Last weekend, while media attention was focused on the March for Our Lives protests across America, a militarised police force blocked the road leading up to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, one of the university’s most famous laboratories, for a special guest. The guest – the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman – visited both Harvard and MIT on his first official tour of the US. Saudi officials boasted about the visit, posting photos of Bin Salman with both Harvard provost Alan Garber and MIT president Rafael Reif on social media.

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Yet both universities have been remarkably silent about the prince’s presence. Neither university publicly announced his visit in advance, and steps were even taken to cover it up. For instance, the Media Lab’s students were sent an email informing them that access to the lab would be restricted, with metal detectors – with no mention as to why. A small protest staged by an anti-war group was the only public indication of Bin Salman’s visit to campus. MIT and Harvard only acknowledged it had taken place afterwards, in response to inquiries by student newspapers and through a press release that didn’t adequately explain the implications of the partnership.

But what is the nature of the relationship between Bin Salman and these elite universities – and why might administrators wish to keep it quiet?

His visit was part of a tour meant to broker deals with American government, business, and academia. In Washington, Bin Salman met Trump to celebrate $12.5bn of US weapons sold to the Saudi government. These weapons are used in the US-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen that has left upwards of 10,000 civilians dead since 2015. The ensuing blockade of Yemeni ports by the Saudi military has resulted in what the UN called the “largest famine the world has seen for decades”, leaving 400,000 children malnourished.

The US visit also seeks to reinforce an all-out PR campaign by the Saudi government to brand the prince as a ‘reformer'

The US visit also seeks to reinforce an all-out PR campaign by the Saudi government, run by consulting firms including McKinsey, to brand Bin Salman as a “reformer”. While some journalists have propagated this myth, Bin Salman does not represent a fundamental shift from the authoritarian monarchy that his family has led since 1932. While he has been praised for advancing women’s rights, the Saudi government has silenced many of the women fighting for equality. It has also detained, and in some cases tortured, members of the royal family and business leaders. It is guilty of scores of human rights violations, still prohibits democratic elections and freedom of expression, and sentences women to imprisonment or death for adultery.

It is as part of this PR campaign that Bin Salman’s visit should be viewed. In exchange for cash, elite universities offer the veneer of a progressive agenda. For instance, Bin Salman’s foundation, MiSK, was accepted as a “member company” to MIT’s Media Lab in 2017, which requires a minimum annual contribution of $250,000 (with a three-year commitment) to the lab. In return, MiSK receives access to the lab’s personnel, technology, and intellectual property. But most important, the lab normalises MiSK – which seeks to extend Bin Salman’s reach over educational affairs in Saudi Arabia – by lending it credibility and a veneer of tech “innovation”. By similar means, Bin Salman used this visit to cement partnerships with other groups at MIT, Harvard and the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Brigham and Women’s hospital.

Bin Salman’s affair with academia isn’t a fluke – it’s a result of the neoliberal logic by which universities increasingly operate. As the journalist David Dickson noted in 1984, American universities and corporations have “teamed up to challenge the democratic control of knowledge” by delegating control over academic research to “the marketplace”. This market rationality extends even to the way research is evaluated – which the Saudi government has been gaming. To give one example, it paid highly cited mathematicians at universities around the world to list King Abdulaziz University as an affiliation, thereby making it the seventh “best” mathematics department worldwide in the 2014 US News and World Report university rankings.

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Here, the Saudi government is only playing by the rules of a game designed by western elites. This is the same logic that has been used to allow corporations, nonprofits and the military to steadily buy out chunks of academia to the point where it makes little sense to presume clear boundaries exist between these entities. As a result, numerous partnerships entangle MIT researchers with Bin Salman. On his Boston tour, he also visited IBM’s Cambridge research facility, which recently partnered with MIT to form an artificial intelligence research laboratory in exchange for a $240m commitment to the university. Boston Dynamics, an MIT partner that builds robots for the US military, also offered a demonstration. Such alliances ought to cast doubt on MIT’s promise to understand the “societal and ethical” implications of AI and build socially beneficial technologies.

The terms of all of these partnerships are essentially opaque, while the secrecy that surrounds them denies the community the chance to deliberate and take action. The growth of unaccountable university partnerships, like other crises facing educational institutions, stems from the absence of democratic engagement. When universities decide to sell themselves to the highest bidder, they become deaf to the interests of their students and the wider societies in which they operate. Subservience to war criminals and corporate overlords tends to follow.

• Grif Peterson is an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Yarden Katz is a departmental fellow in systems biology at Harvard Medical School and an affiliate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University