So imagine you’re the head of a small, oil-rich desert emirate. Having overthrown your father in a bloodless coup, you rule over a sparse, acquiescent population and control access to seemingly bottomless reserves of oil and natural gas.
Life is good, but still, you’d like to raise your country’s international profile a bit, invest in your people’s human potential, and diversify the economy. What do you do?
Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, emir of Qatar, who faced that scenario 10 years ago, started by inviting a handful of American universities to establish branch campuses on a tract of desert near the capital here. He called the project Education City.
Its goal is simple yet unusual: to build a world-class institution comprising parts that are themselves highly regarded universities. So far, four American institutions have accepted the invitation of Qatar (pronounced KAH-ter) to set up campuses. Virginia Commonwealth University opened its arts-and-design program in 1997; Weill Cornell Medical College began offering premed courses in 2002; Texas A&M University started operating an engineering program in 2003; and Carnegie Mellon University began offering undergraduate courses in business and computer science in 2004. Within the next several years, Qatari officials hope, those components will be joined by colleges of diplomacy, journalism, and music, among others.
Only about 350 students, some of them from nearby countries, are enrolled in Education City’s colleges, but officials expect that figure to grow to 8,000 in the next 10 years.
The effort, which involves many billions of dollars -- the planners do not release precise figures -- is overseen by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, the nonprofit organization that Sheikh Hamad established in 1995. It is led by Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, one of his three wives, whom he has chosen as his official consort. (The other wives hold no public positions and are never seen in public.) Education City’s president is Charles E. Young, a former chancellor of the University of California at Los Angeles and a former president of the University of Florida.
The project’s planners had always aimed to bring American-style higher education to Qatar and adapt it to Qatari culture, says Geoff Kelly, a foundation spokesman. But they decided early on that it would be faster and more convenient to bring American universities to the Persian Gulf rather than build a brand-new institution along the lines of the American University in Beirut or the American University in Kuwait, which opened last year.
“The emir’s idea is that the world moves very fast, that your only real resource is your people, and that your people need to be equipped to adapt to a changing world,” Mr. Kelly says. “The feeling was, Why start from scratch when the resources are there to bring great universities here? Why not bring in the best of the best and put them together in Qatar?”
Money Talks
In Qatar, money is no object. The sheer wealth of this oil-and-natural-gas provider -- a sandy, sun-drenched country smaller than Connecticut that sticks out like a thumb into the Persian Gulf -- can be disconcerting to the first-time visitor. Qatar Airlines jetliners are met at the Doha airport by fleets of white Mercedes that ferry first-class and business-class passengers directly to their destinations. Local highways are lined with opulent gated communities that wouldn’t look out of place in the wealthiest reaches of Marin County. Household servants are commonplace even for middle-class families. The entire capital city exudes newness, as if it had been built last week.
Qatar is a monarchy, and the emir is its undisputed ruler. The country is expected to hold its first parliamentary elections next year, but in the past, at least, political demonstrations have been banned and all private organizations had to be registered with the government.
Nevertheless, the emir is considered progressive by regional standards. He was behind the founding, in 1996, of Al Jazeera, the scrappy satellite-television channel that has sparked a revolution in the moribund Arab news media, although the channel rarely criticizes the ruling family in Qatar.
The emir welcomed U.S. armed forces to Qatar ahead of the Iraq invasion, when other U.S. allies in the region were refusing to allow American military bases on their territory.
Although about 850,000 people live in Qatar, fewer than 200,000 of them are believed to be citizens. The rest are temporary foreign workers -- mainly Asians who hold lower-paying service jobs, but also Westerners who work in the oil and natural-gas industries. English is the lingua franca.
The Education City campus is an architect’s dream, each design more visually wondrous than the next, from the starkly modern Weill Cornell Medical College, with its lecture halls that look like giant eggs, to Virginia Commonwealth’s arts-and-design school, which looks far more traditionally Qatari, with soft arabesque designs on its white-concrete exterior.
It is the nation’s vast underground riches of natural gas that has enabled it to import branch campuses of American universities to Qatar with what everyone involved with the project agrees is breathtaking speed.
Jim Holste, associate dean for academic affairs at Texas A&M University in Qatar, says his institution was first approached by the Qatar Foundation in December 2001 and was holding classes in Doha by September 2003. “On an academic scale, this is the fastest I’ve ever seen things done,” he says.
At first, he says, Texas A&M officials were taken aback when, a scant three months after September 11, 2001, they were approached about creating an overseas campus in a conservative Arab nation. Most Qataris consider themselves followers of Wahhabi Islam, a revival movement that seeks to maintain strict social controls on Islamic societies. But Qatar’s version of Wahhabi Islam is generally considered milder than Saudi Arabia’s.
