Field Study - Just How Relevant Is Political Science? - NYTimes.com

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By PATRICIA COHEN

After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects,” political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year’s Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.

Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate the field’s direction, what sort of questions it pursues, even how useful the research is.

Much of the political science work financed by the National Science Foundation is both rigorous and valuable, said Jeffrey C. Isaac, a professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, where one new winner of the Nobel in economic science, the political scientist Elinor Ostrom, teaches. “But we’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it,” he said. “We political scientists can and should do a better job of making the public relevance of our work clearer and of doing more relevant work.”

Mr. Isaac is the editor of Perspectives on Politics, a journal that was created by the field’s professional organization to bridge the divide after a group of political scientists led a revolt against the growing influence of statistical methods and mathematics-based models in the discipline. In 2000 an anonymous political scientist who called himself Mr. Perestroika roused scores of colleagues to protest the organization, the American Political Science Association, and its flagship journal, The American Political Science Review, arguing that the two were marginalizing scholars who focused on traditional research based on history, culture and archives.

Though there is still jockeying over jobs, power and prestige — particularly in an era of shrinking budgets — much of that animus has quieted, and most political scientists agree that a wide range of approaches makes sense.

What remains, though, is a nagging concern that the field is not producing work that matters. “The danger is that political science is moving in the direction of saying more and more about less and less,” said Joseph Nye, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, whose work has been particularly influential among American policy makers. “There are parts of the academy which, in the effort to be scientific, feel we should stay away from policy,” Mr. Nye said, that “it interferes with the science.”

In his view statistical techniques too often determine what kind of research political scientists do, pushing them further into narrow specializations cut off from real-world concerns. The motivation to be precise, Mr. Nye warned, has overtaken the impulse to be relevant.

In recent years he and other scholars, including Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol, both former presidents of the American Political Science Association, have urged colleagues not to shy away from “the big questions.”

Graduate students discussing their field, said Peter Katzenstein, a political science professor at Cornell University, often speak in terms of “an interesting puzzle,” a small intellectual conundrum that tests the ingenuity of the solver, rather than the large, sloppy and unmanageable problems that occur in real life.

“This is the great divide on what we are doing,” he said, adding that political scientists did not agree on the unit of analysis (whether the focus should be on the individual or social relationships), the source of knowledge or how to measure things.

Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who has been active in the “Perestroika” movement, said that the question should determine the method. If you want to test cause and effect, “quantitative methods are the preferred way to go,” he said, but they can’t tell “how political phenomena should be understood and interpreted” — whether a protest, for instance, is the result of a genuine social movement or an interest group, whether it is religious or secular.

Arthur Lupia, a professor in the University of Michigan’s political science department, said he was using the scientific method to understand what processes and institutions were necessary for a democratic society to function.

Mr. Lupia is the lead investigator on one of the projects financed by the National Science Foundation that Senator Coburn has attacked: the American National Election Studies. Senator Coburn has maintained that commentators on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and other news media outlets “provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions.” He has argued that the $91.3 million that the foundation spent on social science projects over the last 10 years should have gone to biology, chemistry or pharmaceutical science.

Mr. Lupia, whose background is in applied mathematics and economics, concedes that political science is not quite like the natural sciences. First, the subjects under study “can argue back.” But he maintains that it uses the same rigorous mechanisms to evaluate observations as any other science.

The elections project, which has been financed by the foundation in various forms for more than three decades and has involved 700 scientists, tracks why citizens vote and how they respond to elections. The database is used by thousands of scholars, and has been widely praised as illuminating the question of why democracy works.

No date has been set for a vote on Senator Coburn’s proposal, which was introduced on Oct. 7. Yet even as he is trying to restrict National Science Foundation financing of social science, the Defense Department has been recruiting scholars in the same fields to work on security issues like terrorism, Iraq and China’s military. The nation must embrace “eggheads and ideas,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said, to meet potential national threats.

Some Defense Department grants were awarded by the Pentagon through a new program titled Minerva; others were distributed through the National Science Foundation because it has experience in grant making and is apolitical.

As for those who criticize quantitative analysis as too narrow, Mr. Lupia said that the big questions were precisely what interested him. His work has been used by the World Bank and government officials in India, for example, to figure out which villages had sufficient institutions and practices to ensure that money earmarked to build a water system would not end up in someone’s pocket. Political science can also help determine what institutions and arrangements are needed to help a dictatorship make the transition to a democracy, he added.

After the fall of Communism, “when Eastern European governments were writing their constitutions, I can guarantee you they weren’t calling George Stephanopoulos,” Mr. Lupia said.

