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[globalnomad2]

A herd of camels meanders through the 115-degree heat as sand billows across the abandoned stretch of desert that once was to be a branch campus of George Mason University.
Nearby, alongside the road that leads into the tall sand dunes is a sign that reads: REDUCE SPEED: MOVING SANDS AHEAD.
The sign is intended for motorists, of course, but it could double as a warning to American university administrators eager to open branch campuses in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.
Institutions from around the world have been intrigued by the idea. And already a half-dozen American universities have set up shop or plan to in the next couple of years. But how easy is it to build a campus from scratch here? Two universities, George Mason and the American University of Sharjah, offer examples and warnings for those determined to negotiate these shifting sands.
Three years ago, Sheik Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, crown prince and ruler of Ras al Khaymah, announced his grand plan to turn his sleepy emirate � one of seven that make up the United Arab Emirates � into a hub of higher education. George Mason University was to be its centerpiece.
"The MOU [memorandum of understanding] we have with the crown prince is that he will build it and we will fill it up," says Zaid Ansari, acting vice president of George Mason University Ras al Khaymah, which opened two years ago.
The crown prince guaranteed full financial backing to the venture, covering all operational and capital costs, as well as faculty salaries. His government even promised to pay for the $300,000 annual administrative and marketing costs the Ras al Khaymah operation incurs in Virginia.
"There was a certain amount of sheer chance in this endeavor," says George Mason's provost, Peter N. Stearns, over the phone from Virginia.
Mr. Stearns jumped at the opportunity to establish a little piece of George Mason here, 56 miles along a desolate desert highway from Dubai. It would, he says, give Muslim and Arab students the opportunity to obtain an American degree without having to travel to the United States. Students and faculty members from George Mason would have the chance to study and conduct research in the Middle East. And, in the aftermath of the United States' invasion of nearby Iraq, the new university here would project a positive image of Americans.
University officials didn't just want Ras al Khaymah to be a branch campus, Mr. Ansari says, they wanted "a robust transplant" of the George Mason experience. The same curriculum, degree requirements, and admissions standards that apply in Virginia would apply here. Students at Ras al Khaymah would graduate with the same authentic American degrees as their counterparts in the United States.
By the fall of 2008, the Virginia public university had hoped to welcome students to a state-of-the-art campus that the crown prince had promised to build on this site in the desert, 12 miles from the center of Ras al Khaymah. Administrators planned to offer a full spectrum of programs and to be well on their way to enrolling 2,000 students.
But things didn't quite turn out as planned.
The state-of-the-art facility has yet to materialize. Instead the campus is housed in a series of prefabricated buildings in a blighted industrial district on the edge of Ras al Khaymah, surrounded by spindly acacia trees and auto body shops. The desert site was abandoned when it proved impossible to bring water and electricity across the sand dunes. Plans have just been finalized to begin construction on another site, at least a year behind schedule.
The fact that George Mason still doesn't have a five-star campus is a big problem in the country that created the seven-star hotel.
"Parents in this part of the world don't want to pay for some used campus someplace," says Mr. Ansari. "People want, I wouldn't call it bling-bling, but they want new. They want cutting-edge stuff."
The uninspiring architecture may have contributed to the campus's larger problem: a lack of students. It enrolled just 164 undergraduates this past academic year, 76 of whom were in a remedial-English program to help them meet the university's minimum language requirements. The other 88 took a full course load. Just two of them were transfer students from Virginia.
Even though it recruits from across the Middle East and parts of South Asia, the campus has had great difficulty finding students who satisfy its minimum score of 570 on the Toefl, the standard test of English as a foreign language � the same score required at the Virginia campus.
Most test scores "out there in certain pockets of the region are no place near 570," Mr. Ansari says.
And instead of the range of academic programs George Mason envisioned, students could choose from just one of six degree options: biology, business, electronic and communications engineering, tourism, economics, and applied computer science.
The administration has also been in flux. The first vice president of the campus had to leave for health reasons. His successor, Sharon Siverts, was reassigned to Virginia after less than a year in charge. Since then, Mr. Ansari, an American who speaks fluent Arabic, has been filling in.
"This is an American institution, but this is not a job in America," Mr. Ansari says, explaining the instability. "And there are some Americans here who didn't understand that."
Equally telling, perhaps, is that not a single staff or faculty member is from the Virginia campus.
"If they can't find anybody in Fairfax who wants to come here and be part of this, then you've got to question why they're actually doing this in the first place," said one staff member at Ras al Khaymah, who asked not to be identified.
