Universities in the region offer jobs and money — but would you want to live there?
The job market on North American campuses may be heading for the deep freeze, but hundreds of positions are opening up in the Persian Gulf as American universities scramble to set down roots in those petrodollar-rich states. The combination of money and opportunity on offer may seem hard to resist.
But academics who trade the rich intellectual environment of America's college towns for the oil-soaked hinterlands of Arabia often perplex their friends, who wonder what kind of life their departing colleagues are in for.
The longstanding reputation of the sand-swept countries leading this academic boom — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates — is that life there is mind-numbingly boring. That the strict observance of Islam, the relative isolation from the rest of the world, and the 110-degree heat that descends for six months a year have somehow stunted intellectual life.
Will the promising American academic who accepts a three-year contract there return home with a flush savings account but an atrophied brain and a derailed career? Or could there possibly be an intellectually satisfying life to lead out there?
That's what I came to Qatar — once described by the Lonely Planet travel guide as "the dullest place on earth" — to find out.
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In 2002, when Virginia Commonwealth University was recruiting administrators for a branch campus it was establishing in Qatar, the first question Valerie Jeremijenko asked her superiors in Richmond seems absurd to her today: "Do you hire women?"
"I knew nothing," she says. "But I was intrigued with this idea of Qatar."
Qatar's rulers had realized that the economy of their tiny emirate was too dependent on its seemingly bottomless oil and gas wells. The push was on to diversify the economy and develop the skills of the sparse population.
So they drew on their oil-and-gas wealth and started paying for American universities to establish campuses on a tract of desert at the edge of the capital here — a development that became known as Education City. Cornell University signed on to build a medical school, and VCU to open an arts-and-design program. Since then Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and Northwestern Universities have joined. Others are expected still.
And so the intriguing possibility of Qatar arose just as Jeremijenko and her two young daughters were ready to make a fresh start in a new place. "It was time for me to leave America and to leave the man I was married to," the native Australian says, sitting in the office she now occupies as assistant dean of student affairs at Virginia Commonwealth's campus in Qatar.
"Two weeks later, we got on a plane with a suitcase each."
Most faculty members at Education City say Doha appeals because it is the academics' equivalent of an adventure; they see a rare opportunity to be part of something entirely new, for which they can be the ones laying foundations.
"Where else is there such political will to support research and scholarship, to bring about a culture of inquiry?" says Mehran Kamrava, who left his post as chair of the political-science department at California State University at Northridge in June 2007 to direct the Center for International and Regional Studies on Georgetown's branch campus here.
Matthew Tinkcom, who is visiting this year from the graduate program in communication, culture, and technology on Georgetown's main campus, agrees: "Universities don't have many opportunities to rethink themselves. So I wanted to see this thing as early as I could."
The risks of joining what is essentially a start-up — even a very well endowed one — are obvious, and many American academics don't come unless they have posts to return to if things don't work out in Doha. Tinkcom's tenured position, for example, is waiting for him back in Washington.
But for Jeremijenko, this was the opportunity her family needed. Where else could she start life as a single mother with the kind of salary and benefits that allowed her to provide things like horseback riding and gymnastics to her girls?
"I could give my kids more than I could ever imagine in the States or Australia," she says.
But as she quickly realized, Qatar could often be a lonely and isolating place.
Women in Qatar enjoy equal rights with men and, unlike in neighboring Saudi Arabia, are not required by law to cover their hair. In universities they make up some 70 percent of the students, and female faculty members hold a number of leadership positions.
Still, Qatari society hasn't always been this female-friendly, and as one of only a few Western single mothers in the country, Jeremijenko knows she occasionally stands out.
"We are vulnerable and, in terms of reputation, there are standards of behavior that my kids and I have to uphold," she says. "You just have to be very aware of your behavior and how you are perceived."
What's more, at first Jeremijenko felt she could never escape her colleagues, who lived alongside her in an occasionally suffocating housing compound at Education City. When she did venture out, she had little interest in the rugby-watching, beer-swilling expatriate social scene dominated by young, single oil executives.
"The options were kind of limited in terms of what I wanted to do," says Jeremijenko, who especially missed a place to practice her longtime passion, yoga. She wondered how long she and the girls would last.
"It was so insular," she says. "And insular can become so toxic."
