Sixty years ago, Doha was little more than a trading post along a barren coast. Today the capital of Qatar is a giant construction site, its building frenzy a testament to the tiny Persian Gulf emirate’s outsized ambitions and resources.
Under the emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani—and now his son Tamim, who took over in June—Qatar has become a regional power broker and a deep-pocketed patron of culture, science, and education. Doha’s curving seaside promenade boasts an Islamic-art museum designed by I.M. Pei. The city is building a new airport, an elevated train line, and air-conditioned stadiums to play host to the 2022 World Cup in the simmering summer heat.
As another part of its bid to make Qatar a global player, the al-Thani family has recruited an important ally: American higher education.
On 2,500 acres on the edge of the desert here, the ruling family has built Education City, a collection of modern buildings, each home to a branch of a well-known university, including Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern. Those institutions are crucial to the emirate’s goal of becoming “a modern society with a world-class education system at its heart,” writes Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali al-Thani, who directs several of the higher-education ventures, in an email.
Yet some observers wonder if Education City, like many other attention-grabbing ventures here, is intended to do little more than bolster Qatar’s international “brand.” While professors say they are free to discuss sensitive topics in the classroom, outside the luxurious walls of the campus, speech is censored and political activities largely banned. Sometimes overzealous customs agents hold up shipments of books to the campus. Security authorities have even detained a foreign researcher who asked discomfiting questions.
Allen Fromherz, a historian who taught at Qatar University, which is not part of Education City, believes that the emirate’s welcoming of foreign universities is intended to introduce only limited change. In his book Qatar: A Modern History, he says the emirate cultivates an image of modernity and openness but that Qatari society is still largely tribal, with power concentrated in the hands of a very few.
“How do you transform into a nation without also transforming the traditional, monarchical, patriarchal system?” he asks.
As the small but natural-gas-rich country emerges onto the world’s stage, this and other questions are unavoidable: Are the American universities actors in the country’s future or merely props? Can they teach students to think critically about the contradictions and changes in Qatar while under the patronage of its ruling family?
During the past 15 years, Qatar has attracted eight universities from the United States and Europe to establish programs on the Education City campus. They are selected for their expertise in fields—the oil-and-gas industry, health services, diplomacy, the news media—that are connected to Qatar’s national agenda.
“We are one useful ingredient in a much bigger societal development,” says Gerd Nonneman, dean of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
The school, which has more than 200 students, is housed in a spacious building with an angular sandstone facade, a state-of-the-art library, and offices with views of inner courtyards and reflecting pools. The student body is roughly one-third Qatari, one-third foreign residents of Qatar, and one-third international.
It was paid for by the Qatar Foundation, a powerful government organization headed by the new emir’s mother, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser.
The cost of building Education City will amount to at least $33-billion, according to documents posted online by one of the designers; one administrator at Education City estimates that the annual operating costs for the campus amount to about $500-million.
The foundation declines to answer questions about its funding of foreign branch campuses or the length of their contracts. But according to financial statements from Georgetown, the university signed a 10-year contract in 2005. The foundation owns and operates the facilities, reimbursing Georgetown for all “allowable costs and expenses incurred on behalf of the foundation,” say the statements. In the 2012 fiscal year, the latest for which a dollar amount is available, the university was reimbursed almost $45.3-million.
For foreign institutions, the opportunities aren’t just material. Georgetown’s presence in Qatar offers the university a chance to study an emerging regional player in international affairs and to help train a diplomatic corps in need of expansion. The branch in Qatar fits with the home campus’ strong international-relations program and its Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.
For Northwestern University, which offers undergraduate degrees in journalism and communications, coming to Qatar has led to collaborations, including with the Al Jazeera television network, which is based here in Doha. Some of its faculty sat in on meetings to coordinate the broadcaster’s recent expansion into North America.
“It was the chance to be present at the creation of a new network,” says Everette E. Dennis, dean of Northwestern’s campus in Qatar. “What a great opportunity to get access to proprietary research data, to get behind-the-scenes in terms of decision making.”
On the manicured lawns among the large and stylish American university buildings in Doha, bright-yellow word sculptures exhort: “Imagine.” “Achieve.” “Create.”
This year, 437 students graduated from the institutions there. About a third were Qataris.
For Qatar, having poured billions of dollars into the branch campuses, what, besides putting the emirate on the map, is the goal?
One is to mold students like Jassim Kunji. A graduate of Northwestern’s journalism program here, he will begin working this month as an assistant producer at Al Jazeera English. A confident and articulate 20-year-old, raised in the United States, Mr. Kunji moved to Doha to have a shot at joining its national soccer team, to get back in touch with his roots and family, and to play a role in Qatar’s future.
“I never know in Qatar if there’s a highly calibrated plan or whether it’s being made up as we go. ... It might not make a lot of difference.”
“You want people from the country to run projects in the country,” he says.
