Education City has attracted some of America's top universities to Qatar. Now comes the hard part.
After two years of negotiations, Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service will finally round out one of the most ambitious projects in the Middle East, Qatar's Education City, when it starts its first class in Doha this August. Last month marked the end of the first year of studies for many at Education City, founded and operated by the Qatar Foundation since 1995.
Georgetown, which will offer one four-year foreign service degree, joins Carnegie Mellon, which offers business and computer science degrees; Weill Cornell Medical College, which offers a two-year, non-degree pre-medical program and a four-year medical program leading to a Cornell University medical degree. Texas A&M offers degrees in chemical, electrical, mechanical and petroleum engineering, and Virginia Commonwealth offers degrees in graphic design, fashion design and interior design. Future plans include graduate and postgraduate degrees at most of the schools.
The experiment is part of a government effort to raise the education level of its nationals, who make up just one-fourth of the country's population of 840,000. While hailed as groundbreaking, Education City was also a desperate measure to propel Qatar's female population into the workforce. It's no coincidence the foundation is chaired by one of the country's most prominent women, Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani's second of three wives, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al-Missned, one of the most visible and outspoken women in the region.
Male Qataris typically go to universities in the US or Britain. But most female Qataris are not allowed such a privilege in this conservative country. Since these young women are unlikely to travel to the United States, the Qatar Foundation brought some of the best US schools to them. "[Qatar] runs the real risk of losing control of its destiny because they don't have enough people to cope with the expansion that's coming," says Jim Holste, associate dean of Texas A&M in Qatar. "If they give up half their potential workforce, they haven't got a prayer."
Texas A&M's engineering programs, which started in 2003, are some of the more practical in a country whose natural gas reservoir is one of the largest in the world. Qatar Petroleum expects investments in the sector of more than $15 billion over the next few years. "They have these goals of 50 percent Qatari employees; there's not enough people to do that," Holste says. "And it's even worse if the women don't get involved. [Education City] is part of a big social engineering experiment."
A social experiment indeed. Holste says some of the issues he ends up dealing with range from debates over who sits where in classrooms to the deferential treatment of certain nationalities. "The whole business of having coeducational classes has not been easy for some students," he says. "Qatari boys and girls are not comfortable sitting together. The boys have a tendency to protect the girls, even from things they don't want to be protected from. That's introduced tensions between the Qataris and other students, who are used to coeducation and are more gregarious. Little things like that crop up every day."
So, if these students, who are getting lots of attention due to a student-to-teacher ratio of 5:1, are having trouble sitting next to members of the opposite sex, how will they fare in the male-dominated oil and gas sector? "We're still trying to understand what the Qatari girls are comfortable doing and which things are going to be problematic," says Holste.
Norma Haddad, the Texas school's head of public affairs, says she believe peer pressure is the issue. "One of the problems is that the girls are too influenced by each other," she says. "It's so hard for us to even get photos for PR purposes. If one girl doesn't want to be photographed, then her friends won't, either. They are afraid to pick a fight they aren't ready for. These girls are going to be engineers. They need to be able to be out there, to be outgoing, to speak to the minister of oil. They have to talk to people out in the field and exchange views. The boys have already accepted this; now the girls have to learn how to do it, too."
Holste is working to get more female professors - there's currently just one - and female engineers to lead seminars. "We are going to start bringing women here who work in engineering to speak to students," he says. "The other thing we have to work on is that the environment they are going into is not used to women. Here, it's closer to the way the US was in the 1950s. But the country can't afford to lose these female engineers. They are so short of people as it is; they have to have these women working."
Other branch campuses are dealing with similar issues. Carnegie Mellon, which started its first class in 2004, has an exchange program where students from the main campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, come to Doha, and Qatari students go to the United States. According to Chuck Thorpe, Carnegie's dean, the first exchange was a success, after some issues with female students were resolved. "One female student's family is renting an apartment in Pittsburgh so the girl can go to school there," he says. "But we have to be sure to make going to Pittsburgh an option, not a requirement."