“We were very slow to make the first visit,” Mr. Holste says. When Texas A&M did finally send a delegation to Qatar, the visitors were impressed by the calm and security of life in Doha, by the welcome they received from the local “Aggie” alumni club (made up mostly of Americans working here), and by the scope of the Qatar Foundation’s ambition. They were, Mr. Holste says, struck by the sense of opportunity to be part of a dialogue with the Arab-Muslim world. “As a land-grant institution, part of our thought pattern is, What we can also do for the community?” he says. “We saw it as a chance to show people in this part of the world how to do things in a progressive way.”
Though higher education has been present in Qatar since 1973, when the University of Qatar’s College of Education was founded, for decades Qatar’s wealthier and more able male students have gone overseas -- particularly to the United States -- for postsecondary education. Many have returned to Qatar inspired and broadened by their experiences abroad. Others have returned early, lonely and disillusioned. And a handful have never returned, apparently having decided that the West suited them better socially and professionally.
Opportunities for Women
By establishing American universities in the Persian Gulf, Education City’s planners hope that the region’s brightest students will study here and take jobs here afterward.
Although the project’s universities are privately run and highly competitive, tuition for all Qatari students -- which is equivalent to the institutions’ rates in the United States -- is paid by the government. Qatar, it is hoped, will become less dependent on foreign professionals, and Education City will become an engine of growth and change for the nation.
Already, fewer young Qataris say they will go overseas to study after finishing high school. Ironically, not all of them see that as a wholly positive trend, says Mohammed Mohammed, 20, a second-year engineering student at Texas A&M here. Like many of his male friends, he says, he was at first disappointed when his family began insisting that he attend one of the American universities that were being founded in Qatar.
“I really wanted to study overseas,” Mr. Mohammed says, fidgeting with the folds of his white head scarf as he speaks in clipped, fluent English. “But my family said, ‘This university is here now, and it’s good for you to stay here.’ For most of the guys, this was the case. We were looking forward to being outside Qatar.”
Even so, he does see advantages to staying close to home. “Going outside Qatar, you need to depend on yourself a lot more, whereas here it’s more convenient, and your family takes care of everything for you,” he says. “And for the girls, this system is much better because they can’t go to universities outside.”
In the view of Education City’s administrators, that last point is the most crucial. Qatari women drive and hold professional positions, and theoretically have the right to dress as they please -- although most female students tend to wear the long black garments known as abayas and to cover their hair for social and religious reasons. But Qatari law allows husbands and fathers to prevent the women in their family from traveling, and it is rare for an unmarried woman to be allowed to travel abroad by herself. In the past, while young Qatari men have headed to the United States or Europe to study, many young Qatari women have seen their educational opportunities drastically diminish after high school.
Education City is changing that. From the start, expanding higher-education opportunities for Arab women was one of Sheikha Mozah’s main goals for the Qatar Foundation. Virginia Commonwealth, the first American institution to join Education City, began offering its arts-and-design classes to an all-female enrollment in 1997.
Esra Al Ibrahim, 19, a student at Virginia Commonwealth here, finds her courses challenging and her American professors inspirational. “They think much more openly about things,” she says. “And in American universities, the students have much more choice” in the variety of courses they can take before settling on a major.
The decision to start admitting men within a few years is now the source of much controversy among the arts-and-design students, who say they feel “freer” in an all-female environment. Some speak mournfully of the perceived need to become more ladylike and quiet once men are admitted.
Divide Between the Sexes
But providing equal opportunities to male and female students, professors say, is not always as straightforward as it would appear. In the classroom of Jacobo Carrasquel, a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon here, men and women participate in roughly equal numbers -- joking, asking questions, and brandishing Starbucks mugs despite the prominent “No Eating or Drinking” signs on the classroom walls. But young men in their white dishdashas sit on one side of the center aisle, while young women cloaked in elaborately embroidered black abayas sit on the other.
Male and female students are uncomfortable working together on class assignments even when they are actively encouraged to do so, American professors say. And according to Dennis Busch, director of student affairs at Texas A&M here, the divide between the sexes becomes even more marked outside the classroom. The universities say that they try to keep extracurricular activities open to both genders, but that women will just not participate most of the time.
“I was not prepared for the extreme gender segregation on a social level,” Mr. Busch says. “When you’re planning social activities and clubs, for many of them the genders just won’t mix. The way it plays out is that the girls just won’t show up.”
According to Mr. Holste, the associate dean, the gender issue becomes especially fraught in terms of planning educational exchanges with home campuses in the United States, which all of the project’s universities want to do.