But today Qatari nationals make up little more than 10 percent of the population; their economy depends overwhelmingly on expatriate workers.
“All Qataris could become doctors, and we still wouldn’t have enough doctors,” says Sheikha Abdulla al-Misnad, president of Qatar University, which most young Qataris attend. “They could all become engineers, and we still wouldn’t have enough engineers.”
The challenge isn’t just demographic. “There is a motivation issue. This is a comfortable society; you have your needs provided for,” she says. (The country has the highest GDP per capita in the world, estimated at more than $100,000 in 2012.)
Another goal of Education City is to attract foreign students who may stay and help shape the country’s future.
Dana Atrach, a classmate of Mr. Kunji’s, is one of those foreigners, a Palestinian-American. She was president and valedictorian of the Class of 2013. At a coffee shop in the gleaming student-activity center, Ms. Atrach, a communications major, talks about a screenplay she has written. Featuring a young woman who runs away from home and passes for a man, her film “is unlikely to be produced in Qatar,” Ms. Atrach notes matter-of-factly.
But she plans to stay in the country, where, she says, she is “making history” as part of the “first generation that knows how to make films and talk about things going on in Qatar.” For now, as she works on her film projects, she is working at Teach for Qatar, a project similar to Teach for America.
That sense of being pioneers can be found as well among the faculty and administrators at the foreign universities in Doha.
John Crist is director of research at Georgetown’s Qatar campus. His job is to teach students to master “rigorous tools of inquiry"—how they use those skills, he says, is up to them.
Nonetheless, he argues, in Qatar there may be “something fundamentally radical about the social-science paradigm.”
“If you’re going to make an evidence-based argument,” he says, “you have to accept there may be certain conclusions that contradict the accepted wisdom of broader society.”
As to what effect that will have, it is too soon to tell, Mr. Crist says. “The thing about education initiatives, if anyone asks you, ‘How’s it going? Are you making a change?’ Well, I’ll tell you in 30 years. You need a generation.”
Others argue that the change the foreign branch campuses are meant to introduce is limited.
“The best and most honest explanation” for the presence of Western universities in Qatar “is that it makes Qatar look good; it makes people want to come here,” says Shabina Khatri, a former adjunct professor of journalism at Northwestern’s Qatar campus who today runs a popular online site, the Doha News. The foreign branch campuses, she says, are “like PR for Qatar.”
In his book, Mr. Fromherz writes of Education City, “The aim of Qatar’s new focus on creating world-class education for Qataris at EC is not to create a larger ruling class that is a source of criticism of the ruling al-Thani family. Instead, education is viewed as a means of creating marketable, international skills; education is focused on connecting Qatar to the outside world, not on the issue of governance and society within Qatar itself.”
In other words, Qatar wants to attract international attention and respect, but not international scrutiny.
That is one of many contradictions that newcomers must negotiate here. Qataris practice a conservative strain of Islam, but the country is more liberal than neighbors like Saudi Arabia, encouraging women to hold leadership positions and tolerating Western lifestyles. Alcohol is served at hotel bars in Doha, and there is no strict dress code for women. For its gleaming infrastructure and luxurious lifestyle, the emirate depends on an underclass of migrant workers who, according to human-rights groups, face exploitation and abuse.
Qatar’s foreign policy, based on cultivating a wide web of relations, makes for odd combinations. Qatar houses the Al Udeid Air Base, which is home to the U.S. Combat Air Operations Center for the Middle East But it also has close ties to Islamist—and, some observers allege—militant groups in the region. It supported the mass pro-democracy protests in other Arab countries, yet it remains an autocracy where political parties are outlawed and freedom of speech severely limited.
Last year a Qatari poet was given a life sentence (since commuted to 15 years) for a poem about the region’s uprisings and its autocratic regimes, which included the lines: “Why, why do these regimes / import everything from the West— / everything but the rule of law, that is, / and everything but freedom?” (Northwestern University’s Faculty Senate passed a motion calling for the poet’s pardon and supporting “freedom of intellectual and academic expression for the people of Qatar.”)
In May, a teacher at an international high school was fired, detained briefly, and then expelled from the country for allegedly “insulting Islam” in an argument with 12-year-old students.
Because of such tensions, and the sensitivity about discussing them, teaching in Qatar involves walking “a very delicate tightrope,” says Mr. Fromherz, who is an associate professor of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history at Georgia State University.
“At times it feels like you’re in a traditional American setting, where everything can be debated,” he told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. “But there are certain lines that really can’t be crossed, and they are invisible to you until you cross them.” Criticizing the royal family, for example, or questioning religious orthodoxy, or “dishonoring” Qataris, says Mr. Fromherz. Even on the foreign branch campuses, he argues, “you don’t know when you’re going to have royal protection or not.”
Administrators in Education City disagree.
