Northwestern University on Tuesday announced that former president Henry S. Bienen, who led the university from 1995 to 2009, will replace outgoing president Michael Schill.
Northwestern’s satellite campus in Qatar marred Schill’s tenure, particularly in the wake of the Oct. 7 terror attacks that drew attention to the foreign and domestic sources fueling campus anti-Semitism. So it is perhaps ironic that Northwestern has tapped the man who launched the university’s Qatar campus to replace him.
Bienen established the university’s Qatar campus during his first stint as president, signing a contract with the Hamas-allied Gulf state that prohibits students and faculty in Doha from criticizing the Qatari regime.
The Qatar Foundation, founded by former emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, approached Bienen in early 2006, near the end of his tenure, asking him whether Northwestern would be interested in joining the ranks of American universities establishing footprints in the Middle East.
“I was getting a lot of e-mails—there was a boom in the Gulf,” Bienen told student publication North by Northwestern in October 2008. The Qatar Foundation gave more than half a billion dollars to Northwestern between 2007 and 2024, and Bienen indicated he understood the potential financial windfall at the time. He told the Daily Northwestern in 2007 that there were “no negatives for the university financially,” as “whatever costs the university will incur will be reimbursed-plus.”
By February 2008, Bienen had visited the fledgling campus in Education City. “I’m really pleased with the Qatar initiative after having spent three days there,” he told the Daily Northwestern. “The scale of what’s going on is really amazing.”
As the Washington Free Beacon reported last week, House Education and Workforce Committee staffers raised “a portion from Northwestern’s agreement with the Qatar Foundation” during an Aug. 5 interview with Schill that maintains that “NU, NU-Q, and their respective employees, students, faculty, families, contractors and agents, shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious, and social customs of the State of Qatar.”
One such Qatari law prohibits subjects from criticizing the country’s government. When asked whether the university “would allow a Northwestern faculty member or student to publicly criticize the regime,” Schill said he had “no idea”—though the House committee staff noted that a Northwestern Qatar student had been “arrested over a tweet.”
While Bienen indicated there would be “no negatives for the university financially,” he also said a Qatar campus would be a positive development for Northwestern. “We went to Qatar because we thought it was an interesting place for us to expand the international aspects of the university,” he said in 2008 after his visit. He told the Daily Northwestern that his students in Qatar would “make an impact” and “improve the world.”
Those students learn from individuals like Ibrahim Abusharif, who teaches the Doha Seminar for U.S. students on the Qatari campus. Abusharif cofounded and served as treasurer of the Quranic Literary Institute, a nonprofit that faced a civil forfeiture action over allegedly funneling money to Hamas in 1999. The U.S. government ultimately seized $1.4 million in assets from the organization, which was also found liable for aiding and abetting Hamas terrorism in a $156-million lawsuit.
Other NU-Q faculty members, like professor of Middle Eastern studies and politics Khaled AL-Hroub, have defended Hamas. AL-Hroub said on an NPR program shortly after the terrorist organization’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack against Israel that he had not seen “any credible media reporting” to suggest that Hamas had killed women and children.
While Northwestern initially condemned “Khaled AL-Hroub’s attempt to minimize or misrepresent” Hamas’s attack, the university revised its statement to remove his name and simply state that the views of individual faculty members do not necessarily represent those of the institution.
Another NU-Q affiliate, joint advisory board member Rami Khouri, has defended Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, praised Hamas as representing “the bottomless arsenal of the human spirit,” and excused the Oct. 7 attack as being similar to how Jews “also fought back during their centuries of victimization in the West.”
Alongside the financial benefits Northwestern stood to gain from a partnership with the Qatari regime and the potential to “expand the international aspects of the university” and “make an impact,” Bienen saw another reason to establish a Doha campus: Al Jazeera.
NU-Q, as the Free Beacon has previously reported, maintained a “partnership with Al Jazeera Media Network” that “enables students to engage regularly with media industry professionals.” Schill severed that relationship shortly after he was pressed about it by lawmakers last year.
Much like the Qatari government, which has sheltered scores of terrorist leaders, Al Jazeera has close ties to terror, with several of its journalists actually being members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In 2008, Bienen touted the propaganda network as a chief reason why he decided to work with the Qatar Foundation. “If we can help bearing a set of standards so it’s not just a political rat race … I thought there was an advantage of doing that in the home of Al Jazeera,” he said. “That’s why they wanted to come to what they heard was the best journalism school in the country.”
John Lavine, dean of the Medill School of Journalism at the time, echoed Bienen’s assessment of the Qataris.
“I remember along the way them saying first of all that we should remember that they started Al Jazeera,” he said in 2008. “They knew what journalism was. And it was rough-and-tumble journalism.”
Northwestern’s media relations department defended the Qatar campus in a statement provided to the Free Beacon.
“Academic freedom is core to Northwestern’s mission, and the University is uncompromising when it comes to preserving it,” the department’s statement reads. “Northwestern University in Qatar has provided international students—over 70 percent of whom are women—access to an elite, western education and helped further the foreign policy interests of the United States government. State Departments under both Republican and Democratic presidents have supported the continued operation of the Northwestern in Qatar campus. Northwestern is in the process of its multi-year review to determine whether to continue operating in Qatar past the 2028 academic year, when its current contract expires.”