“I try to identify problems and then identify solutions to them,” he said, “to find the type of scientific method” that can answer the question.

Bridging Cultures in Doha

By GARY WASSERMAN

On the first day of my American-government course I often play a little trick on the students. I throw one of them out of class.

Admittedly this is not among my kinder acts as a teacher. It comes from posing the questions of what is politics and where does it take place. Usually most of the class identifies politics with the actions of government rather than a process of influence involving power and authority in any number of social settings, including the classroom. So some unsuspecting student answers that, no, politics doesn't go on in this class. In response the teacher feigns anger and asks him or her to leave. The plan is to stop the student at the door, ask why he (or she) is obeying, and encourage a more energetic discussion of authority and politics at a university. Or at least that was the idea.

Two years ago, in my second semester of teaching at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar, I attempted to stage this performance in a class of mostly Arab students. When done in the United States there is a range of responses, from surprise to smirks to quiet calculations of how soon they could transfer out of this wack job's class. But that day, in the wealthy Persian Gulf emirate, I saw looks of pain and horror on the faces in class. By ordering a student out of class I had stepped over a strict line of courtesy and pride. I had also stumbled over these students' elevated respect for teachers. Their discomfort at my disapproval was a reminder that I was in a different culture with a tradition of esteem for teachers.

That was at least one mistake I never repeated.

Let me say upfront that I like teaching in Doha. My students are generally bright, attentive, and fairly hard-working, with a diversity of backgrounds. (How many American universities have a handful of students in every class who have actually experienced wars from Bosnia to Beirut?) Despite an appearance of uniformity, my students are no more monolithic in their political views than those at the average politically correct liberal East Coast college. A professor's academic freedom is not questioned. Even on the no-go topic of Israel, we had a debate last fall on the power of the Israeli lobby in America, which seemed, to their teacher at least, to provoke a range of student views.

In a discussion of teaching in a foreign culture, the temptation is to stress the contrasts, to elevate the exotic to a prominence not deserved. In fact, most of what passes for my daily acts of education are similar to what any American college professor would recognize. And the young men and women in class are also easily recognizable. Some are bright, some aren't; some work hard, some don't. They have the customary range of abilities and interests and identities. Many are mature and motivated, others are occupying space, just fulfilling a family's expectations.

Having been admitted to a well-known American university requiring English fluency, these are privileged students, tomorrow's leaders of the Middle East. Today this gives them the appearance of "global teenagers" plugged into current films, phrases, and fashions, as separate from their boomer teacher as their American peers are. And the student-teacher relationship is not one where either side necessarily reveals vital truths to the other. The few hours a week of our encounters are constrained by grades, ambitions, and honest confusion. Differing goals and self-images seldom encourage candid communications, whatever the cultural similarities or differences.

This leads to the recurring question among the faculty about what exactly we, and our students, are doing here. For me, after a career in Washington spent organizing and lobbying, analyzing and writing about politics, Doha represented a welcome chance to get back to teaching at Georgetown, my alma mater. With our kids out of the house, if not quite out of school, and a wife willing to travel, the move made some sense.

More general motives are usually adapted from the old British imperial credo of God, Gold, and Glory to suit the more secular goals of liberal scholars. Promoting interest in intellectual inquiry, in religious tolerance, and in an openness for dissent and debate all while making a comfortable living in an interesting foreign setting takes in a good deal of ground. For the students the debate was summed up by one social-science colleague, an American, who thought the students' Western loyalties were only an inch deep while their Muslim and Arab traditions composed their deeper roots. Another colleague, a Muslim, thought the religious and ethnic traditions were the surface parts while the Western cultural and consumption patterns were the more profound. I have no idea.

On the most apparent visual level, these students are not Americans. The Qatari boys wear long white robes, the thobe, while the girls cover their hair and wear the black abaya. Other students usually dress in the Western uniform of jeans, with many of the Muslim women at least covering their heads. Dress reflects custom and may or may not indicate a religious bent. The students vary in their devotion. A number go to daily prayers; most take the month of Ramadan seriously enough to show the strain of fasting during the daylight hours, while feasting at night. Perhaps because of the dress, the halls of the campus reflect a certain restraint, even dignity, not found in American academe.

Faculty members have complaints, and what professor doesn't? Structure is often expected, and therefore needed, in the classroom. If attendance isn't enforced, absence and tardiness become problems. Work habits, or the lack of them, are blamed on a privileged background. Of course spoiled kids are not exactly unknown in the higher reaches of American private education. Despite being widely traveled, many of the students show a surprising lack of curiosity about foreign lands, people, and culture.