Georgetown’s Mr. Nonneman points to the work of a faculty member, Mehran Kamrava, as an example. In a 2009 article in The Middle East Journal, Mr. Kamrava said politics in Qatar were characterized by “centralized, often personalized decision making, the lack of accountability and transparency, and a reliance on patronage networks.” Such criticism, says the dean, is evidence of the academic freedom at Georgetown’s Qatar campus, where Mr. Kamrava teaches two classes and is director of the Center for International and Regional Studies.
“There is an appreciation at the highest level that ‘critical thinking’ is a crucially important skill for the development of the country,” says Mr. Nonneman, “and that ‘critical’ does not need to equate with ‘negative’ or ‘opposing the system.’ It means engaging with the spectrum of international evidence and informed analysis, and making sense of these in one’s own terms.”
Yet for those academics who aren’t working within the safety of higher-education enclaves, the risks of posing uncomfortable questions can be high.
In 2011, a researcher with France’s prestigious National Center for Scientific Research who had arrived in Qatar to do postdoctoral work was put in a detention center for a week after making a few inquiries about stateless residents in Qatar, a politically touchy topic in the region. The researcher (who asked to remain anonymous) wrote in an email to The Chronicle that: “The exact concerns about my research were not made clear, but the context of the Arab spring certainly is a prominent factor to be taken into consideration.” The academic was released without charges and even granted a residency visa, but chose not to stay in the country after that “traumatic experience.”
Such incidents bolster the views of skeptics like Lina Khatib, who heads the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University.
“It goes against the very principles that form the core of academic life in the U.S. to go and install a campus in countries that have spoken and unspoken red lines on what can be debated,” says Mr. Khatib. “No financial incentive is a good enough incentive to engage in this kind of risk” to the universities’ reputations.
The American Association of University Professors has raised similar concerns, though not specifically about Qatar and Education City. Four years ago, it issued a statement, “On the Conditions of Employment at Overseas Campuses,” spurred by worries about academic freedom and workers’ rights at New York University’s campus located in Qatar’s neighbor, the United Arab Emirates.
“In a host environment where free speech is constrained, if not proscribed,” the statement says, “faculty will censor themselves, and the cause of authentic liberal education, to the extent it can exist in such situations, will suffer.”
American universities say they are content with their arrangements in Qatar and are considering deeper collaborations.
A few years ago, Qatar announced plans to create Hamad Bin Khalifa University, a vaguely defined institution, named after the former emir, that would develop graduate programs in collaboration with some of the branch campuses.
While there has been some uncertainty about what that would mean for the American universities in Qatar, Mr. Nonneman says it does not threaten their independence. “HBKU doesn’t want to become an umbrella or subsume existing universities,” he says. “They want to sort of sit in between and around them.”
Hamed Bin Khalifa is recruiting deans for four graduate programs: humanities and social science; science and engineering; law, business, and public policy; and public health.
Its development, like many of Qatar’s policies, is the product of a balancing act between the country’s international profile and its domestic concerns. The process is not always transparent, even to its partners. The country’s small circle of decision makers—the emir and his allies—are fond of bold moves, but not of explaining their motives.
“I never know in Qatar if there is a highly calibrated plan or whether it’s being made up as we go long,” says Mr. Dennis, the Northwestern dean. But “it might not make a lot of difference, because the results could be similar. It’s like the difference between classical music and jazz.”
Some Qataris are not in tune with the changes enveloping them. It is common, in the local news media and on social media, to hear concerns about the pace of change, the influence of the West, the loss of traditional Qatari identity.
In March 2011, dozens of Qatari professors and intellectuals began gathering every Monday at the house of the academic and writer Ali Khalifa al-Kuwary. Their discussions—which would have been illegal in a public forum—were eventually collected in a book of essays.
In the introduction, Mr. al-Kuwary, wrote that Qataris were “unable to express themselves and forbidden from influencing current events, participating in building their own future.” Of the foreign universities’ branch campuses, he wrote: “There is no one to ensure their activities serve the public interest, or to audit the public funds that are handed to them without regulatory supervision.”
The discussion group appears to have suspended its activities. And its criticism of higher-education projects and other policies pursued by Qatar’s ruling family is unlikely to receive a wide audience in the country. Mr. al-Kuwary did not respond to requests for an interview. His book, The People Want Reform ... in Qatar, Too, is banned in Qatar.
Corrections (11/22/2013, 2:01 p.m.): This article originally misidentified the nationality of Ms. Atrach. She is Palestinian-American, not Palestinian-Canadian. The article also misstated the plot of a screenplay she wrote. It involves a young woman who runs away from home and passes for a man. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.
Corrections (11/25/2013, 4:21 p.m.): The chart originally misstated the number of students at Georgetown’s program in Qatar. It is 248, not 229. The program’s description also has been revised to better reflect its goals. Originally, it said Georgetown helps develop Qatari diplomats.
