WHY IS THERE SO MUCH SAUDI MONEY IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES? -
By Michael Sokolove, NYT 7-3-19
One spring afternoon last year, protesters gathered on a sidewalk alongside a busy street in Cambridge, Mass. City buses rolled past. Car horns sounded. A few pedestrians paused briefly before continuing on their way. The location was 77 Massachusetts Avenue, in front of a limestone-and-concrete edifice that serves as the gateway into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The building’s lobby leads to a long hallway known as the Infinite Corridor and into the heart of one of America’s most vaunted academic institutions.
Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, would be visiting the next day. The protesters, a mix of students and local peace activists, wanted his invitation revoked. They were opposed to the prince being welcomed as an honored dignitary and were calling attention to the Saudi state’s financial ties to M.I.T. — and to at least 62 other American universities — at a time when the regime’s bombing of civilians in a war in neighboring Yemen and its crackdown on domestic dissidents were being condemned by human rights activists.
Prince Mohammed, who is 33, became Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader in 2017, when he was named crown prince by his ailing father, King Salman. He was in the midst of an American tour and had already been to the White House to meet President Trump, who said, as they sat together in the Oval Office, that they had become “very good friends over a fairly short period of time.” The president thanked the prince for what he said was the kingdom’s order of billions of dollars of American-made military hardware. “That’s peanuts to you,” he quipped.
From Cambridge, Prince Mohammed’s travels would take him to California, where he rented the entire 285-room Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills and was the guest of honor at a dinner hosted by Rupert Murdoch and attended by numerous entertainment-industry grandees. In Silicon Valley, he met with Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, and other tech executives; in Seattle, he met with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief executive. Saudi Arabia was already an investor in Uber through its sovereign wealth fund, which is controlled by the crown prince, and Prince Mohammed was negotiating to buy a stake in Endeavor, the Hollywood conglomerate that includes the WME talent agency and the Ultimate Fighting Championship business.
At these stops on the West Coast, he dressed in either a suit or jeans, sport jacket and open-collared shirt, instead of the traditional black robe and red-and-white-checkered kaffiyeh he wore to the White House. “Here was this young guy who was sort of hip and fit in with the Silicon Valley and Hollywood crowd, and they were easily manipulated,” says Robert Jordan, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia under President George W. Bush. “It was money speaking, and the temptation to hook up with a massively funded kingdom.”
On the sidewalk that day in Cambridge, one of the featured speakers was Shireen al-Adeimi, who is 35. She was born in Yemen and spent part of her childhood there. Her relatives in Yemen were now living through a civil war, one that had caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties and was threatening millions with famine — and yet had barely registered in the American news cycle at that point. The American universities doing business with the Saudis — largely in the form of sponsored research, paid for with money from Saudi Aramco, the giant oil company, and other state-owned industries — saw no reason to stop, and the lonely voices who argued against those ties were easily ignored.
Al-Adeimi lived nearby with her husband, a Ph.D. student, in an apartment owned by M.I.T. She was finishing her own doctoral studies at Harvard and would soon begin a job as an assistant professor of education at Michigan State. She had never been politically active before — “If I ever had something to say in public, I thought it would be about education,” she says — but had started speaking out against Saudi conduct in Yemen by posting on social media and by writing to American politicians. At the demonstration, she wore a gray blazer and a peach head scarf and spoke in a soft but steady voice into a hand-held microphone. “The man M.I.T. is hosting is starving millions of people to death by blockading access to food and medicine,” she said. “The man M.I.T. is hosting has created the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. Simply put, the man M.I.T. is hosting is a war criminal, and he should be punished for his crimes and not welcomed here.”
Al-Adeimi and five others entered the M.I.T. building and walked down the Infinite Corridor to deliver a petition to the university’s president, Rafael Reif. There were some 4,000 names on the petition asking him to cancel Prince Mohammed’s visit. Reif was not in his office, and they never got a response.
The next morning, Prince Mohammed spent several hours at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, a high-profile domain with a carefully cultivated progressive image and a language all its own. (It describes its curriculum not as interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary but as antidisciplinary.) A majority of the Media Lab’s $75 million annual budget comes from corporate patrons, which are referred to as members and pay a minimum of $250,000 each year. Prince Mohammed’s personal foundation was among the roughly 90 members. The Saudis signed three contracts that day, for a total of $23 million, two of them to extend existing research projects with M.I.T. The other one was for a new initiative between the university and Sabic, a Saudi state-owned petrochemical company, for research into more efficient refining of natural gas.
