Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy director Charles Small said new legislation is needed to crack down on foreign influence.
Yale University failed to disclose the full scope of financial contributions it received from Qatar from 2012 to 2023 in violation of federal requirements, according to a new report from an antisemitism watchdog group which claims that the Gulf monarchy is using the funding to spread anti-Israel sentiment.
Yale reported receiving $284,668 from Qatari donors during that period, a far cry from the total sum of at least $15,925,711 the university actually received, according to the study, which was conducted by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.
Examples of Qatari grants listed in the report include an estimated $1,048,156.26 to psychiatry professor Margaret Altemus and two individual grants of at least $1 million to anesthesiology professor Aymen Alian. Under federal law, universities are required to report foreign donations that exceed $250,000, which Yale did not do.
ISGAP also notes that the university’s Jackson School of Global Affairs has close ties to the Qatar Foundation, perhaps best exemplified by former CIA officer Kevin Chalker — who would go on to teach at Yale — and his efforts to help the Qatari government secure the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Yale’s World Fellows Program, as well, has close ties with the Qatar Foundation, ISGAP’s report states, with the foundation and Banco Santander providing financial support for the initiative.
ISGAP executive director Charles Asher Small told National Review that the ease with which universities like Yale flout federal-reporting requirements for foreign contributions calls for new, stricter legislation.
“Enforcement of the legislation is lax, to say the least,” Small said, “and even in our report, we found out about $15 million and change, but we know it’s much higher. There’s just no transparency. So, we’re calling for Yale and other universities to be transparent about how much money they’re receiving.”
Small pointed to the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act as a legislative remedy. As NR reported in November, that bill — introduced by Representative Michelle Steel (R., Calif.) — would curb influence in American higher education from countries like Qatar by creating tighter reporting requirements.
The Act would lower the reporting threshold from $250,000 to $50,000 overall and $0 for what Steel describes as “countries of concern.” A 2019 Senate report found that 70 percent of all institutions fail to comply with Section 117 regulations, and the DETERRENT Act would close loopholes and institute punishments for noncompliance.
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch. When our terror-friendly adversaries pour money into our colleges and universities, it’s safe to say they want something in return,” Steel told NR at the time. “As reports have found, these adversaries seek increased access, political influence, and even the suppression of certain topics.”
Small agreed, saying that the outcome Qatar wants in return for its donations is the spread of anti-Israel rhetoric in American institutions of higher education.
“Forty years ago, Swiss police found documentation showing that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to use antisemitism to try to move Israel away from the United States and the West, to isolate it, to destroy it,” Small told NR about the Islamist organization that receives much of its backing from the Qatari government. “They were going to use antisemitism to fragment and weaken the United States, and 40 years later, here we are . . . this is not a parochial problem for Israel or the Jewish people. It’s really a threat to the stability and democratic nature of our country.”
He said that the events of the past academic year are the logical conclusion of decades of foreign influence in American colleges and universities and constitute a legitimate crisis for the United States.
“After eight months of rhetoric and repeating chants to remove the Zionists, people have become radicalized,” Small told NR. “People could very easily become manipulated to do something terrible. It’s really a security threat. A physical security threat.”
For Yale specifically, that problem has manifested itself in professors defending Hamas’s October 7 attack as representing the “right to resist through armed struggle,” the planning of university-sponsored events where speakers both justify and deny the atrocities committed in that attack, and, as has been the case on many university campuses, rallies where student activists chant and display slogans calling on their fellow classmates to “globalize the intifada.”
The ideologies promoted through foreign contributions also led the Yale Daily News to affix a correction to former NR intern Sahar Tartak’s column on antisemitism in which editors claimed reports of Hamas having raped women and beheaded men were “unsubstantiated.”
A Yale student-activist group posted an exhortation to “escalate disruption and confrontation across historic Palestine” and “escalate protests to an open intifada in every capital and every city” in order to “disrupt all facets of daily life” on its Instagram page.
Small believes that one reason why this problem has not been adequately addressed is the strength of the university lobby in Washington.
“The universities want to be the last unregulated sector of the American economy, and they have a powerful lobby,” he said. “These are universities worth billions and billions of dollars, and they’re putting tremendous effort to ensure the free flow of money and people. Of course, they don’t want any oversight.”
Yale, responding to a National Review request for comment, denied the allegations leveled in the ISGAP report through a spokesperson.
“Yale disputes the conclusion of this report, which contains factual errors and misleading statements,” a spokesperson wrote in an email, though the university did not provide examples of those supposed factual errors and misleading statements. “The university is not aware of any funding from Qatar that has not been reported as required under federal law.”