The Qataris who make up almost half of our 140 students live at home. (The rest of the students are mostly from the Middle East and South Asia.) The Qataris' family lives are private matters not shared with the foreign faculty. Perhaps because families are so central, students tend to compartmentalize their education, restricting how much of their day they wish it to occupy. Not much socializing goes on between faculty members and students or, in general, between expats and locals. Faculty members live fairly close to the Education City campus that Georgetown shares with five other American universities teaching disciplines ranging from business (Carnegie Mellon) to medicine (Cornell). Foreigners live in their guarded compounds, and Qataris live with their families. (In between, the majority of the population, workers from South Asia, live in sparsely furnished all-male dormitories, walled off from both the foreign professionals and local citizens they serve.)

Attempts to scale these barriers even with typical American campus activities have only slowly been accepted. Recently some Georgetown students started a club that sponsored after-hours meals for informal chats between students and faculty members. One evening last fall, the group, called Brain Food, brought takeout food to my house to talk about the presidential election. Of the dozen students who showed up, none were Qatari.

That is not to say that within the classroom there aren't wide-ranging discussions with students who are smart, funny, articulate, and diverse. This diversity embraces women. Education is firmly co-ed, unlike most local schools and colleges run by more traditional local authorities in the Gulf. More than half of Georgetown's student body is female, and they are smart and motivated. They join in class debates and appear willing, even eager, to argue their points of view with male classmates. However they may be treated in the rest of society, and whatever ideas Westerners arrive with concerning the issue of women under Islam, these college women expect to be treated as equals, and on the campus they seem to be. If they are intimidated by men or a male-dominated culture and religion, I haven't noticed.

Many of the teachers here have ties to the people, culture, and religion of the region. Understandably their sympathies lie in the region, but the danger to teaching quality lies in constructing a self-selecting faculty that is narrower, ideologically and politically, than would exist on a more diverse American campus. Some teachers are at the end or the beginning of their careers, and an overseas posting for a few years is viewed as a short-term boost to their plans for the future. The salary supplement for teaching overseas is a clear incentive, and, when combined with free housing, rent received from a home back in the States as well as other perks can double one's salary in the United States. Alas, expenses are also higher in the Gulf. Chances for travel — always by air to elsewhere — are not only abundant but also necessary in a small desert country where the temperature hits 120 degrees in the summer.

Whatever the motives for being in Doha, family issues are always present. Single people have to handle the isolation of a small city in an unfamiliar culture that frowns on alcohol and displays of affection between the sexes. (No holding hands in public.) Married couples have problems with spouses who frequently have difficulty getting a job, keeping busy, or finding friends. Families with children have to find places for them in private schools, which can be both limited and expensive. But, as the phrase goes, if you have a problem money can solve, you don't have a problem. With the availability of inexpensive housekeeping and child care, stipends for education, as well as large houses and SUV's, expats can overcome most of the challenges. And most seem to stay longer than they planned to when they arrived.

Our mandate is to reproduce the same standards and content that exist at Georgetown's main campus in Washington. In our case that means granting a B.S. in foreign service — educating students in international politics for careers in world affairs. Academic freedom may not be up for debate, but what we are doing and whether we're succeeding certainly is, among a faculty that may overthink and overrate the university's mission. Is the education appropriate? Are we as a foreign faculty missionizing or mirroring a conflicted region? How relevant are we to students in blending their traditional values with modernizing habits of the heart? Both the questions and answers overflow with ambivalence.

The worse part of teaching in Qatar may actually occur before arrival: in the worried expectations of friends and family when they first hear of your pending departure. Arabs have a bad press in America, and that can lead to sincere concerns about physical security and intolerance. While generalizations about an admittedly volatile region should be minimized, the surprises in being here for three years are almost all on the positive side. And for a faculty that includes priests, Jews, and other nonconformists, the response has been welcoming and, assuming a degree of discretion, accepting. People of this region seem to want what we have to offer and are willing to put up with the eccentric baggage that Westerners inevitably bring with them. It's not a bad deal for either side, so far.

Gary Wasserman is a professor of government at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar, teaching international relations and American government.

Failure of George Mason U.'s Persian Gulf Campus Sparks Concern - International

By Andrew Mills

Late last month, when George Mason University’s campus in the Persian Gulf emirate of Ras al Khaymah became the first American educational venture in the region to collapse, its administrators immediately blamed the international economic meltdown.

