The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents voted Thursday to end its contract with the foundation that funds its remote campus in Qatar, citing “heightened instability in the Middle East.”
The vote to end the contract with the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, which is run by the Qatar government, means the school will start winding down the Doha campus over the next four years before officially closing its doors, ending the 20-year-old program.
The move by the board of regents follows revelations in a recent report published by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (ISGAP) which highlighted Qatar’s relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood and uncovered “its extensive financial arrangements with Texas A&M University.“
Qatar and Texas A&M’s partnership, according to the ISGAP, included significant access to and ownership of intellectual property on many research projects, including nuclear energy research, which in their view raises safety and security concerns.
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“This is an important statement affirming that there is no place in U.S. academia for billions of dollars coming from a state that supports and funds terror, and promotes and spreads the extremist Islamist ideology from the Muslim Brotherhood,” Dr. Charles Asher Small, director of ISGAP, said of the school’s decision.
ISGAP states in its November 2023 report that, “For decades, Qatar strategically positioned itself as an international funder of education, finance, science, health, sports, arts and culture, communications and development.”
As part of this positioning, since 9/11, Qatar has become the largest foreign donor to US universities, ISGAP says.
ISGAP said it discovered that Qatar provides Texas A&M with more than a billion dollars of funding both in the US and at Education City in Doha, which hosts a vast spectrum of research fields including scientific, nuclear and weapons.
ISGAP says they obtained te agreement that Qatar has made with Texas A&M which created the Texas A&M University in Qatar (TAMUQ). According to ISGAP, the Texas A&M and Qatar agreement involved more than $1 billion USD of funding and more than 500 research projects.
ISGAP also says that the foreign donations from Qatar to higher education in the United States, “have had a substantial impact on fomenting growing levels of antisemitic discourse and campus politics at U.S. universities, as well as growing support for anti-democratic values within these institutions of higher education.”
“By reevaluating Texas A&M’s presence in Qatar, the Board has demonstrated a commitment to academic integrity, ethical principles, and national security concerns,” Small said in a statement.
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The university responded in a statement to Fox News Digital calling the report a “misinformation campaign” that they claim “had no bearing on Thursday’s decision by the Board of Regents, which was made following a close analysis of the university’s mission and the evolving political situation in the Middle East. Discussions about branch and remote campuses are ongoing and were underway long before false information was reported about Texas A&M and Qatar.”
University president Ret. General Mark A. Welsh III said in a statement on Jan. 7 in response to the report that “[d]espite what recent online reports have stated, Texas A&M at Qatar does not offer a nuclear engineering program or any classes on the subject.”
“The research conducted at this campus focuses on energy, water and environment, carbon capture, smart manufacturing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, and data analytics in the energy sector,” Welsh said.
“Contrary to what these articles have implied, no nuclear technology, weapons/defense or national security research is conducted at this campus. Nor does the Qatar campus have any connection to nuclear reactor research done in Texas or the Los Alamos National Lab,” he said.
“The insinuation that we are somehow leaking or compromising national security research data to anyone is both false and irresponsible,” he added.
The Qatar Foundation slammed the board’s decision Thursday. In an email attributed to an unnamed spokesperson, the foundation accused the board of being influenced by a disinformation campaign “aimed at harming the interests” of the Qatar Foundation.
“It is disturbing that this disinformation has become the determining factor in the decision and that it has been allowed to override the core principles of education and knowledge, with no consideration to the significant positive impact that this partnership has brought for both Qatar and the US,” the foundation said, adding that “it is deeply disappointing that a globally respected academic institution like Texas A&M University has fallen victim to such a campaign and allowed politics to infiltrate its decision-making processes.”
The Foundation said that “at no point did the Board attempt to seek out the truth from Qatar Foundation before making this misguided decision.”
