AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urges Saudi Arabia to discuss who ordered the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, we end today’s show looking at how U.S. universities are facing new scrutiny over their close ties to Saudi Arabia in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder. Earlier this year, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman visited both Harvard and MIT on his first official tour to the U.S. Ahead of the meeting, MIT students presented their university’s president, Rafael Reif, with a stack of petitions protesting bin Salman’s visit.

MIT STUDENT: We’re here because we want to urge President Reif to reconsider the meeting with Mohammed bin Salman. We are aware that this meeting is going to happen, but we feel that, you know, accepting resources from somebody in sort of like a—in sort of a blanket way, without acknowledging that there is a substantial famine being caused by Mohammed bin Salman in Yemen, goes against the principles of MIT, which is sort of, you know, wanting just to maintain human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Both Harvard Provost Alan Garber and the MIT President Rafael Reif met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Saudi officials later publicized the meetings on social media in a move critics say was used to give the crown prince legitimacy.

Meanwhile, Yale University Law School’s Abdallah S. Kamel Center for Study of Islamic Law is reportedly funded by a Saudi potentate, and the University of New Haven in Connecticut has formally partnered with King Fahd Security College in Riyadh since 2016. When the partnership was first announced, University of New Haven President Steven Kaplan said, quote, “We are excited to put the University of New Haven’s world-renowned programs in criminal justice, national security, and forensic studies at the service of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s next generation of security professionals.”

Well, Democracy Now! reached out to Harvard, to MIT, to the University of New Haven and Yale University Law School’s Abdallah S. Kamel Center for Study of Islamic Law. None of the institutions accepted our offer to join us on the show today. But for more, we are joined by two people. In Boston, Massachusetts, Yarden Katz is with us, department fellow in systems biology at Harvard Medical School. He wrote an article for The Guardian on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to Harvard/MIT. His piece, focusing on the kingdom’s close ties to U.S. universities, is headlined “Elite universities are selling themselves—and look who’s buying.” And in Hartford, Connecticut, we’re joined by Stanley Heller, executive director of the Middle East Crisis Committee, also a member of the Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Yarden Katz, let’s begin with you. Explain your response when you heard about what happened to The Washington Post columnist Khashoggi, the latest news, you know, Turkey demanding the crown prince come clean on what he knows and who ordered this murder. Your response to that, and how this connects to your protests?

YARDEN KATZ: Right. So I think it’s important to emphasize that the protest started before the Khashoggi horrific murder. So, when bin Salman was being greeted as a reformer when he visited the United States in the spring, he was visiting Harvard and MIT, as well, and already a local antiwar group here, Mass Peace Action, was protesting the visit. They said, “We don’t want this war criminal on our campus.”

The problem is that we didn’t really know when to protest, because the universities kept the visit so secret. So, my colleague Grif Peterson and I, who I wrote the piece with, started investigating it, and we found that bin Salman was going to be hosted by the MIT Media Lab, which is one of the school’s most famous laboratories. And that visit was kept very secret. People in the lab were told that if they want to access the lab that day, they would have to go through metal detectors, but they weren’t told why.

And bin Salman, on that day, received demos of the latest technologies at MIT. He met with leading university officials. He was demoed war technologies, such as autonomous robots. And he signed many new partnerships with these universities, and also his visit signaled the continuation of existing ones. So, already back then, students were protesting it, activists were protesting it.

And even after lobbying, Cambridge City Council passed a resolution condemning the visit and condemning the way that MIT and Harvard handled bin Salman’s visit and greeted him as a kind of reformer as opposed to the war criminal that he is. So the Khashoggi affair, obviously, has reignited interest in that, but it’s been going on since March.

AMY GOODMAN: And you suggest that not only didn’t they publicize the visit; you’re saying they tried to cover it up, Yarden.

YARDEN KATZ: Yes, absolutely. And you can see the contrast in the way that these elite universities talk about their partnerships with the Saudis and the way that Saudi Arabia talks about it. So, whenever you have a partnership like that with an elite institution like Harvard or MIT that has a very progressive and techy image, the Saudi government uses that on social media. They use it to sort of create the illusion that they’re really also a progressive government, that they’re really on the same page with MIT, that they superficially use the same language.

On the other hand, universities haven’t said much about it. They only put out a press release after the fact, and they’re trying to minimize that, because I think they realize that it doesn’t look good. Here you have a representative of an absolute monarchy coming to campus. There’s a devastating war in Yemen. Activists are being silenced and thrown in jail in Saudi Arabia. So it’s not a good situation, and universities know that viscerally, but they want the money, and they want the prestige of affiliating with these groups.

