The war with Iran is throwing the Middle East into turmoil. Missiles and drones dominate the headlines, but another casualty is emerging: the global university.
In a nearly unprecedented move, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated that U.S. universities in the Middle East are “legitimate targets” following reported U.S.-led attacks on two universities in Iran. Another attack since then targeted Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, one of Iran’s most prestigious institutions.
Over the past two decades, universities from across the globe (including many from the U.S.) have planted campuses throughout the Gulf. Beginning in the early 2000s, they opened branches in places like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, drawn by ambitious national strategies to build knowledge economies and sometimes supported by generous host-country funding.
The promise was not only about money, but also access to a regional population eager for higher education and the stability of the host nations, ensuring a long-term investment would pay dividends. These branches did an enormous service to the Gulf region: They expanded access to education, strengthened research capacity, connected their hosts to global academic networks and provided the legitimacy of an international imprimatur.
The relationships fostered by these educational ties became important instruments of soft power, further enhancing the region’s global influence. The branch campuses were like an educational United Nations, with institutional representation from Australia, Canada and the U.S., as well as India, Russia and, yes, even Iran.
The branch campuses collectively form a regional mall for education, allowing students easy access to academic pathways from more than a dozen different countries, offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in a range of disciplines, including business, engineering, medicine, foreign policy and journalism, in a stable, safe and multicultural environment.
For almost a quarter century, the gamble paid off.
Since 2009, a group we founded, the Cross-Border Education Research Team (C-BERT), has tracked the growth of international branch campuses (IBCs) in the Middle East and around the world. During that time, we have talked with hundreds of university leaders about opening branches. They typically worry about financial sustainability, regulatory changes or shifting government priorities. Those risks are real, but manageable.
Military conflict was also a noted risk. But it rarely seemed to be taken as seriously as the other concerns. When it came up in discussions, the response was usually nervous laughter. War was a risk in the abstract, not in the real world created by wealth and stocked with global influence.
The war with Iran has upended that calculus.
As tensions and missiles moved across the region in early March, several IBCs moved courses online or suspended operations. Even if the ceasefire holds and the conflict is temporary, the perception of the Gulf as a stable and safe environment for long-term academic investment and educational opportunity may be a more enduring casualty.
Our C-BERT data shows there are more than 50 IBCs in countries directly affected by the war (and this does not include those institutions called “American University of …,” which publicly announce their alignment with the U.S. higher education system while only having limited ties to the country). The U.S. alone has 11 IBCs in directly impacted countries. These include three campuses in the United Arab Emirates (Hult International Business School in Dubai, New York University Abu Dhabi and Rochester Institute of Technology Dubai) and seven in Qatar (Arkansas State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, Northwestern University, Texas A&M University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Weill Cornell Medicine–Cornell University), as well as Empire State University in Eskişehir, Turkey.
Universities from 17 different countries have constructed classrooms, recruited faculty across continents and persuaded students and their families that the institution will be there through graduation. Their investments have a decades-long horizon. War upends long-term timelines overnight.
If these branches close, the losses extend beyond the physical outpost and could take years to reconstruct. Universities have spent years cultivating partnerships with government leaders, local businesses and other stakeholders across the Middle East. Faculty and staff recruited internationally may suddenly find their contracts uncertain. Students, often expecting a foreign-affiliated degree without leaving the region, could be left scrambling to complete their education.
Broader impacts are also likely. Already data shows that student interest in studying in the Gulf has dropped by almost a third just since the war started. Branch campuses outside the Middle East may also close as higher education reassesses risk. The positive soft-power benefits of international education become less valuable when put up against the brute force of war.
The rapid shift to online learning demonstrates the resilience of global higher education. Universities have become adept at adapting to crisis. But resilience should not be mistaken for preparedness.
This war raises a critical question: Are universities prepared for the new geopolitical era?
For decades, universities expanded globally under an implicit assumption that academic collaboration could operate largely above geopolitics. That assumption is increasingly untenable. Conflicts are spreading across regions once considered stable, governments are asserting greater control over cross-border education and universities themselves have become instruments of national strategy.
International branch campuses were designed for a world of globalization. They now must operate in a world of fragmentation.
Universities will need to rethink how they design and govern their global activities, ranging from contingency planning and student protections to the fundamental question of where and how institutions should invest abroad.
The question is no longer whether geopolitics and war will affect universities operating overseas.
They already have.
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