Topline: Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flow into Harvard University, Brown University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, but that didn’t stop the three schools from supplementing their funds with nearly $10 million in combined foreign gifts from the “State of Palestine.”
Key facts: A new report from OpenTheBooks.com revealed that between 2017 and 2023, IUP accepted $7.3 million from Palestine, Harvard got $1.6 million, Brown took in $643,000.
OpenTheBooks’ auditors previously reported the significant amount taxpayers spend to subsidize Ivy League schools. Harvard received $3.3 billion in federal grants and contracts from 2018 to 2022, and Brown received $1.2 billion. IUP is a public school operating with Pennsylvania state money.
Neither the U.S. nor the United Nations acknowledges the existence of the “State of Palestine.” Brown, Harvard and IUP have decided to play by their own rules, even though they accept U.S. taxpayer money.
Brown used some of its Palestinian funds to hire Beshara Doumani as its first professor of “Palestinian Studies.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis reports that the department’s lectures center around “antisemitic conspiracy theories and gross misinformation about Jewish history and identity.”
During the period, Doumani was granted leave to run the West Bank’s Birzeit University, whose employee union praised Hamas terrorists for standing “boldly in the face of colonial fascism” when slaughtering innocent Israelis on Oct. 7 and Hamas is the largest student group on campus.
This April, Brown was one of the first and only universities to give in to pro-Palestine student protestors’ demands of considering divestment from Israel.
Most of IUP’s gifts went to pay tuition and fees for Palestinian students in the school’s business PhD and MBA programs at Arab American University in the West Bank.
Harvard’s Palestinian funds were unrestricted, so there are no federal records of how the money was spent.
Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights has run programs with Birzeit University, including courses like “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
Background: The Palestinian “gifts” are just one piece of the larger influence the Middle East wields over U.S. higher education.
In the last 40 years, $1 on every $4 of foreign gifts and grants to American universities has come from four Middle Eastern nations: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), United Arab Emirates ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).
Summary: U.S. taxpayer money should be supporting institutions that advance our national values, not those that accept money from groups terrorizing our country’s allies, and sowing antisemitism on college campuses.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com
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