I’d also like to add, though, that this is not just a Saudi issue. It’s really—we’re not saying that universities like Harvard and MIT are so ethically pure that they shouldn’t affiliate with the Saudi government, but rather that universities, as a matter of routine practice, form unaccountable partnerships that are negotiated in secret with many dubious actors. Sometimes it’s a foreign government like the Saudi government, and sometimes it’s a dubious American actor.

So, for instance, MIT has numerous partnerships with Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, who are weapons manufacturers. They are the biggest suppliers of weapons to the Saudi government. Their weapons are being used in Yemen. So the school bus that was demolished earlier this year, where 40 Yemeni children were killed, that attack was enacted using a Lockheed Martin-made bomb made in the U.S. So that’s an American partnership that’s also problematic and tied to this web of unaccountable partnerships that universities form all the time.

AMY GOODMAN: How did MIT President Reif respond to you, Yarden Katz?

YARDEN KATZ: I think that’s a great question, and it’s very telling, their lack of response. So, we had a piece that was published in The Guardian. It’s a pretty visible venue, obviously. After our piece, the MIT student newspaper, The Tech, published a very forceful and very perceptive editorial talking about MIT’s hypocrisy and the gap between its espoused ideals of making the world a better place and its reality of hosting a war criminal. Then there was the Cambridge City Council resolution that I mentioned, that was passed unanimously, also condemning the universities.

And the sad reality is that the universities didn’t have to confront any of this. They didn’t respond to the Cambridge City Council resolution. They didn’t respond to our piece. They’re generally unavailable for comment. The only response was MIT President Rafael Reif writing an op-ed in the student newspaper in response to the editorial, basically not engaging with the issues and just saying, “Look, universities have to make compromises. It’s a balancing act. And we prefer dialogue over no dialogue.”

AMY GOODMAN: The assistant vice president of communications at Harvard University, Melodie Jackson, declined our offer to be on the show, but she did send Democracy Now! a statement, that read, in part, “As a global research university, Harvard has a broad and robust scholarly engagement in the Middle East, including in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has benefited immensely from the intellectual contributions of Saudi-based individuals over the years. … We are following recent events with concern and are assessing potential implications for existing programs,” she said.

Now I want to turn to University of New Haven in Connecticut. Stanley Heller, you’re executive director of the Middle East Crisis Committee, also a member of the Coalition to End the U.S.-Saudi Alliance. Talk about what happened at UNH and at Yale.

STANLEY HELLER: Good morning, Amy. We have been alarmed for about a year and a half that the University of New Haven has a program, kind of secretive—we don’t know exactly what it is—to have its Henry C. Lee College, that specializes in forensic and police work, helping the King Fahd Security College. And this is a college where all the police in Saudi Arabia go for training. We wrote to them. We had a letter signed by nearly 50 prominent Americans telling them, warning them about Saudi Arabia. We got no response at all. So that was about a year ago.

Then, the Khashoggi killing, we started wondering what is—you know, what is going on. The Turkish sources started saying, leaking, that the alleged killer was a man named Salah al-Tubaigy, a top forensic scientist. So we’re starting to think, “Forensic scientist? That’s some of the things that Henry C. Lee College is famous for.” And we did some poking around on some Saudi websites, and we saw the editorial board of a Saudi forensic society had on it Henry Lee and a Dr. Salah Tubaigy. This was extraordinary. And so, we sent out press releases and been trying to get some response to the university.

University, in a year and a half, has never said a word to us, but they do say some things to the media. Their first response was, “Well, we’re told that it’s a different al-Tubaigy. The spelling is different.” And so on. That seemed pretty odd that there would be two Saudi top forensic scientists with the name al-Tubaigy. So we wrote to that society and asked them, “Is there a second al-Tubaigy?” A Hartford Courant reporter also did the same and never got a response. And then, just a couple days ago on that editorial board page, in English, Salah Tubaigy’s name was removed. So, we think that theory of the two al-Tubaigys has been put to rest.

AMY GOODMAN: Stanley Heller, we have to break.

STANLEY HELLER: Then the university—

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but we’re going to do Part 2 of this, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. We’ve got to end the show. Stanley Heller, executive director of the Middle East Crisis Committee, and Yarden Katz, department fellow in systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

Tonight, Juan González will be speaking at Rutgers University, moderating a discussion in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at 7 p.m. with Oscar López Rivera and Puerto Rican scholars Ivonne Acosta Lespier and Johanna Fernández.

That does it for the broadcast. We have a job opening, full-time broadcast engineer, here in New York. Check our website. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us.