of them 10, 20, 30 years, and they influence the campus environment over that period.”

They also write textbooks and appear on news channels as experts, he said.

“They write the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal or in the New York Times. I have counted more than 5000 that support the boycott of Israel. And maybe even more serious is it filters down to K through 12. It doesn’t just stay within the college campus, because these professors do teacher training for K through 12. They write textbooks and curriculum, and a lot of this comes from Arab states.”

While at least one research group has determined that Arab funding may be contributing to antisemitism on campus, Bard said that conclusion was not derived from hard evidence but from a supposition based on the unreported funds.

“In their study, they couldn’t produce a single example of how undocumented money can influence antisemitism,” he said. “So where is antisemitism coming from on campus?”

Bard posed that the incitement may be coming from departments of Middle East studies.

“The Middle East Studies Association voted last year to boycott Israel,” he said. “It’s full of professors who are promoting radical Islamic views.”

He also pointed to gender and ethnic studies as problematic when it comes to proliferating antisemitic thought on campus, as well as anti-Israel professors in other fields, such as engineering and math, who are sharing their views on the Middle East even though those views are unrelated to course work.

But “social science and humanities are the biggest causes or biggest sources,” he said, “and one reason is because of intersectionality. … The idea is that all persecution around the world, all types of persecution are all interrelated, so that the persecution of Blacks by U.S. law enforcement is similar to the persecution of Palestinians by the IDF. They’re all somehow related.”

Bard has “argued for decades,” he said, that “the only place that antisemitism is acceptable in the United States of America is on college campuses. The only place. Every place else you would never accept it.” PJC

Toby Tabachnick can be reached at ttabachnick@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.