In a region whose higher-education scene is quickly gaining a reputation for being as hazardous as it may be lucrative, is George Mason’s failure the beginning of the end for American-style higher education in the petrodollar-rich countries of the Middle East?

“Of course there is still a demand for American and other international higher education here,” says Ayoub Kazim, executive director of Dubai’s Knowledge Village and International Academic City, which are home to dozens of foreign-university operations. “But we have to differentiate between what happened at George Mason and what’s happening everywhere else. The various models, the approaches, are very different.”

Every American university that has established a venture in the gulf does so with a local partner. Those partners may be investors who are motivated by the opportunity to profit from the educational needs of the region. At the other end of the spectrum are the ruling families of the region’s city-states, who dip into their considerable wealth not to make money but because they want to develop their economies and societies.

It is no surprise that what motivates a university’s local partner—not to mention how deep its pockets are—is key to the venture’s success.

But George Mason’s experience also shows the importance of a mechanism that guarantees that academic standards are controlled by the home campus, and of offering courses that students are going to want.

To be sure, since it opened in Ras al Khaymah, George Mason’s campus has been beset by problems revolving around administration, academics, and identity. Student recruitment has been particularly difficult, and in hindsight administrators say they should have controlled marketing, rather than leaving it to local partners. This year only about 180 students enrolled at the campus, far fewer than the 2,000 students its planners hoped would enroll by 2011.

Peter N. Stearns, George Mason’s provost, maintains that with time, those institutional challenges would have been solved. “We were in this for the long run,” he says. “The problem is we weren’t allowed the long run.”

New Demands

Two months ago, as the global economic meltdown was gaining pace, Edrak, the private educational company that was George Mason’s partner and paid the campus’s operating budget, told administrators in Fairfax, Va., that it wanted to make some serious changes.

For the 2008-9 academic year, Edrak has provided George Mason with between $7-million and $8-million to operate a campus for some 180 students. But for 2009-10, Edrak was prepared to provide only about $6.5-million, yet it expected George Mason to enroll 300 students, Mr. Stearns said.

Edrak also demanded that George Mason allow it to hire a new academic dean for the campus who would report to the company, not to the university. Previously, the campus’s chief academic officer, the vice president, reported to Mr. Stearns.

Those budgetary constraints meant the university wouldn’t be able to continue providing students in Ras al Khaymah with the kind of education that would meet the standards of George Mason’s home campus, Mr. Stearns said. And the proposed shift in academic control, he added, would neither satisfy expectations on Mason’s home campus nor make the grade with its accreditor, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' Commission on Colleges.

“The changes in our agreement, which were sought by our partners in Ras al Khaymah, would have put the university’s accreditation in jeopardy, and that is unacceptable under any circumstances,” Mr. Stearns told the university’s Board of Visitors as he recommended they withdraw the university from the venture, which he had originally championed.

Mr. Stearns says that, initially, Edrak’s investors—the identity of whom even he does not know, he says—had planned that the George Mason campus, which opened in 2005, would not break even for its first five years. Edrak did not respond to requests for comment.

“In my honest opinion, there was some change of mind as to when the profit would begin,” Mr. Stearns said, adding that he suspects the investors’ change of mind has been prompted by the economic crisis.

Gambling on Success

As the economic crisis persists, the fear is that other American colleges that have set up operations in the region will begin to fail as their local partners—especially those expecting a profit—begin to feel the heat.

The risk is perhaps greatest in Dubai, which has grown at a breakneck pace in recent years but finds itself reeling in the downturn. Unlike its neighbors, Dubai doesn’t have vast oil or gas reserves to fall back on. With scant consumer and investor confidence in the city-state, four in 10 expatriate workers are preparing to leave the country, according to a recent survey.

That places the more than 30 foreign campuses in Dubai at serious risk, especially because many planned to fill their seats with the children of expatriates. The native Emirati population is far too small to sustain these campuses on its own.

Dubai’s approach to higher education has been to match largely middle-tier foreign universities with local investors. Many of these arrangements offer specialized programs for a particular audience that function as pipelines into the local labor market. An Indian university branch campus, for example, might serve a predominantly Indian expatriate population.

“Many of these partners in Dubai are gamblers,” says Daniel J. Guhr, managing director of the Illuminate Consulting Group, which advises universities on internationalization. “The attitude is that if you create 10 institutions and five fail, you’re still far better off than if you had none, as long as you’re not one of the five who fail.”