“We would like to see all of our students take classes in Texas,” Mr. Holste says. “We think it would work best if they all went for a semester. But the idea of sending single Qatari girls to America is a big issue here.”
Professors and administrators here say they are working hard to learn about Qatari culture and to understand their Qatari students’ conservative Muslim values. Some American faculty members are studying Arabic. And while Education City’s aim in establishing American universities in Qatar was to fuel economic growth and social change, the American institutions are clearly adapting to Qatari culture as well.
Professors are learning to negotiate uniquely Qatari issues, such as whether maids should be permitted to wait outside classrooms to carry students’ bookbags home. (The maids were banned.) Female dormitories are carefully guarded, and curfews set by parents are strictly enforced by guards.
Separate male and female prayer rooms are an architectural focal point in some of the building designs, and class schedules are arranged around prayer times. American professors take care to introduce new plans in ways that are sensitive to Islamic values -- for example, adjusting the academic calendar to take Islamic holidays into account.
This process of mutual adaptation is not without conflicts. Homosexuality, for example, is a criminal offense in Qatar, while the American universities’ nondiscrimination policies include sexual orientation. That issue has not yet arisen here, but it may leave the universities vulnerable to political trouble at home. Faculty members at some of the American institutions have already questioned how hospitable Qatar would be to Jewish professors, although Qatari officials have said they will not discriminate (The Chronicle, September 6, 2002).
The universities’ freedom from government interference -- in all matters pertaining to hiring, tenure, curriculum, and admissions -- is guaranteed in the contracts they signed with the Qatar Foundation. The Education City universities operate like branch campuses in the United States, their American officials say. Because the curricula of the branch campuses focus so far on noncontroversial subjects like medicine and engineering, classroom discussions do not seem to have ruffled any local feathers.
Plenty of Perks
In fact, many American professors here say they have been pleasantly surprised by their experiences in Qatar. Suresh Tate, a professor of biochemistry at Weill Cornell Medical College here, says many newly arrived professors are finding their students brighter and harder-working than they had expected.
“There was a lot of skepticism about the quality of the students we’d get here, but the quality is just unbelievable,” Dr. Tate says. “More and more of our faculty in New York are asking to come out here.”
To American academics accustomed to budget cuts, the freewheeling Qatari approach to spending, evidenced by Education City’s enormous resources, might help account for such enthusiasm. University officials and professors work with architects to design their buildings in the way most ideally suited to their needs -- only to be asked later if their plans aren’t just a bit too modest.
“When we were talking about designing the new engineering building, we went to the Qatar Foundation with the plan,” says Mr. Holste. “They said, ‘Where’s your expansion space? You need to add an extra 25 percent in shell space to let yourselves grow.’ We’ve had to work to break out of the mold of rejecting certain plans because we can’t afford them. It’s actually a bit of a challenge to uncouple yourself from rejecting things that would be too expensive, and to think about how things really should be done.”
Although Education City’s universities will not disclose details of faculty salaries, professors here clearly are rewarded at a level well beyond that of their colleagues in the United States, and the average contract that they sign seems to be for two or three years. One American professor said a typical package includes not only a salary that is 25 percent higher than stateside, but also monthly car and housing allowances, free private-school tuition for children, and business-class tickets home once a year.
Arguably, such benefits are necessary to attract American academics to the Persian Gulf. Although professors and administrators become somewhat defensive when the topic of money arises, several Education City employees acknowledge that Qatar’s deep pockets are part of the attraction. Marion Oliver, a mathematics professor at Carnegie Mellon here, calls the feeling of teaching in state-of-the-art facilities “indescribable.”
“Of course, when you’re telling the folks at Qatar Foundation what you want in your classroom, you’re not going to be frivolous,” he says. “But I don’t believe that if the funds weren’t there this would be happening. You’re not going to get people coming to this part of the world, leaving their research, their homes, if the funding wasn’t there.”
In the coming years, the Qatar Foundation hopes to build Education City into a world-class research center as well. Its planned teaching hospital will have an $8-billion endowment, they say. A new science-and-technology park is under way. A branch of the RAND Corporation, known as the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute, opened in 2003. One of its first projects is a plan to overhaul Qatar’s public-education system, from the University of Qatar down to the elementary schools, developing a curriculum that de-emphasizes rote learning in favor of more creative and collaborative methods.
Chuck Thorpe, dean of Carnegie Mellon’s Qatar campus, puts the feeling simply: “We’re seeing a new Arab renaissance.”
QATAR’S EDUCATION CITY
Education City, which is made up of four branch campuses of American universities, is located near Qatar’s capital city of Doha.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 51, Issue 33, Page A42