Tinkcom understands what she is talking about. "One of the strangest things is the bubble, the way that educated Westerners who are brought here to do very sophisticated forms of work live inside a virtual globalized world," he says. His social circle in Doha is limited to other employees of Education City. "I've discovered that it's really hard not to be inside that bubble."
Today, like Doha itself, Education City is sprouting from the desert as a sleek cluster of futuristic buildings.
And as just about everyone acknowledges, Qatar is transforming itself into an interesting place to live. "It's still a small village, of course," says Daniel R. Alonso, dean emeritus of Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. "But did you know we just inaugurated the Qatar Symphony Orchestra?"
The money-is-no-object attitude allowed Qatar to recruit 100 classical musicians from around the world and relocate them to Doha. It lured the 91-year-old architect I.M. Pei out of retirement to design the spectacular Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in December. It persuaded Robert De Niro to establish an offshoot of the Tribeca Film Festival here.
It has also allowed for a taste of the kind of over-the-top excess that Qatar's flashier, more reckless neighbor, Dubai, has become famous for. This year, for example, will be the official opening of the Pearl-Qatar, a $2.5-billion artificial island loaded with luxury villas and five-star hotels. The Villagio, a faux Venetian shopping mall, is already open, complete with gondolas that ferry customers along a series of canals.
Qatar can no longer be declared boring.
Cambridge, Mass., it is not, but Education City administrators say the growing international hype about Qatar is making it easier to attract the most elusive of academic recruits: faculty members who meet the high standards demanded by the home campus but are willing to move to Qatar.
Nowhere is this a bigger task than at Weill Cornell where, over the next few years, administrators must recruit 18 principal researchers and about 100 postdoctoral students and technicians to staff the laboratories of its ambitious biomedical-research program. What's more, over the next five years, the school must hire 200 clinicians and 50 researchers for the Sidra Medical and Research Center, its teaching hospital, which has an $8-billion endowment.
Sitting at a small, boardroom-style table in his plush office — thick carpet, leather sofa, giant plasma-screen television — Alonso pretends that I'm the kind of medical academic he needs to recruit and gives me his best shot.
"Well, first off, here's the funding to continue your research," he says. Qatar's government has devoted 2.8 percent of its gross domestic product, about $1.9-billion, to scientific research, so there is no talk of cutbacks, caps on funds, or downsizing. "Bring the whole lab. Bring your postdoc fellows. You like your researchers, bring them, too."
He offers the kind of research equipment found at only a few top medical schools in the United States, like a next-generation gene-sequencing platform in the genomics laboratory.
And if I'm worried about feeling disconnected from other colleagues in my field — after all, Doha is 7,000 miles from New York City — the university will pay for me to attend two academic conferences a year, anywhere in the world, no questions asked.
If I want to go to still other conferences, he adds, we can discuss that, too.
What about my family?
Bring them, of course, says Alonso, describing the Education City package that most academics get: furnished house, car, private-school fees for the kids, and a bundle of cash every year for the whole family to travel back to the States.
"You can use that money for whatever you want," he says. "Heck, go on vacation to Australia."
Then he lowers his voice and looks at me over the top of his round glasses, as if he's a bit embarrassed to make his next offering: "And of course, there is the foreign-service benefit."
The foreign-service benefit?
"Yes. A 25-percent bonus on top of your base salary," he says, breaking into a grin and nodding slowly. "Are you beginning to get the picture?"
I am. But I'm still not convinced this is the kind of place that will stimulate my brain.
On a Monday evening in November, I sit nervously in the atrium of Virginia Commonwealth University's campus here, waiting for somebody to swoop in and shut down the provocative slide show that Chris Jordan is giving.
The show, called "Running the Numbers," is a series of images the Seattle photographer has arranged to depict aspects of American excess. At first the images are innocuous enough: A million plastic cups, the amount used on U.S. airline flights every six hours. Two million plastic beverage bottles, the amount used in the United States every five minutes. Paper grocery bags, 1.14 million of them, the amount used every hour.
Then Jordan flips to an image of 32,000 naked Barbie dolls arranged to portray two giant naked breasts, nipples erect. This image, he says, depicts the number of breast augmentations performed in the United States each month.
I cringe, waiting for the lights to abruptly flick on and Jordan's microphone to be cut.
