Henry Bienen, who took over as interim president in September, initiated the university’s relationship with the Gulf state during his first stint as its leader
Interim Northwestern University president Henry Bienen said Monday that he is “positive about the relationship” between the university and the Hamas-friendly Gulf state of Qatar. That relationship, which Bienen initiated during his first stint leading Northwestern from 1995 to 2009, includes a contract that prohibits students and faculty at the university’s Doha campus from criticizing the Qatari regime.
“I think it’s fair to say Qatar is very eager that we renew the relationship,” Bienen told the Daily Northwestern when asked about a review to determine whether the university will continue operating in Qatar past the 2028 academic year, when its contract expires. “So that’s a process of discussion back and forth. And that process is ongoing. … Of course, Qatar is a board decision. I have my ideas. I’m positive about the relationship, frankly.”
As the Washington Free Beacon reported in September, Northwestern’s contract with Qatar holds that “NU, NU-Q, and their respective employees, students, faculty, families, contractors and agents, shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar.”
Qatar’s penal code criminalizes criticism of its government and bans the sharing of online content the regime deems harmful. After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack, the regime also demanded that U.S. universities operating satellite campuses “be aligned and in touch” on official communications, the Free Beacon reported in March. Northwestern’s school in Qatar “intentionally chose not to circulate” an Oct. 13, 2023, message to students condemning the attack as “abhorrent and horrific,” the House committee noted that month.
Bienen, who took over as interim president in September, established the university’s presence in Qatar during his first stint as president, saying at the time that Northwestern’s students in Qatar would “make an impact” and “improve the world.” Those students take classes from instructors like Ibrahim Abusharif, who teaches the Doha Seminar for U.S. students on the Qatari campus. Abusharif cofounded and served as treasurer of the Quranic Literary Institute, a nonprofit that faced a civil forfeiture action in 1999 for allegedly funneling money to Hamas and was found liable for aiding and abetting the terror group in a 2008 lawsuit.
Bienen said in 2008 that he “thought there was an advantage of doing that in the home of Al Jazeera,” saying, “That’s why [Qatar] wanted to come to what they heard was the best journalism school in the country.”
Just as the Qatari government has close ties to terrorism, so does Al Jazeera. Several of its journalists were found to have been members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
When Northwestern faced criticism over its Qatar campus last year, its media relations department argued that the campus provides “international students—over 70 percent of whom are women—access to an elite, western education and helped further the foreign policy interests of the United States government.”
Roughly 9 percent of NU-Q graduates since 2014, however, come from some of the most powerful families in Qatari business and politics, while more than 10 percent bear the surname of the ruling Al Thani family, meaning that around one in five graduates in that time represent the country’s elite.
Northwestern did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bienen is not the only leader of a university with a Doha campus to state his approval of the arrangement even as those agreements face scrutiny. Georgetown University’s interim president, Robert Groves, told the House Education and Workforce Committee in July that he was “very proud” of the school’s relationship with Qatar.
Georgetown has an agreement with the Qatari government that requires that the university consult with a Qatari government group when selecting “themes and speakers” for events in Washington, D.C., the Free Beacon reported. That contract, according to the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, amounts to “the secret creation of propaganda under the direction of a foreign nation.”
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