MIT is the behind-the-scenes developer of an ambitious new technology institute in the Persian Gulf
For the past two years, a steady stream of visitors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made the roughly 7,000-mile trek from Cambridge to this gleaming desert city on the edge of the Arabian Peninsula.
They are here to help build what aspires to be the first graduate-level research university devoted entirely to fostering renewable, clean, and sustainable sources of energy.
Set to open this fall with a few dozen students and faculty members, the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology aims to eventually enroll 800 master’s and Ph.D. students. The institute will also anchor a large clean-energy community, known as Masdar City, being built around it.
The project is backed by Mubadala, an investment fund controlled by Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and next in line to be president of the United Arab Emirates. The fund says it has set aside $15-billion in seed capital to build the city, including the Masdar Institute.
“Not only will this institution produce manpower, but it will contribute to the development of technology and know-how,” says Fred Moavenzadeh, director of the technology-and-development program at MIT, which oversees the university’s involvement in Abu Dhabi. “But more importantly, with the venture capital that is available, it will try to develop some start-ups. So it’s a very ambitious plan and strategy that we’ve put forward.”
The project is so audacious that some wonder whether it can succeed, especially in today’s troubled economic climate. But MIT’s work here represents a relatively low-risk investment and offers what may become a more common model for American institutions looking to extend their influence abroad: the behind-the-scenes consultant.
An Unlikely Partner
With the world’s sixth-largest oil reserves and the fifth-largest reserves of natural gas, the United Arab Emirates seems an unlikely place to conduct what promises to be some of the planet’s most environmentally friendly research.
Currently the UAE gets all its energy from nonrenewable sources. Its citizens have the largest carbon footprint in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund. (The UAE government disputes the claim.)
What’s more, the country has no record of scientific research in the area of clean and renewable energy technology, and a very weak tradition of high-level scientific research in general.
But Masdar’s backers say that’s exactly why they called MIT for help. The university offered the expertise, and credibility, that government leaders needed to get such an ambitious venture off the ground quickly.
MIT, in turn, would be able to conduct energy-related research on a scale that may not have been possible back home.
“We look at the MIT relationship as an ongoing one,” says Marwan K. Khraisheh, acting provost at the Masdar Institute. “We are building a homegrown institute that will sustain when MIT leaves.”
Masdar’s creators, though, had first hoped for a much more public partnership.
“When they came to us, the initial request was to establish a branch campus there,” Mr. Moavenzadeh says.
The Emiratis told him that money would be no object, and they wanted MIT faculty members to move to Abu Dhabi and begin offering students the same degrees that MIT offers in Cambridge.
But Mr. Moavenzadeh says he argued that that was not the way to go.
He believes that the branch campuses that have opened throughout the petrodollar-rich countries of the Persian Gulf aren’t sustainable.
“You cannot get faculty members from the parent university to go there forever, so you have to hire other faculty from somewhere else,” he says. “When you have to do that, there will always be questions of quality.”
If the parent university pulls out of the branch campus — as George Mason University did from its branch in the emirate of Ras al Khaymah last month — the whole campus will collapse.
“All you will have left are the buildings,” Mr. Moavenzadeh says.
As it turns out, MIT’s caution may have protected it even more than administrators realized at the time.
Plans for the Masdar Institute were made during the heyday of the UAE’s six-year oil boom, which came to an end in the second half of 2008.
Now that the global economic crisis has struck even oil-rich sheikhdoms like Abu Dhabi, capital-intensive projects like Masdar are proceeding carefully.
This month, Masdar’s CEO, Sultan al-Jaber, announced a cautious investment strategy for 2009.
“At least for the next six months, we will focus on executing the existing pipeline of projects,” he told reporters.
It’s not yet clear how this will affect the Masdar Institute. But Abdel Moneim Osman, director of Unesco’s Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States, warns that throughout the Persian Gulf, investors in higher education are finding it increasingly difficult to bridge the gap between an institution’s dwindling incomes and growing expenses.
“A lot of money has been lost in the UAE in the last couple of months,” Mr. Osman says. “So offshore universities are going to have to be extremely careful before they commit to ventures in the Gulf for the next three or four years.”
The $40-Million Deal
In the end, MIT persuaded Masdar’s backers to allow the university to act as a consultant and developer.
For $40-million, MIT agreed to a five-year commitment in which it would help build the Masdar Institute from scratch.
“You establish it, but we will literally control the quality,” Mr. Moavenzadeh says, adding that it didn’t take long for the Emiratis to catch on. “We persuaded them that they will have a very different sense of accomplishment if they establish a homegrown university than if they paid for a group from abroad to set things up.”
MIT administrators and faculty members have been working with local administrators to set up the institute’s administrative and governance structure, recruit and train faculty members, and design the course work. MIT has also agreed to help Masdar seek out research contracts with industry and governments.
It is a deal that perhaps only an elite institution like MIT could have struck. But a number of other American universities have developed similar consulting projects on a smaller scale.
Dartmouth College, for example, works closely with the American University of Kuwait, helping to design academic programs and recruit faculty members. And the University of Southern California is helping the American University in Dubai establish a mass-communications program.
The MIT arrangement will allow it to avoid some of the pitfalls that other American universities have faced when attempting to establish outposts abroad. Many have struggled to transfer the same standards of admissions and instruction and hire the same caliber faculty members that they command at home.
At Masdar, MIT’s name won’t be on any of the buildings. Its professors will not be expected to teach here. And the degrees will be issued by Masdar alone.