At the time of Prince Mohammed’s visit, Saudi Arabia seemed to be liberalizing, at least a little. Women had been granted permission to drive, finally, a reform that gained a great deal of media attention. When a movie theater opened in Riyadh that spring, it ended a 35-year ban on cinemas. (“Black Panther” was the first showing; a late scene, a kiss between two of the stars, was cut by censors.) Six months after the prince’s triumphal American trip, on Oct. 2, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen who lived in Virginia and was a columnist for The Washington Post, was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. American intelligence agencies held the Saudi state responsible and concluded that the crown prince himself most likely authorized the action. (A United Nations report released in June reached a similar conclusion.)
Later in October, M.I.T. announced that it was reassessing its extensive links to the kingdom. Richard Lester, an associate provost who oversees the school’s partnerships with foreign entities, was put in charge of that review. A nuclear engineer by training, Lester is an M.I.T. lifer, having joined the faculty in 1979 when he was in his mid-20s; he is now 65. His mission was to explore whether a source of money could be so unsavory as to warrant rejecting or returning the funds — hardly an easy task. Once an institution goes down that road, what other donors might some on campus find objectionable? What other streams of funding could be endangered? What names might have to come off buildings?
In December, Lester outlined his preliminary findings in a letter to Reif, which was also shared with faculty members and students. Lester had to acknowledge an uncomfortable fact: “One of those individuals now known to have played a leading role in Mr. Khashoggi’s murder in Istanbul had been part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s entourage during the latter’s visit to the M.I.T. campus,” he wrote, referring to Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer. “This individual had engaged with members of the M.I.T. community at that time — an unwelcome and unsettling intrusion into our space, even though evident only in retrospect.”
Endeavor returned a $400 million investment from Saudi Arabia this year, but many other American corporations stayed in business with the kingdom. In April, the regime executed 37 people in one day, most by beheading; one of the condemned was said to have been “crucified,” with his headless body displayed in public. Investors eagerly bought Aramco bonds, which were offered for the first time in April, and AMC still plans to build dozens of new theaters in the kingdom.
Activists on campus, however, wanted more from their universities. “They all have those Latin sayings, stating some higher purpose,” says Grif Peterson, a former fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “Look at it, it’s right there on the wall.”
M.I.T. does not need Saudi Arabia’s money. Chartered on the eve of the Civil War (two days before the first shots were fired), it is one of those ultrawealthy universities whose finances are sometimes compared to the economies of small or midsize nations. M.I.T. spent about $3.6 billion on its operations last year, and its endowment, $16.5 billion, is the sixth-largest among American universities (and greater than the gross domestic product of nearly 70 countries, including Mongolia, Nicaragua and the Republic of Congo). The money it receives from Saudi sources is relatively modest, less than $10 million in many years, though the school has received individual gifts from Saudi billionaires of as much as $43 million.
Federal law requires universities in the United States to report revenue of more than $250,000 from outside the country, which is logged by the Education Department on what is known as the foreign gifts report. It shows that Saudi money flows to all sorts of American schools: M.I.T.’s elite peers, including Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, Stanford and the California Institute of Technology; flagship public universities like Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley; institutions in oil-producing regions, like Texas A&M; and state schools like Eastern Washington University and Ball State University.
For that last category of schools, the Saudi money comes almost entirely in the form of tuition for its students — full tuition, at the out-of-state rates, which are usually double what state residents pay. With a population of 34 million, Saudi Arabia is the 41st most populous nation in the world, but with 44,000 students in the United States, it is the fourth-largest source of foreign students, trailing only China, India and South Korea. Saudi students began coming to the United States in large numbers after a 2005 meeting between Crown Prince Abdullah (Mohammed bin Salman’s uncle) and President George W. Bush at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex. They were seeking ways to restore warmer relations between the two countries after the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi; the first pillar of a new “foundation of broad cooperation,” as their joint statement put it, was for the Saudis to send greater numbers of students to the United States.
The Saudi government pays the tuitions directly, under individual contracts with many universities for undergraduate students. The contracts specify students’ majors and state that the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission in Northern Virginia, which manages the college program, must be informed if a student seeks to switch concentrations. “This financial guarantee provides coverage only to the degree and major specified above” is the language I saw in one contract, for a student at the University of Kansas. Any changes to the major, it continued, would render the contract “null and void.” No other nation pays for its American-based college students in the same systematic way. Most other foreign students, including the more than 300,000 from China, pay with family money and sometimes a combination of scholarships from their home countries and their American schools.