The beauty of the exchange program, Thorpe says, is that it teaches American students just as much as the Qatari students. "They ask, 'Where is the place? How do you pronounce it? What's it like to live there?' We found that once people come over here and interact with the students, they think it's really cool," he says. "We have convinced the trustees that, no, we are not living in tents and, yes, the Qatari students are friendly people."
Carnegie Mellon, which in its first school year had only 42 students - 65 percent of whom are female - saw only one student drop out last year. "I think she was just too uncomfortable with the coeducational thing," says Thorpe. "She arrived in the fall and then came back in spring with a veil, which she wasn't wearing before. Now she is taking a leave of absence. She has gone over to Qatar University to see if she likes it better there."
Thorpe says that regardless of the difficulties in getting accustomed to coeducation, the women have been outspoken and hard working. "Ten years ago in computer science in Pittsburgh you'd have four women huddled together in the back of the room surrounded by aggressive men," he says. "The women here are hard working and more aggressive than we expected. That's something that has surprised my American colleagues. It starts with Sheikha Mozah being a role model."
Charles Young, who heads up the Qatar Foundation, is finding out firsthand how strong Arab women can be. The former University of Florida president was brought out of retirement to run the Doha non-profit organization. Young works directly with Sheikha Mozah and says that she has been more involved that he expected. "It's not been as hard to get people as it was originally thought," he says. "One concern was that it would be hard to get people to come for three or more years, but we are finding that there are more people who are extending their three-year contracts than people wanting to leave before the end of that contract."
In addition to gender issues, Education City professors are dealing with the challenges of implementing an American-style of teaching, which is more analytical and participatory than a typical Arab education. "We've been asked to do in Doha what we do in Pittsburgh," says Carnegie Mellon's Thorpe. "It's wonderful to see these students acting like students. We have succeeded in importing the Pittsburgh atmosphere here."
Thorpe adds, however, that most Qatari students have difficulty with writing. "If you talk to the students when they come in as freshmen, they are all pretty comfortable speaking English. So you assume they will be able to write as they speak. Then you find out that they are not used to putting together an argument and citing sources, doing a critique, other things that American kids learn in high school," he says. "So how do you fix that? It starts with rewriting the introductory curriculum."
Thorpe is incorporating teamwork exercises in robotics classes as a way to get students to think for themselves and act fast on their feet. "One of the courses that our second-semester students are in is mobile robotics. This is the first course they've ever taken that requires teamwork; it's also the first class they've ever taken where there's not a right or wrong answer."
"For some of our students, we have to offer remedial English courses in the first year," says Texas A&M's Holste. "We've found that the students coming from the Qatari scientific schools haven't really been taught to read and think and put together ideas. So their writing suffers not just because their English isn't strong; it's the whole business of organizing new ideas and putting them out there. It's clear that this is not something you can fix with a course or two."
Holste will soon be facing another challenge. "As students go into engineering, they often find out that they don't really have the aptitude for it. It gets harder and harder. On the [Texas] campus, half the students who start in engineering don't graduate as engineers. Here, we don't have any other majors. It remains to be seen how we will deal with that in a reasonable way."
Despite all the challenges that lie ahead, though, neither dean is daunted. Holste, who compares Doha to a small town in Texas, says, "There's no place like this in the world in terms of organizational structure. The concept is good for the Qataris because the onus is on us to teach well. If the students don't do well, we can't just say, 'We advised them on how to set it up, and they screwed it up.' We have to live with it if our students aren't up to par when they graduate. That was a wise approach on [Qatar's] part."
"You get a very different sense over here," says Carnegie Mellon's Thorpe. "It's a key moment in history. The success or failure of this generation - especially in Qatar, which is trying modernize without Westernizing - is crucial. This really gives you a sense of being a small part of something big."Elizabeth Drachman
© Arabies Trends 2005