But he continues, flipping to an image portraying 28,000 barrels of oil: the amount the United States consumes every two minutes.
"These are our unconscious habits, and the results to our environment are catastrophic," Jordan says to the 200 or so people who have assembled in the atrium. "When we become aware of them, then we have a choice that we weren't aware of previously."
"I feel like an alcoholic who has woken up to my alcoholism," he says.
Surely this falls beyond the bounds of what is acceptable here in conservative Qatar, I think. Sexual openness and alcohol are considered among the biggest taboos, and oil is the lifeblood that has made just about everything in Qatar — including Education City — possible. (Academics joke that Education City is financed by the proceeds from a single oil well. It's called, of course, the well of knowledge.)
But no. Like all distinguished speakers who make the rounds of Education City, Jordan expresses his ideas as freely and critically as if he were on any American campus.
"Contrary to the dumbest stereotypes, there is a culture of critical thought, engagement, and dialogue here," says Georgetown's Tinkcom, who specializes in film studies and queer theory.
"In the courses I have taught, when the topic of gender difference — and I include queer theory and same-sex sexuality — has come up, I haven't avoided it, and my students here have been receptive to it," he explains in an e-mail message. "I don't detect any avoidance of discussions about gender — or, for that matter, any more curiosity, than I would with students on main campus."
Among faculty members, too, academic life on the campuses of Education City unfolds much the way it does at home, without censorship, with vibrant discussions, and with equal participation from men and women.
The faculty at Weill Cornell, for example, is to hold a conference this spring at which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars will discuss the ethics of the embryonic-stem-cell research that is planned to take place in the Qatar campus's biomedical laboratories. And Georgetown's Center for International and Regional Studies isn't afraid to tackle some of the region's thorniest issues. It has staged symposia, screened documentaries, and welcomed speakers on issues including militant Islam, human trafficking, and Iraqi refugees.
"At a purely intellectual level, there is an incredible amount to explore here," says Kamrava, the center's director. "It's an intellectually exciting place to be. So much is happening."
The center has even received a research grant to study what many academics say is the most troubling issue about life in the Persian Gulf: the abuse of migrant workers and lax enforcement of labor laws.
"I don't want you to think that my emotions are directing our scholarship, because they're not," says Kamrava. "But the treatment of migrant laborers here is something that troubles me at a deeply human level."
He and Tinkcom acknowledge that there's little they can do about it on a personal level, other than treat workers with the same respect they accord everyone. They are buoyed by the fact that the construction of Georgetown's building here will be the first at Education City that proceeds according to international safety standards.
The treatment of workers has become a big issue at New York University, which is building a branch campus in Abu Dhabi that is scheduled to open next year. Thousands of faculty and staff members and students in New York have signed a petition demanding the administration ensure that fair labor practices are followed in the construction and maintenance of the new campus. What's more, the NYU branch of the American Association of University Professors is working with Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, to draft a code of conduct for labor practices on the Abu Dhabi campus.
Education City is among only a few outposts in the Persian Gulf region where the standards of academic freedom and inquiry expected of Western-style higher education apply. But that is changing. All eyes will be on the opening of NYU's Abu Dhabi campus, which aspires to offer the same liberal-arts experience the university provides back home. Even Saudi Arabia — probably the region's least progressive country when it comes to democracy, women's rights, and cultural and religious freedoms — is about to begin its own experiment with Western-style academic freedom at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which is set to open in September. Endowed with a whopping $10-billion, it is the world's sixth-wealthiest university and has already poached dozens of professors from American campuses.
If Qatar's neighbors hope to pull off their equally ambitious plans for higher education, they must follow Education City's example and create the kind of conditions that allow Western-trained academics to go on living vibrant intellectual lives both inside and outside the classroom.
Matthew Tinkcom is considering extending his stay in Doha. And almost seven years after Valerie Jeremijenko arrived, she says moving here was the best thing she ever did. Having taught yoga classes at the Sheraton Hotel, she and a partner opened their own yoga studio, which now attracts more than 500 students a week. Jeremijenko has made connections in the expatriate community beyond Education City and no longer feels isolated here.
"I don't plan ever to leave," she says. "They'll have to force me out, because if you're smart about it, this is the best place to be."
Andrew Mills is a correspondent for The Chronicle, based in Beirut, Lebanon.
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