How Texas A&M's Qatar campus suddenly collapsed

The Texas A&M system Board of Regents voted last Thursday to close their branch campus in Doha, Qatar. No incoming class will be admitted for this fall, according to a system spokesperson, and the campus will cease operations by 2028. The decision comes just three years after Texas A&M renewed its 10-year contract with the Qatar Foundation, a state-sponsored nonprofit that partners with many international universities to operate satellite campuses in the Persian Gulf country. There was no public discussion of the issue at the board meeting; the vote for closure was introduced and finalized in less than a minute. It was an abrupt and unceremonious end to a 21-year partnership worth hundreds of millions of dollars—and, some say, a harbinger of future challenges for international branch campuses in a politically charged environment.

System spokesperson Mike Reilly said the decision was made due to regional instability and changing institutional priorities, but many are skeptical of that rationale—especially since the vote was held two months after a splashy report accused Texas A&M of sharing sensitive nuclear energy and weapons development research with the Qatari government. Faculty members living and working in Doha are devastated by news of the closure. Brittany Bounds, a history professor at TAMU Qatar, said the decision was “absolutely shocking.” When the vote passed in Texas, it was the middle of the night in Qatar, and Bounds woke up to “hundreds of messages” from sympathetic friends in College Station and panicked colleagues in Doha. Most faculty members in Qatar are on year-to-year contracts; Bounds said the university sent an email guaranteeing extensions for at least another year, but that did little to assuage their concerns. “I felt kicked in the gut … Most people here, we live in Doha, we’ve built lives here; even if there is a landing pad in Texas, many of us have no desire to go there,” she said. “It felt like losing a family member and having to grapple with that. Now we’re coming out of the shock of it and asking, what do we do?”