Billionaires from the right and left of the political spectrum have involved themselves in the recent university protests. Ken Griffin, Ronald Lauder, and Bill Ackman have all halted donations to Ivy League universities in protest at the rise of anti-Semitism on their campuses, while social-change groups involved in staging the protests have had their funding traced back—albeit through several degrees of separation and without their specific knowledge—to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Yet the money flowing from, or being withheld by, these donors is dwarfed by the billions of dollars that authoritarian foreign governments are donating to the universities in order to quietly influence curriculum, hiring, and admissions policies.
According to the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), the largest donations are coming from Qatar and its NGO proxies. “Qatar has less than 350,000 citizens [its total population, which is some 2.5 million, is largely made up of migrant workers], and they are giving more money to American universities than any country in the world,” says Charles Asher Small, the founder and executive director of ISGAP, who on May 8 gave a closed-door briefing to the Congressional Committee on Oversight and Accountability about the rise of anti-Semitism on college campuses.
