MIT Offers Harsh Words for Saudi Arabia, but Stops Short of Cutting Financial Ties

Updated (2/6/2019, 3:11 p.m.) with comment from a faculty critic.

After a monthslong review of its partnerships with Saudi Arabia, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday condemned the kingdom’s abuses but said MIT should not cut ties with it or its affiliates.

In a letter to the campus, the president, L. Rafael Reif, accepted the recommendations of a report by Richard K. Lester, associate provost for international partnerships, despite protests from the MIT community.

Reif’s letter attempts to stake out a middle ground. It levels harsh criticism at Saudi Arabia’s abuses, in particular the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, but accepts Lester’s recommendations to preserve relationships. It places much of the responsibility for reconsidering partnerships on faculty members, some of whom will join staff members and students on an ad hoc committee to further examine the question.

“On one hand, we have the behavior of the regime,” Reif said in an interview with The Chronicle. “It may appear that the solution is pretty simple: Just disengage and be done with it.” But most of the university’s partnerships with the kingdom are faculty-led research projects, Reif said, and a wholesale severance of ties could intrude on faculty autonomy.

“We have to be very careful on how we do that, and where we do that,” Reif said, “which is why we need faculty engagement to figure that out.”

The institute will help faculty members who wish to disengage from research projects, the administration said. None have asked to do so yet, according to The Boston Globe.

MIT’s review also weighed “the challenge of working in a nation so out of step with our commitment to inclusion and free expression, and our community’s deep sense of revulsion at actions of the Saudi regime,” Reif wrote, echoing language in Lester’s report.

MIT’s response offers the latest example of a university confronting the side effects of its global entanglements, and the apparent inescapability of heated geopolitical questions. Since 2011 American institutions have received at least $62 million in gifts and contracts from Saudi entities. A few, like Harvard University, Babson College, and the University of New Haven, have drawn further scrutiny either for the scale of accepted gifts or for the unusual depth of certain partnerships.

Many of those partnerships have inspired calls to cut ties with the kingdom following Khashoggi’s murder and human-rights abuses in the war in Yemen. The U.S. Senate in December voted to end American support for the war, and to condemn the Saudi crown prince for Khashoggi’s killing.

‘Moral Money Laundering’

Lester’s preliminary report, released in December, drew comments and criticism from 123 people, including 42 faculty members, 23 students, and dozens of staff members and alumni.

It’s tough to classify comments as simply “for” or “against” Saudi partnerships, Lester said. Many supported some recommendations but not others. But his report shows that roughly three-quarters of both faculty and nonfaculty respondents were at least generally opposed to his recommendations to maintain ties. Twenty-four of the 42 faculty members were “strongly opposed,” he wrote.

Jonathan A. King, an emeritus professor of biology at MIT and an activist with Massachusetts Peace Action, was one of the critics. “I wasn’t surprised” by the recommendations, he said. “They’re very well written, but the conclusion is incorrect.” The institute’s arrangements are “driven not by intellectual content, but by the money,” he said, and they help legitimize a military regime.

King said both faculty members and administrators should take a harder line. If an MIT researcher wants to study renewable energy, for instance, she can find funds outside of Saudi entities like Saudi Aramco, the oil company.

Lester’s final report grapples with some of those arguments. Some worried MIT was sacrificing its reputation for its financial interests. “MIT’s name must continue to stand for something higher than shallow pragmatism,” one comment read. But MIT’s activities with Saudi Arabia account for roughly 0.2 percent of the institute’s operating budget, Lester wrote. Last fiscal year, Saudi-government entities and universities sponsored about $7.2 million in MIT research, supporting 48 principal investigators.

In his first report, Lester argued that state-owned enterprises like Saudi Aramco are too distantly related to the kingdom’s abuses to consider disrupting partnerships. Some commenters contended that “it is not possible to distinguish government agencies from the person of the crown prince” and that the partnerships constituted “moral money laundering.”

Commenters disagreed over whether teaming up with “progressive” modernizing projects benefited Saudi citizens and people at MIT. Some argued that MIT’s prominence gave it leeway to set an example and cut ties. “Views regarding the practical impact of a cutoff of MIT activity are inherently speculative” and would require further study, Lester wrote in response.

But the institute should take pains to condemn the kingdom’s actions, Lester continued. “We must not allow ourselves to be defined by our utility to any sovereign state or to any other organization,” he wrote, “and we may sometimes need to take exceptional measures to avoid this. This is one such case.”

Some commenters described their own experiences with discrimination on trips to Saudi Arabia. In at least one case, Lester wrote, “full participation in the project required some participants to hide certain aspects of their identity,” and female researchers “were not accorded the same civil rights as their male MIT faculty colleagues.” In cases where future travel to the kingdom involves multiple researchers, he said, the principal investigator should provide reviewing committees a written explanation “of why such restrictions should be tolerated, and a plan for managing them. In general, such cases will not pass muster.”

The crisis sparked by Khashoggi’s assassination touched MIT in a “disturbing” way, Lester wrote in his December report. A photo circulated of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, visiting the institute in March. One of the prince’s aides, visible in the background, was later implicated in Khashoggi’s murder.

MIT is not among the top recipients of Saudi funding. But it has a longstanding relationship with Saudi Aramco, which last March allocated $25 million for MIT’s research in renewable energy and artificial intelligence.

Reif expects MIT’s ad hoc committee to finish its deliberations in September.

“We are globally engaged,” Reif said. “This is a kind of situation that went beyond the pale for many of us. But how do we actually engage, how do we allow faculty to engage with good people in countries that have regimes that act in a way that we don’t approve?”

“That to me is a very serious question that a globally engaged institution has to answer,” he said, “and we are in the process of answering that for ourselves, and perhaps even for others as well.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.