Facing a beautiful cove on the Red Sea—about an hour and a half’s drive from the town of Jeddah—King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is an anomaly many times over: a spectacular campus in the middle of nowhere; an international, co-ed institution in a gender-segregated society; and an aspiring world-class research graduate university created virtually overnight.
Kaust, as it is known, also faces a unique challenge. It must convince the world that through a combination of wealth and vision, it can flourish in one of the most restrictive countries in the world. Many here believe that the next year will be a critical one in its development.
The university opened in 2008, even while faculty and students were still camped in hotels in Jeddah and the university remained under construction. Now the 8,900-acre campus, basically a mini-city that includes residential neighborhoods, commercial areas, and social and recreational facilities, is nearly complete, and most of the labs are operational. Members of Kaust’s fledgling community—professors, administrators, and students—say they must show they can succeed by publishing original research, attracting more Saudi students, and recruiting more top-notch faculty.
King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia’s absolute ruler, donated the university’s $10-billion endowment in the hope that Kaust will make his country “a player in global science,” says Kaust’s president, Choon Fong Shih, who formerly headed the National University of Singapore.
While Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s wealthiest countries today, the kingdom is overwhelmingly dependent on oil for its revenue. But if current population growth and consumption patterns continue, by 2025 the country could be consuming 70 percent of its oil domestically. There is a growing realization that a diversified private sector, built on science and technology, is necessary to ensure a post-oil future and to create jobs for millions of young Saudis.
The university is organized around nine research centers, which focus, for example, on advanced membranes and porous materials, plant-stress genomics, and solar and photovoltaics engineering. The work of all these centers feeds into three fields key to Saudi Arabia’s future: solar energy, water desalination, and drought-resistant crops.
Mr. Shih cites the California Institute of Technology and the Rockefeller Institute as models for Kaust. The university’s selective focus is intended to “build critical mass in areas where we can achieve global excellence, get world recognition,” he says. It will be easier, Mr. Shih argues, to reach “a few peaks” than to create “a high plateau.”
And unlike many universities in the West, where there is “the unrealistic expectation that you can do more with less,” says Mr. Shih, “we have enough resources to make things happen.”
Dream Labs
Kaust has built itself quickly through academic partnerships with top universities, including Cornell, Stanford, Texas A&M, the University of Oxford, Institut Français du Petrole, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the American University in Cairo. Much of its international faculty has been drawn from these partners or their networks. Kaust currently has about 85 faculty members, coming in near-equal proportions from the West, the Middle East, and Asia; it plans to employ about 225.
Many of the academics here say they were drawn by the chance to design their own labs from scratch. “The designers told me: You will get 10,000 empty feet. Fill it up,” says Ingo Pinnau, director of the advanced-membranes and porous-materials center. “That’s a dream for a research scientist.”
The membranes Mr. Pinnau’s lab develops could help Saudi Arabia distill natural gas and desalinate water more efficiently. Mr. Pinnau is a consulting professor at Stanford University and worked for 20 years as director of materials and membrane development at Membrane Technology and Research Inc. in California.
He and other directors of the university’s research centers have been able to acquire the latest equipment, design labs specifically to their requirements, and assemble research teams of their choosing. They showed off their labs with palpable excitement.
The university’s shared core labs also contain an impressive array of equipment, from a “supercomputer” to some of the world’s most sensitive microscopes. The university has spent $1.5-billion on equipment.
Another benefit for researchers here is the relative ease with which they can get funds for their work: The university gives research grants of $3-million to $5-million over five-year periods, as well as providing other forms of support.
“In the U.S., you are under tremendous pressure to find outside funding. Here you don’t spend 30 percent of your time writing proposals,” says Gary Amy, the director of the water-desalination and -reuse center and a former professor of water-supply engineering at the Unesco-IHE Institute for Water Education and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.
There is also the chance to do first-of-its-kind work. For Christian R. Voolstra and Michael Berumen, assistant professors in the Red Sea research center, coming to Kaust meant being among the first to work on a body of water that remains virtually untouched and uncharted.