Only a few American colleges have decided to establish campuses in Dubai, the most prominent of which is Michigan State University, which began operating last fall in International Academic City. The Dubai campus offers undergraduate degrees in business administration, construction management, computer engineering, early-childhood education, telecommunications and media management, and youth development.

It also offers a handful of graduate programs. This year slightly more than 50 students have enrolled; the university expects that figure to double this fall. Michigan State’s local partner, Tecom Investments, extended the university a line of credit at a very low interest rate to cover construction and operational costs during the start-up period. Once the Dubai venture breaks even, and Michigan State pays back its loan, Tecom will collect rental fees and nothing more, says John K. Hudzik, vice president of global engagement and strategic projects at Michigan State.

The expectation is that the Dubai project will eventually sustain itself with tuition fees alone.

“Tecom has nothing at all to do with the academic side of the operation,” says Mr. Hudzik. “That has always been one of our conditions, that we are 100 percent in control of the academic programs.”

Because of the economic downturn, Michigan State expects to break even in Dubai two years later than it originally projected, probably in its fourth or fifth year, Mr. Hudzik says, rather than in its second or third.

That said, Michigan State must still pay back its line of credit, which means it must ensure that there is an adequate demand for its programs. George Mason had chronic problems attracting enough students in Ras al Khaymah. Its nursing program, for example, shut down after only two students enrolled.

But while George Mason left what little market analysis it did to local partners, Michigan State is doing its own due diligence. Mr. Hudzik said, for example, that Michigan chose its programs to align with some of Dubai’s long-term economic-development goals.

Still, Mr. Hudzik acknowledges that risk can never be fully eliminated.

“You do the best you can to run a series of due-diligence tests,” Mr. Hudzik said. “But there’s no way to ensure anything.”

Mr. Hudzik also said the university selected only those programs that have the strength to duplicate what they do in East Lansing on the other side of the world.

“Without naming them, every university has programs that are weaker than others,” he said. “We did have several programs that expressed serious interest in Dubai that we turned down, even though there may have been a market for what they offer.”

Still Flush With Cash

Only in Abu Dhabi and Qatar, the two city-states in the Persian Gulf that boast the region’s largest per capita wealth, have U.S. branch campuses been able to remove profit from the equation altogether.

In both emirates, senior members of the ruling families have provided the funds and the political will to establish flashy branch campuses of American colleges.

The most-watched venture is in Abu Dhabi, where New York University plans to establish an ambitious liberal-arts campus. NYU officials declined to be interviewed for this article, issuing instead a written statement saying, “Recruitment of the first class of undergraduates at NYU Abu Dhabi, which will commence studies in the fall of 2010, is well under way.”

The university, which received $50-million from the government up front, in addition to payment for construction and operating expenses, opened the NYUAD Institute last fall, which offers conferences, lectures, and other cultural activities, as a precursor to the full campus.

In Qatar, a foundation controlled by the ruling al-Thani family has paid for six American institutions—Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth Universities—to open and operate campuses in a development called Education City.

“This is not about making money,” says Charles E. Thorpe, dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. “We collect tuition and turn it over to the Qatar Foundation. They pay our operating costs.”

Mr. Thorpe won’t disclose what the campus’s operating budget is, but the fact that it employs 47 faculty members for just 183 students suggests that operating costs significantly outpace tuition revenue. It would be cheaper, Mr. Thorpe notes, to pack all 183 students off to Carnegie Mellon’s campus in Pittsburgh.

“It’s incredibly costly to do undergraduate education this way—probably more expensive than anywhere in the world,” Mr. Guhr, the consultant, said. “But they’re trying, relentlessly, to drive things from the top.”

With Education City, he says, the Qatar Foundation isn’t just educating students. It is using Education City as a catalyst to transform the country’s economy, build a culture of research, and put the tiny emirate on the map.

And although the price of oil and gas has dropped, Mr. Thorpe points out that Qatar’s economy is still booming relative to the rest of the world’s. In 2009 the country’s GDP is expected to grow by some 11 percent, compared with 42.3 percent in 2008.

“There are no cutbacks here,” he says.

Still, he adds, even Qatar is taking a more deliberate approach to growth. In Carnegie Mellon’s annual budget negotiations with the foundation, the university decided to hold off on establishing a graduate program, perhaps in software engineering or information systems. “We’ve done a market survey, we think there will be strong demand,” Mr. Thorpe later wrote in an e-mail message. “But it doesn’t hurt to slow down for a year and do a little more detailed planning before we launch.”

Academics in the Persian Gulf

By ANDREW MILLS

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.

***

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.