The one university in America that contracted with Palantir

Happy Wednesday, folks! It feels so good to be back! 

Thank you to all of y’all who filled out FOIAball’s first-ever reader survey. I got over 170 responses, which blew me away!

If you’re wondering how my vacation went, the answer is great! I left my phone on airplane mode for seven straight days and received no texts, tweets, emails, or updates.

It was a lovely reset. But I really missed this. I know the platitudes about doing what you love, but this was the first vacation I’ve ever taken where I was in a rush to get back to work. 

Now let’s talk about a school that contracted with Palantir. 

Palantir is the biggest of America’s big data boogeymen, a nebulous and opaque firm whose digital tendrils reach into every crevice of modernity. 

Or maybe they don’t. Palantir maintains a blog on Medium where it fastidiously responds to misleading narratives the mainstream media peddles about it. 

I don’t feel like becoming the subject of a post, so for every statement in this article, please assume the opposite is potentially—possibly even probably—true. 

Like if I say Palantir is a malevolent leech that latched onto our government to create an omnipotent surveillance state that actively worsens conditions for the poor and helpless, it’s also possible that Palantir is a symbiotic parasite that latched onto our government to create an omnipotent surveillance state that actively improves conditions for the rich and powerful. 

I really don’t love both-sides journalism, but I do gotta be fair here. 

Ain’t no disputing right now, though, that the company isn’t exactly our nation’s most beloved corporation. Palantir’s best-known work is with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, both of which are waging violent, unpopular, and reckless campaigns turbocharged by Palantir interfaces and algorithms. 

Which probably explains why a public university that used Palantir to help crunch student data was reluctant to hand over its contract to FOIAball. 

Took me four months and a threat from a lawyer. 

Palantir’s actual work is rather banal (there’s some famous quote escaping me at the moment), developing slick-looking skins that integrate various databases and churn out AI-recommended courses of action. Think Jason Bourne cast as the lead in Her.

As outrage around the firm’s work has ramped up, especially over the custom tools ICE is using, its leaders have gone on the charm offensive. 

Palantir’s founder, Peter Thiel, is actively telling people that a 23-year-old girl is the antichrist. 

And CEO Alex Karp—who we can only say “appears to be” and not “is clearly” zooted out of his gourd—is railing against an even worse threat to society: college. 

If there’s one thing that Palantir hates, it is the scourge of higher education. The company has an almost reflexive revulsion to liberal arts and academia. 

In 2025, it launched a fellowship to hire students directly out of high school.

“Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination,” its tagline reads. “Get the Palantir degree.” 

In an interview promoting his new book, Karp declared that “everything you learned at your school about how the world works is intellectually incorrect.”

That stance (maybe! dunno! can’t say!) might have something to do with the fact that college students have been the face of public protests against Palantir for years.

But for all its stated disdain for institutions of higher learning, it doesn’t refuse to work with them.

Back in December, I asked over 100 schools if they had any contracts with Palantir. 

One said yes.