The southern Red Sea “offers a look into the future [of the world’s oceans] because it’s so saline and so warm,” says Mr. Berumen. Yet it’s “immensely understudied. Everything we do is new.”
“Which means we can publish it,” notes Mr. Voolstra.
This past spring the two researchers were busy tagging a newly discovered community of whale sharks and pinpointing the time of year when local chorals spawn.
The proximity of the university’s labs to the sea is also exceptional, they say.
“I can’t think of any place that has this combination of access to reefs and to world-class facilities,” says Mr. Berumen. “It’s like being at a field station and having your lab on the beach.”
An Unusual Proposition
When recruiting, Kaust pitches itself as an adventure. And, indeed, faculty frequently speak in those terms, describing their experience at the new university as “an opportunity,” “chaotic and exhilarating,” and “peculiar.”
“This is not a place for timid souls,” says Mr. Shih, the president. “We need people with big ideas and big ambitions.”
Yet while the university has been able to attract established senior academics ready for another challenge before retirement, as well as promising young faculty taking what they hope will be a career-making gamble, it remains difficult to lure tenured professors in the middle of their careers (especially since Kaust, in line with Saudi Arabia’s labor laws, can offer five-year rolling contracts but not tenure).
“You have to have something very special to offer,” says James R. Luyten, who headed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before coming to direct Kaust’s Red Sea research center “or they have to be dissatisfied.” Mr. Luyten says he isn’t sure how many more top-notch researchers “who are willing to take the risk to start from scratch” are left in his field.
The university, unsurprisingly, offers attractive financial packages. James A. Calvin, interim associate provost for academic affairs, declined to give figures, but he said salaries are in line with those at top international universities. The university also offers overseas incentives, which in the first rounds of hiring have included a 50-percent raise above basic salary and a start-up allowance of 25 percent.
The university’s commitment to its faculty is “implicitly ... quite like tenure,” adds Mr. Calvin. In any case, argues Mr. Pinnau, “When you’re good you don’t worry about tenure.”
“More than 50 percent of candidates, when they come to visit, commit. The big step is to get a candidate to visit,” says Mr. Shih.
The campus, built by the international architecture and design firm HOK, is stunning. Faculty enjoy spacious offices with views of the sea and live in condos or beachfront villas. There are state-of-the art recreational facilities and international elementary and secondary schools.
Yet for all the beachside charm of the campus, there are significant lifestyle adjustments. The university, like the rest of the country, is alcohol-free. The campus is a larger version of the diplomatic or company compounds that house Westerners across Saudi Arabia, with all living quarters and services within a secure zone that has guarded checkpoints. Opportunities for spouses to find employment are scarce. When faculty venture off campus, they have to respect the country’s religious conservatism and its authoritarian rules.
But Kaust’s administrators argue that international, long-distance scientific collaborations are increasingly common, and, thanks to new communications technology, the university is part of a global network.
“Yes, we live in a gated community,” says Mr. Shih, “but we aren’t isolated. Geography is less of a factor today.”
For some, Kaust’s calm, compact, and secluded campus is a bonus. “I can come back to my lab after the kids go to bed,” says Jasmeen Merzaban, a mother of two and an assistant professor of biochemistry who took a position at the university alongside her husband.
For others, it doesn’t make that big of a difference. As a scientist anywhere, “you see the people in your lab,” says Mr. Voolstra. “You see the same number of people you would see in another place.”
It’s just that if you want to extend your social circle, he adds, “you have to take an airplane.”
High Expectations
Exciting as it is to set up one’s own lab, it’s also extremely time consuming. Being the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia means that Kaust has had to figure out everything—procurement processes, links with industry, administrative procedures—as it goes along.
The university is still ironing out some kinks. The Red Sea research center’s building will take another year to complete because the life-support system for its aquariums wasn’t built correctly. Obtaining permits from Saudi authorities for boat trips and to station underwater equipment has also been challenging.
While procurement processes have improved dramatically, “compounds you’d expect overnight can take two weeks or a month,” says Chris Gehring, a professor of plant science who was previously a senior professor of plant biotechnology at the University of the Western Cape in the northern suburbs of greater Cape Town, South Africa. “You pay considerably more—by a factor of five or ten—for goods and services.”
