Branches of elite US universities at Qatar's doorstep

Doha, Qatar  - Any self-respecting family in the oil-rich Arab Gulf monarchies sends its children to study in Britain or the United States and conservative ones send their sons only. Some progressive clans also give their daughters a chance - always in the hope that after four semesters in the "sinful" West, the young women will still be marriageable back home.

As most Gulf Arabs prefer to have their daughters nearby or at least in an Islamic environment, female students outnumber males in many places in the Gulf states. At state-run Qatar University, for example, there are currently about 6,000 female students as opposed to
3,000 male students.

Women are also well represented in the new and prestigious Education City, on the outskirts of Doha, capital of the emirate of Qatar. About half of them wear a headscarf and an abaya, the traditional black over garment of women on the Arabian Peninsula.

Nothing else is traditional at Education City, which includes branch campuses of six noted US universities. The buildings seem more like five-star hotels or modern museums than those usually found on university campuses. And each branch offers just one or two programmes of study, the Qataris having picked out the cherries from the mother universities - the programmes that made their reputations.

The Qatar branch of Washington, DC-based Georgetown University offers a major in international politics. At Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) in Qatar, journalism and communications are the courses of study. Business administration and computer science are taught at the Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) branch, engineering at the Texas A&M University (College Station) branch, and medicine at the Weill Cornell Medical College (New York City) branch.

Education City also has a faculty of Islamic studies. The Qataris run this themselves, unlike a number of other states that have requested assistance from Cairo's al-Azhar University.

The architecture of the buildings on campus is spectacular - an arabesque facade to the right, a space shuttle look-alike to the left, and palm trees in the middle. Seats in the small lecture halls are of the finest wood, and each has an internet connection.

The young knowledge-seekers do not have to queue up or vie for a seat as is often the case at mass universities in Europe. On a campus covering 14 million square metres, there is plenty of space for the 1,400 students. In some programmes of study, the ratio of students to professors is five to one.

Qatari graduates of this incubator for the elite are expected to join the ranks of the country's managers one day or to raise its fame abroad. One of the richest countries in the world, Qatar is known mainly for its enormous oil and natural gas deposits, and for the satellite television news channel al-Jazeera.

Education City was conceived by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, which is headed by Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser al-Missned. She is the wife of Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, the emir of Qatar.

As is customary in the emirate, the plans were realized in no time. In 2002, the campus opened its doors to the first students, whose parents must pay tuition fees which are just as high as those charged at the respective mother universities in the US. Last year saw the first graduations.

The dean of Texas A&M University at Qatar, Mark Weichold, said the "very special university experiment" in Doha benefited not only Qataris, who comprise about 50 per cent of the student body, but also the US professors, some of whom had initially asked, "Where in God's name is Qatar?"

Meanwhile, the emir's ambitious wife is not yet satisfied with the achievements of Education City and there are plans for further expansion.

"Negotiations are ongoing with universities in France and Britain," said Ahmed Hasnah, the Qatar Foundation's associate vice president for higher education.

Qatar launched a reform of its educational system three years ago to help as many Qataris as possible meet admission requirements for the Doha branches of the elite US schools. Children now receive better instruction in English.

Hasnah said Qatar also wanted its children "be raised from a young age to think critically," a cultural aptitude that up to now has not exactly been promoted in the conservative Islamic states on the Gulf. (dpa)

Regions: