Latitudes

Texas A&M announces sweeping changes to its Qatar campus

Texas A&M University will move ahead with controversial changes to its branch campus in Qatar, including shifting arts-and-sciences faculty to instruction-only positions with no research role.

The plan, announced in a memo to faculty and staff members by Texas A&M’s president M. Katherine Banks, largely echoes a reorganization proposal put forward last year by the dean of the Qatar campus, César Malavé. The restructuring effort was criticized by faculty members in both Qatar and College Station, and a review committee appointed by the provost recommended against the changes.

Banks said the new plan reflects the mission of the Persian Gulf campus, which was established nearly 20 years ago to offer engineering degrees. “The goal is to center our academic structure around our degree-granting programs,” Banks wrote in the memo, adding that the current system “does not prioritize the unique role of the degree-granting units and therefore does not allow for efficient use of resources.”

Faculty members have argued that their research deepens their teaching, and that the campus’s liberal-arts foundation adds value to the engineering degrees it awards.

The plan also removes oversight and review of faculty members in Qatar from their corresponding departments on the main campus. Instead, the Qatar campus dean will be responsible for decisions on hiring, retention, promotion, and annual reviews, although he may choose to consult other deans, the memo said.

In addition, the restructuring ends rolling contracts for professors. Faculty members in engineering will receive fixed-term contracts of up to five years, while those for instructional faculty members will be renewed on an annual basis. Rolling contracts had acted somewhat like tenure for professors in Qatar, giving them longer-term job security and preventing them from being fired without cause.

Going forward, no new rolling contracts will be issued, the memo said, and existing ones will end as of September 2026. The other changes will begin on September 1.

A committee of professors and administrators appointed earlier this year to assess the proposed revisions had recommended that faculty members remain in research positions and that evaluations and promotion decisions continue to be made jointly by program leaders in Qatar and on the main campus. The Texas A&M Faculty Senate passed a resolution urging Banks to support the committee’s recommendations.

Dale Rice, an instructional associate professor of journalism and speaker of the Faculty Senate, said he was disappointed in Banks’s decision, which comes on the heels of a home-campus reorganization that created a single arts-and-sciences college. “This is one more piece of a growing body of evidence that shared governance is not a priority at Texas A&M,” he said.

A university spokeswoman noted that Banks has the authority to make such changes under college administrative procedures.

Still, overseas branch campuses established in conjunction with a foreign partner complicate such governance debates. The Qatar Foundation, which underwrites the cost of the Qatar campus, included a number of key performance indicators related to engineering research and local economic impact in a recent contract renewal with Texas A&M.

The president of the foundation’s higher-education arm previously told The Chronicle that the organization had not asked for the reorganization. In her memo, however, Banks cited the importance of meeting performance indicators set by the Qataris.

Balancing the goals of American campuses and their overseas partners can be challenging. Last year, the National University of Singapore announced it was ending its collaboration with Yale University to start Yale-NUS College, a liberal-arts institution. In defending Yale-NUS’s closure, Singapore’s education minister noted that such partnerships “evolve and mature” and some come to a “natural end.”

Joseph Daniel Ura, a Texas A&M political science professor on temporary assignment to Qatar, said the announced changes will weaken the ties between the Qatar campus and the main campus. Research and hiring and promotion will now be handled very differently in Qatar, and Ura, who has tenure, said he worries about protections for academic freedom. The Middle East campus “is no longer a branch campus in a meaningful way anymore. It’s not a meaningful extension of what goes on in Texas,” he said. “It’s more like a co-branded institution.”

Meanwhile, faculty members in Qatar are asking what comes next. One professor, who asked not to be identified because of the uncertainty, said she was dismayed by the abrupt shift of arts-and-sciences faculty members to instructor roles. Although Banks had been expected to make a decision, the announcement comes just a couple of weeks before the start of the new semester.

Her colleagues’ positions will change before they even have a chance to go on the academic job market, the faculty member said, predicting that most professors would soon be looking for a job or considering an early retirement. “This is an absolute betrayal of TAMUQ’s faculty,” she said.