In fact, MIT must be consulted every time Masdar wants to mention the relationship between the two institutions in its promotional materials.
If the Masdar Institute fails, MIT can exit when its contract expires. But if Masdar succeeds, MIT will be forever linked to one of the world’s most innovative research institutes, not to mention to the deep pockets of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family.
Mr. Moavenzadeh is optimistic that the partnership will bring tremendous benefits to the university.
“MIT’s graduate students get exposed to the type of projects that are important to this part of the world. " he says. “But more importantly, the faculty members do receive research contracts and do work on research with the collaborators at the Masdar Institute.”
Although it has never been attached to a project quite this ambitious, MIT has been involved in the development of higher-education systems abroad for almost six decades.
In some cases, faculty members and administrators have worked to strengthen existing universities. Three years ago, MIT struck a $40-million deal with Portugal to improve scientific and technological competitiveness throughout its higher-education system.
In other instances, MIT has helped establish new institutions. In the 1950s, for example, MIT had a hand in building Brazil’s Aeronautical Institute of Technology, which became the backbone of the country’s aviation industry.
Under Construction
Where Abu Dhabi’s housing compounds give way to desert scrubland, three cranes and a few dozen workmen are all that so far signals the Masdar Institute’s permanent campus.
Just six months away from opening, the institute — the centerpiece of the effort to transform Abu Dhabi into a Silicon Valley for clean energy — remains more of a construction zone than an academic enterprise.
Housed temporarily in a borrowed building on the edge of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s refinery grounds, the institute has a skeleton staff, including 14 scientists. Another 15 or so are expected to join them by September.
Sgouris Sgouridis signed on to become one of Masdar’s first faculty members before he had completed his Ph.D. at MIT.
His graduate work focused on applying system-dynamics modeling to the aviation industry, he says, and he wanted to apply the same models to investigate ways of making commercial air travel more sustainable.
Anywhere else, he says, it would have been difficult to find financing for such research.
“But it hasn’t been an easy journey for us,” Mr. Sgouridis says, noting that when he arrived in Abu Dhabi last fall, the institute’s administrative infrastructure, like its computer network and its library, was barely existent.
Like all Masdar faculty members, Mr. Sgouridis was interviewed by panels from both Masdar and MIT. Once he was hired, he spent nine more months at MIT sitting in on classes, meeting with faculty members, and learning the way MIT operates. That is part of the hiring process for all new Masdar faculty members.
“We want them to get the feel of MIT, that it’s not enclosed in its own little castle,” Mr. Moavenzadeh says. “Faculty here compete with each other; they’re expected to go out and raise their own money. It’s entrepreneurial and dynamic.”
The incomplete nature of the Masdar campus also means the institute has had to select the type of students who are willing to study in a construction zone.
“This is not an easy thing,” Mr. Khraisheh says. “They are not coming to an established lab, established libraries and dormitories. No. So we want mature people who understand the challenges and also understand the opportunities.”
Masdar has selected almost 80 of the 100 students who will enroll at the institute this fall, based on the same minimum test scores expected of students entering MIT (a GRE score of 730 and a written Toefl score of 600-630) and a slightly lower minimum GPA of 3.5 instead of the 3.6 at MIT.
The first class draws from Pakistan, the Palestinian Territories, and the United States, among other places. The government of Abu Dhabi will pay students’ full tuition, housing expenses, and monthly stipend.
Mirroring MIT
The man in Cambridge most heavily involved with Masdar’s day-to-day operations is Steve Griffiths, executive director of MIT’s Abu Dhabi program.
Mr. Griffiths spends hours in MIT’s videoconferencing center each week, talking with administrators in Abu Dhabi about new faculty hires, the progress of joint research projects, and the details of Masdar’s new curriculum.
“It’s like we’re trying to mirror the best of what we do here, over there,” Mr. Griffiths says.
He is also Masdar’s chief ambassador at MIT, identifying and approaching faculty members who he thinks would benefit the Masdar Institute.
A joint executive committee of MIT and Masdar faculty members meets via videoconference every three weeks or so to make decisions about the day-to-day development of the new institute.
Early on, that executive committee asked several faculty members at MIT to build Masdar’s curriculum, by both borrowing from MIT’s catalog and creating new courses.
Initially, Masdar will offer master’s degrees in five areas: mechanical engineering, materials science and engineering, engineering systems, water and environment, and information technology.
When a course was selected, the MIT faculty member who teaches it was asked to provide his or her lecture notes, assignments, and reading material to Masdar and to allow the new Masdar faculty member to sit in on lectures.
The incentives for an MIT faculty member to participate are minimal — usually a month’s salary and the resources to support a graduate student for four and a half months. But Mr. Griffiths says most MIT faculty members are sold on the program itself.
MIT professors also collaborate with Masdar faculty members on one of 21 research projects jointly conducted in Abu Dhabi and in Cambridge. Financing for the projects — about $250,000 to $300,000 each — is drawn from the $40-million provided to MIT by the government of Abu Dhabi.
Mr. Sgouridis and one of his former MIT advisers, R. John Hansman, work on the system-dynamics models he developed as an MIT graduate student and apply them to the Middle East’s growing aviation industry.
“Dr. Hansman and I sort of work as one unit,” he says.
Although MIT will eventually scale down its involvement in Masdar, the research links are expected to continue for years to come.
“The goal is to get our faculty involved with MIT professors as a counterpart,” Mr. Khraisheh says. “Not as a student. Not as a postdoc, a trainee, or a visitor, but as a counterpart.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 55, Issue 29, Page A26