In 2018, the 411 Saudis at Eastern Washington University accounted for more than 12 percent of the school’s total tuition revenue while making up only 3 percent of the student population. Northern Kentucky University has educated more than 700 Saudis over the last decade. According to François LeRoy, the university’s director of global engagement, most of them have been men, tending to major in engineering technology. A substantial number are married and live off campus with their families. Their presence has served the additional benefit of helping the local economy. “The car dealerships have done wonderfully well,” LeRoy says, “because most of them purchase a car as soon as they arrive.”
Saudi high school graduates are not generally considered as strong academically as those coming from China or other nations sending students to the United States. A consultant who advises universities on issues related to international students told me he believes that the Saudis gravitate to less selective schools where they can easily gain admission.
M.I.T. does not educate a great many Saudis: Just six undergraduates and 27 graduate students (out of about 11,600 total students) were enrolled in 2018. Its relationships and transactions with Saudi Arabia are largely with the Saudi government and various state-owned entities. The same is true of other top-tier American universities.
At least 25 universities have contracts with Aramco; Sabic, the petrochemical company; or the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, a government research facility in Riyadh. M.I.T. works with all three. Many of the agreements focus on technical aspects of oil and natural gas extraction and processing. Economists at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are working directly with the Saudi government to reconceive the kingdom’s labor market for the day when it will be unable to rely as much on revenue from oil — and also to increase opportunities for women and younger workers. In all these instances, the universities’ collaborations with the Saudis are akin to consulting, but academics do not call it that, unless it is work done on the side; they call it academic research.
The benefits to Saudi Arabia from these relationships are clear. The kingdom gets access to the brain trust of America’s top academic institutions as it endeavors to modernize its economy, an effort Prince Mohammed has named Vision 2030. Perhaps as important, the entree to schools like M.I.T. serves to soften the kingdom’s image. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, hostile to women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights and without protections for a free press or open expression, but its associations beyond its borders can make it seem almost like an honorary Western nation. Another way to view the Saudi relationship with American universities is as a form of branding; its recent moves to sponsor prominent sporting events serve the same purpose. “It’s a way of spreading soft power,” says Jordan, the former ambassador, “in the same way the U.S. has done for years around the world.”
On his trip to Cambridge last year, Prince Mohammed spent a full day along the two-mile corridor that is arguably America’s most hallowed academic ground. After the morning at M.I.T., he made the short trip in his motorcade to Harvard, where he participated in what was called a faculty round table, followed by a reception with local college presidents.
No one asked him about Yemen or about much of anything else. An administrator at Harvard who helped arrange the crown prince’s event there described it as “a show, a meet-and-greet — there was not a big give-and-take or an opportunity for questions.” It was a repeat of how Prince Mohammed spent his time at M.I.T. “They asked to come, and we agreed to host them,” says Richard Lester, the associate provost. I asked if he knew the reasons for the crown prince’s visit. “I think one of them undoubtedly was that there was a P.R. value associated with the visit,” he said. “And they may have also been genuinely curious about what we do here.”
Administrators at universities with ties to Saudi Arabia emphasize their role as a liberalizing influence. The University of New Haven, a private school that has a criminal-justice program, helps educate Saudi law-enforcement officers. The program has come under scrutiny because of the kingdom’s notoriously harsh and autocratic justice system. New Haven’s president, Steven H. Kaplan, told me that his institution had created a curriculum based on American constitutional law that would make Saudi students less likely to be involved in any activities like rounding up, torturing or executing dissidents. “We are helping implement the kind of change that will instill in citizens there the kind of values that would cause them to resist and oppose such horrible acts,” he said. He acknowledged that he had no way of knowing for sure what activities students were involved in once they graduated.
To critics, the universities are selling their good names. Sally Haslanger, an M.I.T. philosophy professor, refers to the university conferring “symbolic capital” on the Saudi regime. “M.I.T.’s name, integrity, credibility and scientific excellence have power,” she told me, “and we have used it to burnish the reputation of Mohammed bin Salman and his regime.”
