[list_indonesia] [ppiindia] Qatar opens up by importing universities
- From: "Ambon" <sea@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <"Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@freelists.org>
- Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 03:09:50 +0100
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Getting a foreign education New Feature
By Otto Pohl International Herald Tribune
Friday, March 25, 2005
Qatar opens up by importing universities
DOHA, Qatar Qatar may seem an odd country to be leading education reform in the
Gulf region. The country's ruler, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, tolerates
no political dissent, and many areas of public life remain off-limits to
debate.
.
Yet Doha has become home to one of the boldest experiments in higher education
in the world, and certainly the boldest in the Middle East. Four U.S.
universities - Cornell Medical, Virginia Commonwealth, Carnegie Mellon and
Texas A&M - have opened branch campuses in this tiny Gulf country over the past
two years, and a fifth is expected soon.
.
With post-Sept. 11 visa restrictions curbing access to top universities abroad,
Qatari officials have decided that the best way to fill the growing demand for
world-class education in the Middle East is to import it.
.
Sheik Hamad, while keeping a lid on dissent, has encouraged economic and social
change; education reform is intended to further help his subjects help
themselves. This is democracy, one degree at a time.
.
The foreign universities are located in a development called Education City
overseen by one of Sheik Hamad's three wives, Sheika Mozah. She is leading the
overhaul of the country's entire school system, including Qatar University, the
largest in the country.
.
When completed, the 1,000-hectare, or 2,500-acre, site will include several
more universities, a 300-bed teaching hospital, and a science and technology
park.
.
Al Jazeera, the satellite television channel based in Qatar, plans to broadcast
a children's channel from a building in Education City beginning in May.
.
Qatar can afford to dream big. This tiny country, which occupies a small
peninsula jutting off of Saudi Arabia, pumps 900 million barrels of oil a day
and will soon be the world's largest producer of liquid natural gas.
.
The government faces few financial restraints and, with only 150,000 citizens,
limited social pressures.
.
Virginia Commonwealth University, the first school to open here, is housed in a
futuristic building designed by Ibrahim Mohammed Jaidah. Cornell is next door,
in a stark building by a Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki.
.
Much of the rest of Education City, however, is only in the planning stages.
Newly planted palm trees, leaves still wrapped, line walkways between
unconstructed buildings.
.
While universities have long organized educational exchanges and semesters
abroad, few have ever opened a fully equivalent degree-granting branch campus
overseas.
.
So far the only foreign universities in Doha are American, but the president of
Qatar Foundation, Charles Young, said that discussions are under way with
schools from other countries.
.
"What we're trying to do is build a center of excellence in a region which is
filled with mediocre practices," said Sheikha Abdullah al-Misnad, president of
Qatar University and a board member of the Supreme Education Council.
.
The Qatar experiment is on the leading edge of a larger trend to
internationalize education.
.
Singapore is establishing a large number of international graduate degree
programs with internationally recognized universities including Duke, Stanford,
MIT, Insead from France, and the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven from the
Netherlands. The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland opened a branch campus
last October in Bahrain, a small Gulf country just to the north.
.
In Qatar itself, there are currently about 350 students at the U.S. branch
campuses.
.
Officials expect up to 8,000 when development is completed, with about
two-thirds of them from Qatar. In order to help gifted students from marginal
educational backgrounds gain access to these new universities, the Qatar
Foundation runs a one-year bridge program that culminates in an international
baccalaureate degree. About 200 students are enrolled, including nine from
Iraq.
.
Many of the students were attracted by the combination of a Western education
in a Middle Eastern setting.
.
"It's a lot like Saudi Arabia," said Anaya Sarkar, a first-year pre-med student
at Cornell. "It's just a smaller version of where I lived."
.
One of her friends, who is currently studying at George Washington University
in Washington, is considering transferring here, said Sarkar: "There is too
much of a cultural gap."
.
That gap works both ways, however. At home, in Saudi Arabia, Sarkar is obliged
to shroud herself in the big billowy black cloth known as the abaya. In Qatar,
some students wear the abaya to class, but there is no dress code.
.
This is helpful, noted Sarkar: "It's kind of difficult to do lab in an abaya."
.
Tasnim Khalife, 18, a first-year student, wears a head scarf rather than the
long cloak.
.
"In Saudi Arabia, if I walked around like this I would get weird looks," she
said.
.
Many of the social and cultural aspects of university life in the United States
are absent here.
.
Male and female students live in separate dorm rooms under strict curfew. There
is no alcohol near campus. The potentially difficult issue of religious study
has been minimized by largely avoiding it.
.
Some students at Qatar's foreign universities admit they would rather have gone
to the United States. Miryam Shafaee, a first-year pre-med student at Cornell's
Qatar branch, for one, was unable to obtain an American visa.
.
Even when applying from Doha, with Cornell supporting her application to attend
summer school in New York, the visa process took so long that she missed the
classes she had hoped to attend.
.
The branch universities in Doha maintain close contact with their home
campuses.
.
Some classes, like the radiology class at the Cornell medical school, are
taught by videoconference from New York. In order to maintain academic
standards, the universities maintain complete control over staffing and
admissions.
.
Although the university experiment here is largely successful, cultural
differences surface in unexpected ways.
.
A professor at Carnegie Mellon, John Robertson, describes teaching a
Victorian-era novel in a freshman seminar. He explained to the class that, in
writing from that time, nature reflects the inner turmoil of the characters.
.
He found that the students missed the implication for the main character,
however, in one key scene where the skies darkened and rain loomed.
.
"We live in a desert," Robertson recalls one student telling him. "Why should
we think that clouds and rain are a bad thing
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