Northwestern Qatar's compliance with Qatari law exposes university's contradictions: ANALYSIS

Northwestern confirmed that their Qatar campus, NU-Q, practices under Qatari law. 

This means the school is unable to critique or speak against the Qatari regime, leaving students enrolled in its journalism and communications programs at the university, which is defined as a place for students to pursue “independent inquiry and free expression” do not actually have the legal capacity to carry out this crucial component of their mission.

Because NU-Q operates under a nondisparagement clause, faculty and administrators are barred from criticizing Qatar or its policies. The jurisdiction piece subjects disputes to Qatari law and courts. Together they restrict what can be said and where conflicts can be litigated.

[RELATED: Northwestern President Michael Schill resigns amid anti-Semitism controversy]

Enforcement of this clause is shaping curricula, speakers, and research, so the university is restricting participation and expression in a way inconsistent with U.S. civil rights norms. The university benefits from the Qatari funds allocated to Northwestern-Qatar because the deal stipulates Qatar endows three chair positions at the flagship Evanston campus in Illinois. 

These endowments exert Qatari influence on what Northwestern defines as “the highest academic honor that a faculty member can attain.” Endowed professorships at Northwestern are used to ”recruit” especially talented academics who will then mentor  junior staff. When donors tie their funding to particular fields or research areas, they shape an institution’s intellectual trajectory, steering it toward their own priorities.

A recent report from the Middle East Forum found that from 2025 through 2028 the Qatar Foundation will pledge around 221 million dollars in funds to NU-Q.

”Research reveals that NU-Evanston and NU-Q are integrated, receiving a continuous flow of funding and human resources shared between the two campuses and between the Qatar Foundation and Northwestern Evanston,” the report says. 

NU-Q students get Northwestern University degrees at graduation. Because NU-Q falls under Northwestern’s regional accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission, it must uphold the Commission’s standard of “academic freedom and freedom of expression in the pursuit of knowledge.” This doesn’t seem to be what’s going on.

In an exclusive report, Campus Reform announced the demise of the partnership when a Northwestern spokesperson told Campus Reform that the school had ended its Memorandum of Understanding with Al Jazeera. The termination came after years of disapproval amongst alumni, students, and faculty. 

Campus Reform covered the antisemitic views held by Al Jazeera correspondents during the time of the university partnership and released an exclusive report where Northwestern alumni who demanded the termination of the partnership.

”Owned by the government of Qatar, Al Jazeera cannot possibly function as a free and independent news organization,” the exclusive CAAN report states. “Having a partnership with either Russia-owned TASS or China-owned Xinhua would make as much sense for Medill as having one with the state-sponsored news agency of Qatar.”

These provisions chill academic freedom in Evanston, limiting seminars, speakers, and even course design, since testing or acknowledging the restrictions is off-limits. Reports of redacted or restricted media at NU-Q further reveal a state-controlled media pipeline operating under Northwestern’s name.

New details from Congress underscore the extent of the problem. In testimony before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, Northwestern’s then-president Michael Schill—who has since resigned—acknowledged that “NU/NU-Q personnel are subject to Qatari laws and must ‘respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar.’” 

Schill further admitted that NU-Q students were exempted from the university’s antisemitism training, even as officials recognized “extreme pro-terror and antisemitic social-media activity by NU-Q professors.” 

Schill has since resigned from his post as president of Northwestern after facing controversy for the way he handled Northwestern’s pro-Palestine encampments last spring. The Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, or CAAN, formally calls upon the university to disaffiliate from the NU-Q.

CAAN told Campus Reform they believe Schill’s resignation is due to a convergence of failed governance, campus unrest, and eroded trust, combined with federal scrutiny of Northwestern’s handling of antisemitism. “The university needed to show it is willing to change course,” spokesperson Michael Teplitsky said. “A leadership change became unavoidable.”

One of the current exhibitions at NU-Qatar’s media-dedicated museum, Media Majilis, curated an exhibit about memes that seeks specifically to respond to the “decisive political backdrop that sets the scene” for the museum, “namely, the silencing of Arab journalists across the Middle East.” The museum’s exhibit thus seeks to promote Arab journalists as opposed to any other kinds of journalists. 

NU-Qatar offers only six minors, all of which have to do in some way with either strategic media communication and middle eastern studies. Qatar has paid around 737 million dollars to fund NU-Q since the campus was established in 2008. 

In May of 2024, Campus Reform exposed Northwestern professor Steven Thrasher, chair of social justice in reporting, of the Evanston campus, for his many racially charged anti-Israel posts on X. The posts compared Israel to Nazi Germany, calling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a “genocide of the disabled people.”  

At a student journalism event, Thrasher reportedly told students that as journalists, “our work is not about objectivity.” Instead, he framed the goal of journalism as “opening your compassionate hearts.” Thrasher still works at Northwestern.

Northwestern University also employs Ibrahim Abusharif, a professor who co-founded and served as treasurer of the Quranic Literacy Institute, an organization which was later found by a federal jury to have laundered more than $1 million to Hamas in the Boim terrorism financing case, resulting in a $156 million judgment and the dissolution of the institute. Abusharif currently teaches the mandatory “Doha Seminar” for all American exchange students at Northwestern’s Qatar campus.

This appointment sits within a broader institutional alignment. Since its founding in 2008, NU-Q maintained a close partnership with Al Jazeera’s parent media conglomerate. A 2013 Memorandum of Understanding formalized collaboration on joint research projects, strategic studies, training workshops, faculty exchanges, and journalist-exchange initiatives. As part of that arrangement, NU-Q journalism students could fulfill their residency requirements by interning directly at Al Jazeera, further embedding the program within Qatar’s state-backed media apparatus.

In 2010, Al Jazeera gave a platform to Anwar al-Awlaki when they published an interview they chose to conduct with him discussing his aspirations to kill Americans. The subtitle of the interview on their website describes al-Awlaki: “Yemen-based religious scholar says he supports attempt to blow up a US-bound plane.”

Al Jazeera wrote a “look back” piece to commemorate Anwar al-Awlaki’s life after he was killed by the American government. In this piece they highlight how al-Awlaki urged Muslims to kill Americans “without hesitation,” declaring: “Don’t consult with anyone in fighting the Americans, fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers or seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils.”

[RELATED: Hamas claims ties to US campus protests: ‘We have our own people everywhere’]

Another NU-Q faculty member, Khaled Al-Hroub, said in an Oct. 2023 interview that he doubted that Hamas fighters had actually killed Israeli women and children on October 7th. The program hosting the interview, WBUR, issued a statement acknowledging that the interview failed to meet their editorial standards and apologized for dispelling Al-Hroub’s misinformation.     

In his book Hamas: Political Thought and Practice, Al-Hroub framed the group’s actions in political rather than terrorist terms, making excuses for their violent extremism. 

A spokesperson for Northwestern told Campus Reform that the university is “in the process of its multi-year review to determine whether to continue operating in Qatar past the 2028 academic year, when the current contract expires.” 

The spokesperson also told Campus Reform that NU-Q seeks to “further the foreign policy interests of the United States government.” 

In a statement released following the resignation of former Northwestern President Schill, CAAN demanded the termination of the university’s partnership with their Qatar campus. They say that “severing ties” is the only way Northwestern can “credibly lead reform” for the university and prove its full support of Jewish students. 

Campus Reform has reached out to Northwestern University and Al Jeezera for comment, this article will be updated with any response.