On a Frigid night in late February, about 100 people filed into a basement auditorium in the Cambridge Public Library for a program titled “Whose University Is It?” Two dozen speakers, a mix of professors, students and community members, addressed a range of what they considered dubious relationships between local universities and foreign or corporate interests. Halfway through the evening, Ruth Perry, a professor of literature at M.I.T., led the crowd in a version of the folk anthem “Which Side Are You On?” with lyrics she had rewritten for the occasion. One verse went: “A crown prince comes to visit/To take us by the hand/No partnering with killers/In Middle Eastern lands.” Another verse said, “Our schools get Judas cash.”
The debate over Saudi involvement in American higher education echoes the movement a generation ago that pushed universities to divest from apartheid-era South Africa, and more recently, calls from some quarters for schools to disassociate from Israel in protest of its occupation of the Palestinian territories. Faculty members and students — as well as the surrounding communities in urban centers like Cambridge — often want universities to reflect their own sense of moral clarity and outrage. University administrators, in almost all cases, resist.
Saudi Arabia directed about $650 million to American universities from 2012 to 2018 and ranks third on the list of foreign sources of money, one spot behind Britain, according to data contained in the foreign gifts report. The top spot is occupied by Qatar, another oil-rich Persian Gulf state and a bitter rival of Saudi Arabia. American strategic adversaries on the list, including Russia and China, reveal some other relationships — like M.I.T.’s partnership with a technology incubator outside Moscow. Its president is the billionaire oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, who was also an M.I.T. trustee until the Treasury Department put him on a sanctions list.
The totals on the foreign gifts report are incomplete, probably significantly so. Not all universities comply with the reporting rule in the same way, and some appear not to comply at all. The tuition payments alone from the Saudi government, which some schools report and others do not, could exceed $1 billion a year. (If the kingdom paid $20,000 in out-of-state tuition for every one of its students, the total would be $880 million, but some of them attend private schools that cost more.) The universities themselves are not clear about what they should report. “It’s such an obscure corner of the Higher Education Act that some institutions overlook it,” Terry Hartle, a senior vice president at the American Council on Education, told me.
M.I.T. officials say its annual revenue from its contracts with Aramco in recent years has usually been less than $10 million — a pittance to the oil company, which makes roughly $1 billion a day in revenues. Recent deals involve the research and development of methods to extract oil more efficiently and cleanly, as well as “computational modeling, artificial intelligence, robotics and nanotechnologies,” according to a university statement.
The agreements are part of a much larger picture: M.I.T.’s partnerships with big businesses in the United States and abroad. Aramco is a member of the university’s Energy Initiative, along with Exxon Mobil, Shell and BP. Most other major research universities have similar consortiums, a concept M.I.T. helped pioneer. Companies pay a membership fee to sponsor research and benefit from the findings.
The Media Lab is another corporate consortium. Despite its name, the lab’s focus is on computing and technology rather than the news media. Its director, Joi Ito, identifies as a hacker, and his motto for the lab — “deploy or die” — means that students should not be afraid to quickly test their ideas in the marketplace. (Ito is a board member at The New York Times Company.)
“It’s the classic model of leveraging private money at a very high level,” says Jonathan King, a biology professor and chairman of the editorial board of M.I.T.’s faculty newsletter. “The Media Lab did not grow out of a national science priority or a desire to cure cancer or Alzheimer’s. Its roots are entrepreneurial, not academic.”
The Saudi associations raise another question, which is whether universities should take a political or moral stand. The kingdom’s conduct has been extreme enough to inspire a rare instance of bipartisanship in Washington — a Senate vote in June to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, its partner in the Yemen conflict. (The measure is unlikely to survive the expected presidential veto.) When I visited Shireen al-Adeimi at Michigan State, eight months after she spoke on the sidewalk in Cambridge, she was clear about what she thought M.I.T. should do. “Just disassociate from him,” she said, referring to the crown prince. “If this was an African warlord from a poor country, would we even be having this conversation? Would they be so cautious about how they respond?”
Richard Lester’s office looks onto the tree-lined courtyard where M.I.T.’s graduation ceremonies take place each May. He was born in Yorkshire, in northern England, and still speaks with a British accent. “I hope you’re O.K. with dogs,” he said as his mini-labradoodle stretched out beside his desk.
M.I.T. has been alone in publicly grappling with what to do about its Saudi associations, which has won the university some grudging respect, even from its critics. “They are the only school that’s been willing to engage at all and give us anything to push back on,” says Grif Peterson, the former fellow at the Berkman Klein Center. There are certainly reasons for those on campuses — or anywhere, really — to fear speaking out against the Saudi regime. Last August, Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, called for the release of two jailed Saudi human rights activists. It was a fairly diplomatic rebuke. In response, the Saudis criticized Canada’s “negative and surprising attitude” and announced a long list of retaliatory measures, including recalling several thousand Saudi students.
