By Adam Andrzejewski, OpenTheBooks CEO/Founder
Published at OpenTheBooks.Substack
In February 2020, Brown University, an Ivy League school with a tax advantaged $6.5 billion endowment, negotiated a $643,000 gift from a foundation located within the “State of Palestine” to create a new Palestinian professorship within its Center for Middle East Studies.
However, “Palestine,” as a nation, does not exist.
Neither the U.S. State Department nor the United Nations recognize Palestine as a country. The “State of Palestine” is a political fiction that provides cover for numerous terror organizations funded by Iran and others.
American universities taking six-figure foreign funding from an area of the world dominated by terrorists raises all kinds of questions.
For example, codified into the law of the Palestinian Authority (PA) is the gruesome practice of “pay for slay” – paying pensions to the families of dead terrorists who killed Jews. More than 10 percent of the PA’s budget pays these murder incentives / benefits.
At Brown, the foreign gift established, “…support for a Professorship in Palestinian Studies within Middle East Studies.” The “first chair of its kind dedicated to this field of study.” An anti-Israel professor named Beshara Doumani was tapped as the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies.
Soon after his appointment at Brown, Dr. Doumani was given permission also to simultaneously head Birzeit University in the West Bank for two years.
The Birzeit campus is a hotbed of radicalism. Members of the Hamas-affiliated “Islamic Bloc” have won most seats on its student council over the past two years.
Days after Hamas slaughtered and kidnapped hundreds of Israeli civilians, Birzeit University’s Union of Professors and Employees said:
“2023 will be recorded historically as the year that Palestinians stood boldly in the face of colonial fascism and screamed in defense of their homes, humanity, and lives.”
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Brown is not the only top school getting funds from Palestinian organizations, or with ties to Birzeit. According to federal disclosures, Harvard University received $1.6 million from entities within the “State of Palestine.”
Harvard’s grants were not restricted – so federal records have no description of how funds were to be spent. Harvard, unhelpfully, refused to comment.
Harvard’s activities with Birzeit University are not related to the $1.6 million foreign gift, but they still raise questions about Birzeit's ideology impacting Harvard students.
One project, through Harvard’s famous François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, works with Birzeit University to use:
“a decolonial framework in program development, leadership, and engagement. This framework involves surfacing, examining, and working to dismantle power dynamics and structures that perpetuate inequities in knowledge production and dissemination between Global North and Global South institutions.”
A member of Palestine program’s leadership team provides a prime example of how anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment flourish under the umbrella of “decolonialism.”
Bram Wispelwey, the leader team member, teachers a course called, “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
It uses “case studies from the United States, South Africa, and Palestine/Israel...[to] elucidate universal and particular elements of settler colonial societies while drawing causal chains to their perpetual outcomes: poorer health for indigenous and other non-settler (“arrivant”) communities.”
Funds originating in the West Bank not only may be radicalizing American students but are also educating “Palestinians” with American university resources.
Some $7.3 million went to Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP), located in the city of Indiana, Pennsylvania, as part of a restricted contract. Not only entities from the “State of Palestine” contributed $6.4 million, but something from a self-described area of the “Palestinian Territory, Occupied” sent $900,000.
Most of these contracts funded “payment of tuition and fees for students from Palestine. Funds are also utilized to pay for educational related expenses incurred by the university for these students through their enrollment in this program.”
IUP is connected directly with the West Bank and the Palestinian Authority through its business PhD and MBA programs, offered in association with the Arab American University, the first private university there.
A spokesperson said "IUP has received instructional agreement income for providing educational programs at various international locations, including one in Palestine, since 2014."
The American people are disturbed by the civil unrest playing out on the campuses universities nationwide. They know these major schools are underwritten by billions of dollars in federal grants, contracts, subsidized tuition, and practically non-existent taxes on massive endowments.
In fact, several of America’s most elite institutions are more federal contractor than educator. They receive more dollars from taxpayers for federal contracts and grants than they collect on undergraduate student tuition.
But as the “Palestinian” funding shows, foreign influences fund these universities as well. Our auditors found that since 1986, $44 billion in foreign contracts and grants were disclosed by colleges and universities under Section 117 of the Higher Education Reporting Act. That is more than one billion dollars per year.
Such funding raises alarms about foreign influence over American universities. During the Trump Administration, then-U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy Devos forced disclosure of foreign gifts and grants.
Secretary Devos trained a white-hot spotlight on the Confucius Institutes, funded by Communist China, as alleged outposts for Chinese espionage.
Since 1986, China had given $2.8 billion to American colleges and universities. But shortly after being exposed, China retreated and closed up these “cultural learning and language” institutes.
Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com discovered that the gifts to U.S. higher education from four Middle East countries – Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Kuwait – dwarf the dollars that came from China.
In fact, a staggering $10.3 billion – or $1 of every $4 in foreign gifts and grants over the last 40 years – comes from these four: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), UAE ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).
Now we know that entities in non-existent areas such as the “State of Palestine” or “Palestinian territory, occupied” are also providing funds.
Has foreign funding of some of our nation’s most prestigious universities fueled civil unrest? That is an open question. But as graduations are cancelled, Jewish students are threatened, and campuses are trashed with “encampments” across the country, it is painfully clear that the American taxpayer is getting shortchanged.
ADDITIONAL READING
University Protests Provoke Inquiries About Elite School Funding | The National Desk Interview with Adam Andrzejewski | May 3, 2024
Elite American universities receiving billions in federal funds see rise in antisemitism: 'Gamed the tax code' | FOX News Channel | November 3, 2023
‘Exclusion U’ Documentary Exposes Ivy League Elitism | Best Colleges | June 2023
Ivy League, Inc. — Quantifying $42 Billion In U.S. Taxpayer Subsidies, Tax Breaks, And Federal Payments FY2010-FY2015 | OpenTheBooks Oversight Report | March 2017