Research looks at efforts to guard against ‘threats’ from a Western education

China and Saudi Arabia send more students abroad than almost any other country. Yet both nations have authoritarian governments that are wary of foreign education’s impact on their societies, fearful that students will learn Western values alongside their degree programs, which may threaten national security and stability.

China and Saudi Arabia rank first and fourth in the size of their college populations overseas. Each has seen foreign study as a vehicle for knowledge transfer and a catalyst for modernization. A paper by researchers in Hong Kong examines these tensions and looks at how the two governments, one a religious monarchy and the other secular and autocratic, have responded.

The paper — by Yan Xiaojun, an associate professor of politics and public administration at the University of Hong Kong, and Mohammed Alsudairi, a postdoctoral fellow at HKU who also teaches at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh — details how both countries have sought to exercise greater control over their higher-education systems in the past decade. China has barred the discussion of controversial topics — including press freedom, judicial independence, and the historic mistakes of the Communist Party — from its college classrooms. Saudi Arabia has established “thought-security units” in its universities to combat influences such as secularism and liberalism.

When it comes to students overseas, the two countries have taken separate approaches, in large measure because of the difference in those who go abroad: Most Chinese students are self-funded and international study is an individual choice, while nearly all Saudi students travel abroad on a government-financed scholarship program. As a result, the Saudi government is able to exercise more supervision and control of its students while they are overseas, such as emailing students to warn them that they could lose their scholarships if they engage in political activism.

Although there has been concern about ties between Chinese student groups and local embassies, the Chinese government has largely followed a more targeted, post-study strategy to counter ideas students may have been exposed to in foreign universities, the researchers note. For example, it has required returning graduates who want to work in academe or government to complete “political thought” sessions in order to be hired or promoted.

While it’s difficult to measure the effectiveness of such policies in heading off perceived threats to political and ideological security, the researchers conclude that China’s narrower one may block the advancement of officials and academics from “problematic educational backgrounds.” The strategy, they write, may be “the most consequential approach in proofing the political system from the imagined dangers of overseas study.”

The pandemic and educational exports

$6.1 billion.

That’s the value of American education-related services exported to international students studying outside the United States. Such economic activity grew markedly during the Covid-19 pandemic, from $2.2 billion in 2019 to nearly $6.1 billion in 2021, as American colleges offered remote learning to students stuck in their home countries.

But that growth in no way offset the economic hit caused by the sharp decline of international students coming to the United States during the pandemic. My colleague Dan Bauman breaks down the latest data on educational exports from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Around the globe

A new U.S. Department of State program for teaching East Asian languages at rural and underserved institutions was included in a defense bill passed by the U.S. House. It must now win Senate approval.

Efforts to make it easier for international graduates in science and technology to get green cards may have suffered another setback. Bloomberg reports that language exempting STEM grads from green-card caps has been dropped from a stripped-down bill to help American research compete with China.

The German Academic Exchange Service faces unexpected budget reductions, which could affect funding for international-exchange programs and global research centers.

China has made scientific gains, but top-down government control and other structural issues prevent it from becoming an innovation superpower, this analysis argues.

A survey of Chinese parents by Amherst College’s international-admissions office found little understanding of how financial aid at American colleges works, with some saying they thought their children’s chances of being accepted could be reduced if they applied for support.

The Taliban is forbidding women from traveling outside the country without a male chaperone, which is preventing female students from studying abroad.

Several Hong Kong universities have started generous scholarship programs in a bid to retain students.

Researchers surveyed senior international-education administrators about their goals and criteria for developing overseas partnerships.

And finally …

For the language nerds among you, may I recommend this Q&A with the subtitle writers from Stranger Things? I love people who clearly love language, but it was also really fascinating to read about how they translate emotion and tone for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.

Thanks for reading. I always welcome your feedback and ideas for future reporting, so drop me a line, at karin.fischer@chronicle.com. You can also connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you like this newsletter, please share it with colleagues and friends. They can sign up here.