One Saudi student in the United States whom I asked to interview said he would participate only if I shielded his identity. “Thanks for reaching out, please DO NOT use my name, affiliation or any descriptive information in any published work,” he wrote me in an email. When we met, he said that in contrast to what he considered some forward economic reforms by the government, “freedom of expression has been going in the other direction. You can’t risk even moderate criticisms. And if you’re an explicit critic, I feel like you could end up in prison.”
In Lester’s office, I told him about a meeting I had the day before with a senior Harvard administrator. The official had said he would be happy to talk with me about Harvard’s relationship with Saudi Arabia when I got to Cambridge. But when we settled into his office, he informed me, sheepishly, that I could not quote him by name. He apologized, saying that the directive came from someone higher up in the administration.
The Harvard administrator reached across his desk and handed me a two-paragraph written statement. It said that the university would no longer set aside 100 seats in its summer program for Saudi students who were sponsored by the crown prince’s personal foundation, which is known as MiSK. The statement, which has not been publicly disclosed, was not signed — the letterhead was from the Office of the Provost — and it did not say exactly why the agreement was being discontinued, only that “it has not been renewed.” There was no explicit reference to Khashoggi. “We are following recent events with concern and are assessing potential implications for existing programs,” the statement said.
When I told Lester that others seemed to speak only elliptically about Saudi Arabia, if at all, he said, dryly, “M.I.T. has its own culture, and the culture is one that I think appreciates facts.”
Lester knew that whatever he recommended to Reif, M.I.T.’s president, would displease some people. In his December report, he noted that M.I.T. had been aware of Saudi Arabia’s “internal repression and external aggression” but that until recently some still believed it was on a path to becoming a more progressive society. “The Khashoggi murder has deflated many of those hopes,” he wrote. “There were also the particular facts of this case, notably the combination of brazenness, brutality and contempt for international opinion that made it stand out even within the crowded global gallery of official malevolence.”
Lester asked for comments from the M.I.T. community — students, alumni and faculty members — and a majority of respondents wanted the university to sever its direct relationships with the kingdom and its closely related entities. In a follow-up letter in January, which, like his preliminary report, was made public, Lester noted that the respondents were appalled not just by “the Khashoggi assassination and attempted cover-up” but also by “the atrocities perpetrated against civilians in Yemen and the repression of human rights, the absence of basic rights of self-determination for women, the persecution of Saudi L.G.B.T.Q. citizens and the attacks on free speech in the kingdom.” In the most recent fiscal year, according to Lester, M.I.T. received $7.2 million for sponsored research from five Saudi sources: Aramco, Sabic, the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and two state-run universities. “It’s a very negligible amount of money,” he told me.
In the end, M.I.T. severed its connection with only one Saudi entity: MiSK, which was a member of the Media Lab. Ito told me that the foundation had “some issues on payment” but refused to elaborate. “As a matter of policy,” he wrote in an email, “we don’t comment further on members and reasons for their leaving.”
Lester recommended that M.I.T. continue its other work with the Saudis, including the state-owned firms. The university gave faculty members serving as principal researchers the option of ending the collaborations. According to Forbes, Aramco accounts for roughly 87 percent of Saudi Arabia’s budget. To the critics, it is the giant oil company that funds the war in Yemen, the roundup of dissidents and all else that occurs in the kingdom. “It was a hard issue,” Lester told me. “I know that there are some who take the view that there is not a distinction between these entities — that they are all part of the regime, part of the government.” He concluded that a line could be drawn and that even some of the companies most closely affiliated to the Saudi regime served as moderating social influences — for example, by employing female engineers and managers.
Reif accepted Lester’s recommendations and, in his own letter, made a distinction between the Saudi government and the Saudi citizens M.I.T. has worked with. “Knowing these individuals, it is impossible not to see them as separate from the regime they did not choose and cannot control,” he wrote. The critics of the university’s ties to the kingdom had hoped for a different conclusion.
“Lester talked about what a tiny fraction of the overall budget the Saudi money is,” says Jonathan King, the editorial board chairman of M.I.T.’s faculty newsletter. “He could have decided that we don’t have to be in bed with murderers and a government that imprisons its women activists. But he insisted on keeping the relationship. I don’t get it. Why would M.I.T. want to sully its national and international reputation for chump change?”
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