Students at Georgetown voted Tuesday to urge the university to divest from Israeli companies. Finally, a leading promoter of Islamist terrorism, Qatar, seems to get some bang for its buck, as its long-term investment in American higher education institutes is paying off. Founded in 1789, it appears as if America’s oldest Jesuit school of higher-learning is in bed with the Mideast’s top Hamas backer. How did we get here? 

On a visit to the natural gas-rich emirate a few years back, our Benny Avni was shown the clean, modern classrooms of Georgetown’s Doha campus, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in April by renewing the partnership for another decade. In the event, Georgetown honored Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, who chairs Doha’s Qatar Foundation, with a prestigious medal. The partnership seems to have been sealed with a kiss.     

The university’s President’s Medal, awarded this month, is “one of the highest distinctions conferred by Georgetown,” its interim president, Robert Groves, said on April 17. “It is reserved for individuals whose contributions reflect the university’s deepest commitments, and it is a privilege to present it to Her Highness.” Is it a coincidence, then, that yesterday Georgetown students voted by a large margin to boycott Israel?

Sheikha Moza’s Qatar Foundation is the country’s global influence arm, which is as malignant in the West as Al Jazeera is in the Mideast. Doha reportedly donated more than $2 billion to American universities between 2021 and 2024. So now Mr. Groves is proudly reporting that his students voted, by a margin of 1,447 to 685, to divest from companies “arming Israel” and to end “partnerships with Israeli institutions.”  

Along with Turkey, Qatar is the chief Mideast sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood, which thrives on instilling Islamist fundamentalist sensibilities in the region. The most well-known offshoot of the Brotherhood is Hamas. For half a decade before October 7, 2023, a Qatari official would periodically arrive in Gaza with suitcases filled with $100 bills, supposedly for hospitals and schools. In the event it went to arms and tunnels.

Is this the kind of partnership Father John Carroll had in mind when he secured the deed to one acre of land overlooking the village of Georgetown? He founded an institution that prides itself in naming, in 1873, Patrick Healy as America’s first African-American president of a majority white university. In World War II it hosted specialized Army training. President Reagan celebrated Georgetown in 1988. It graduated Bill Clinton. And now?

Last week President Trump issued an executive order designed to “end the secrecy surrounding foreign funds in American educational institutions, protect the marketplace of ideas from propaganda sponsored by foreign governments, and safeguard America’s students and research from foreign exploitation.” Critics pounced, claiming that funds for scientific research would dry up and America would lag behind Communist China.

Yet Beijing and Doha are the top foreign donors to America’s most prestigious higher education institutions. Are their yuans and riyals spent to help America maintain our technological edge? As the increased radicalism on campuses proves, turning students against the values that Georgetown was originally founded to promote seems a more likely reason for these donations. Disclosure of foreign funds could start taking the weeds out of the Ivies.