Texas A&M board votes to close Middle East campus
The Board of Regents of Texas A&M University has voted to shut down its 20-year-old campus in Qatar, a move that surprised even the university’s Middle Eastern partner.
The abrupt announcement of the closure of the overseas branch of the system’s flagship campus, in College Station, is yet another sign of the political microscope that higher education’s international ties are under.
In a written statement, Bill Mahomes, the board’s chairman, said that the “core mission of Texas A&M should be advanced primarily within Texas and the United States” and that the university did not “necessarily need a campus infrastructure 8,000 miles away to support education and research collaborations.”
The statement said that the board had begun reassessing the university’s physical presence in the Middle East last fall because of instability over the Israel-Hamas war. A spokesman for the university system declined to respond to Chronicle questions about the review process or other elements of the board’s decision.
The 7-to-1 vote happened after the board met in executive session but without public discussion.
Francisco J. Marmolejo, president of the higher-education arm of the Qatar Foundation, the campus’s Middle Eastern sponsor, said there had been no prior conversation between the foundation and the university system about winding down the partnership. “It was decided unilaterally by the board,” Marmolejo said in an interview, noting that a new 10-year contract had been signed just two years ago.
The Qatar campus, which awards degrees in engineering, has been a particular lightning rod. A controversial 2021 reorganization undercut its liberal-arts and sciences instruction, and caused an uproar among faculty members in both Doha and College Station. More recently, the Qatar Foundation and Texas A&M’s president, Mark A. Welsh III, have had to deny accusations that Qatar was underwriting weapons research on the campus.
In a statement, the Qatar Foundation blamed the allegations for the closure decision. “It is deeply disappointing that a globally respected academic institution like Texas A&M University has fallen victim to such a campaign,” the statement said.
Although Texas A&M-Qatar is one of just a handful of prominent overseas branch campuses of American colleges — another, Yale-NUS College, the liberal-arts college started by Yale University and the National University of Singapore, announced in 2021 that it would close — the decision nonetheless offers broader, and disquieting, lessons for international education.
For one, it underscores the political tightrope college leaders have had to walk since the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel. The leaders have been criticized by many, including alumni and politicians, for not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus, while protesters have called on colleges to boycott academic ties with Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians.
In the current environment, deep institutional engagement in the Middle East, and particularly in Qatar, which has been accused of supporting Hamas, may be a no-go, said Kevin Kinser, head of education-policy studies at Pennsylvania State University and an expert on international branch campuses. “Sensitive,” he said, “may be too anodyne a phrase.”
Kinser speculated that the regents, all of whom were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a Republican, may have taken action rather than wait for the university’s presence in Qatar to draw legislative scrutiny.
He noted that public officials have increasingly disapproved of how colleges are run and have tried to limit diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and to mandate what can, and cannot, be taught in classrooms.
While higher ed as a whole has been caught in a partisan maelstrom, colleges’ international activities have themselves come under criticism. There have been investigations of foreign research ties, demands for greater transparency of funding from overseas sources, and calls to revoke the visas of student protesters. States too are getting into the act — a new Florida law could bar public colleges from hiring graduate students from “countries of concern” as teaching and research assistants, and could lead to the closure of overseas degree programs.
It could become more difficult for colleges to strike international partnerships, especially in countries that are “not seen as being part of the home team,” Kinser said, including China, Russia, and even Qatar.
Politics aside, there is also no longer a consensus about the benefits of international engagement, as there was a decade ago, Kinser said. “We used to be able to assert that international partnerships were an unquestioned good. We’re not in that era anymore.”
As for Texas A&M-Qatar, the closure will take place gradually, over four years, so as not to disrupt the educational experience of current students. It’s too early to say what the next steps will be, Marmolejo said. Qatar recruited Texas A&M and a half-dozen other prominent foreign universities to Education City, its higher-education hub, to expand its educational and research capacity, and Marmolejo said he is regularly contacted by overseas institutions interested in partnerships with Qatar. One of those colleges could take Texas A&M’s place, but Qatar has also expanded its engineering curriculum at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a national institution, and might offer engineering education without an international partner.
“We are sorry that Texas A&M will not be part of our future, but we are looking forward to the horizon,” Marmolejo said. “We are ready to move on.”