After organic samples he needed deteriorated while sitting in Saudi customs, Mr. Gehring now has samples sent by courier in cryoshippers, special plastic containers lined with nitrogen.
Meanwhile, younger faculty members, who have spent the last two years helping to get the university up and running—dealing with significant teaching loads in addition to devising curricula and setting up labs—are eager to focus on their research and to start publishing.
“I can’t put on my CV that I spent a year setting up a program,” says Mr. Voolstra of the Red Sea research center. “Publications are all that matter.”
The university has also made every effort to attract a bright cohort of international students. Admission comes with free housing, insurance and a yearly round-trip ticket home; students receive $20,000 to $30,000 stipends.
Ali Moussawi, a mechanical-engineering student, was encouraged to come to Kaust by a former Cooper Union classmate who had enrolled there. “I wasn’t sure it would be a good idea,” he says, “but I decided to give it a shot.” He discovered, he says, that Kaust “is academically high quality. We are a tight-knit community, and I think we get a greater amount of personal attention from our professors.”
Students’ levels and backgrounds are quite mixed, and it is sometimes a challenge to “pitch” lectures correctly, say professors at the university. The institution is particularly concerned with attracting Saudi students since one of its main goals is to create a new scientific elite for the country. Saudi students make up between 15 and 20 percent of about 300 students now at Kaust. The university plans to eventually enroll 2,000 graduate and 1,000 postdoctoral students.
The number of Saudi students with the required English and science skills is limited, and Kaust must compete for them with international universities. And it must teach some of those skills itself.
Many Saudi students are used to a theoretical, text-driven approach to science, says Ms. Merzaban. “Research culture and scientific method is what they’re lacking—and what we’re trying to instill.”
“I actually had students complain that we weren’t using a textbook,” says Mr. Gehring. “But there is no textbook for this field.”
Afnan Mashat, one of a few dozen young Saudi women attending the university, studied English in Britain for a year to prepare for Kaust, where she is working on creating new nanomaterials. Her parents are happy she is getting a strong education without having to leave the country, as her two sisters have done. Other young Saudi women regularly ask whether they should apply, worried that the programs might be too difficult. She admits she’s found her studies challenging but tells them: “It’s my second year and I’m still alive.”
A King’s Vision, and Protection
Kaust is more than a research university, however. It is also a key component of the king’s plan to reform higher education broadly.
Unlike other Saudi universities, Kaust doesn’t answer to the Ministry of Higher Education, and it is steered by an international board of directors composed of academic, corporate, and philanthropic leaders.
Kaust needs to be autonomous so it can “raise the bar,” says Mr. Shih. “But we also need to be relevant to the kingdom’s aspirations. It’s a balancing act.”
After studying Kaust’s strategy, other Saudi universities have begun creating international advisory boards and forming search committees for faculty. Some have also started pressing the Ministry of Higher Education to be allowed to operate as independently as Kaust does.
As the country’s only co-ed institution of learning, home to such anomalies as a movie theater and a co-ed beach, the university is also a liberal enclave within the extremely conservative kingdom.
Fawziya Al-Bakr, a professor at King Saud University, says she and her colleagues were stunned when they realized upon visiting that they would all be entering the campus through one gate, instead of by the usual gender-segregated entrances. “For us this is unheard of,” says Ms. Al-Bakr, who has never met the head of her own department, a man, despite having worked with him for 15 years.
To be sure, conservatives have lashed out at the university. Security there is high, and Kaust keeps a very low media profile.
And while the king’s determination and largess is what enabled such an ambitious institution to be created in so short a span of time, royal patronage has its risks.
Several Saudi observers expressed doubts about the university’s future, saying there is no guarantee that whoever succeeds the 87-year-old King Abdullah will share his vision for it.
President Shih dismisses such concerns. “We are contributing to the development of the kingdom, and we are a source of pride,” he says. “I think we will have more and more support, I think they [Saudis] will see Kaust is the right thing for the kingdom, and it will gain acceptance and recognition.”
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