It's not clear if George Mason anticipated that faculty members from the Virginia campus would rotate through the UAE campus in shifts or on short-term contracts, but Mr. Stearns says he never expected them to come until the first class entered its junior year, which happens this fall.
Still, he and Mr. Ansari willingly acknowledge that the Ras al Khaymah venture has been much more complicated than they imagined.
"This is no joke. Anybody who wants to open up a university here needs to take a reality check," says Mr. Ansari. "We have learned three valuable lessons: feasibility, feasibility, feasibility."
A Narrow Pipeline
Forty miles south of George Mason's struggling campus are the flower-lined boulevards and polished marble courtyards of the American University of Sharjah.
Sharjah's well-established operation, prestigious campus, and solid reputation have attracted some 5,000 students from more than 80 countries.
In 1997, Sheik Dr. Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, ruler of Sharjah, put up countless millions to build and operate a comprehensive, not-for-profit university organized on an American model. Like the ruler of Ras al Khaymah, he too wanted to put his tiny emirate on the educational map.
And, 10 years on, he has.
The American University of Sharjah is now the closest thing the emirates have to a venerable institution. It offers 22 bachelor's degrees, 39 minors, and eight master's-degree programs. It has one of the most extensive English-language libraries in the country. And its administrators boast that they have had to cap enrollment, forcing them to turn away qualified students.
What's more, the place feels like a campus. Students hang around in a lofty central atrium, waiting for classes to begin. Nearby, a bulletin board advertises sports clubs and coming meetings for religious groups, dramatic societies, and an array of other student organizations.
Except for the Islamic-inspired architecture and the occasional Emirati student wearing a traditional white dishdasha � most just wear jeans � this could be any American campus.
But all this has come with a few hard learned lessons.
The university's toughest challenge has been to identify and recruit the kind of high-caliber students from across the Middle East and Asia needed to fashion itself as a leading institution.
That task has fallen to Ali Shuhaimy, a veteran of the UAE's higher-education boom. Mr. Shuhaimy worked in admissions at Zayed University and United Arab Emirates University, both public institutions, before coming to Sharjah in 2000.
It's not that students in the region aren't capable, says Mr. Shuhaimy, vice chancellor for enrollment management. The region's high-school system simply isn't an effective university pipeline.
A 2007 study of American-style higher education in the Arab world conducted for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy backs up his argument. High-school students in the Arab world are "used to learning through lectures and memorization and an authoritarian style of education," the report concluded. "They feel that their opinion can be held against them."
As a result, most universities here offer an extra year of remedial course work to get students up to speed. At the UAE's public universities, for example, a full third of the budget is spent preparing students to work at the college level.
Instead of adding remedial programs, the American University of Sharjah decided to adjust its admissions criteria.
"We realized we couldn't just start at the top, we had to go to the middle and attract average students," Mr. Shuhaimy says. "And then we started building on that."
For the first five years, students with the equivalent of a C average and above were admitted to the university. The cutoff was gradually raised. Now nobody gets in the door with anything less than a B+.
Shafeeq Ghabra, former president of the American University of Kuwait and an education consultant, thinks other Western-style universities will have to follow that approach.
Institutions need to lower admissions standards and design a freshman and sophomore curriculum that enables students, by their junior year, to express themselves, think critically, and be independent learners, he says.
"They must look at the B and the C students because with a carefully designed curriculum they will mature into B and A students," he says.
A Double Standard?
But branch campuses of U.S. universities can't simply drop their admissions standards to attract a bigger pool of students. In fact, colleges would put their accreditation at risk if they did so.
That raises a critical question for other universities planning to open shop in the Persian Gulf.
"How many students are there of a certain caliber?" Mr. Shuhaimy asks. "When dozens of institutions are thinking this way, sooner or later they will all face a reality: There aren't enough people to attract following this admissions model."
Michigan State University and New York University, for example, are set to open campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, respectively. However, like George Mason and the American University of Sharjah, the universities have both stated that they plan to recruit students from around the world, not just the gulf, which would minimize the pressure to find top-flight students locally.
Still, Mr. Ghabra maintains that American colleges will never be successful if they set out simply to clone themselves in this part of the world.
"If they want to be viable, they must adapt to this region," he says. Universities can't expect that they will attract the brightest and best-prepared students simply because they are American colleges offering American degrees. If they don't help students bridge the gap from high school to college, he says, "they will never enroll more than a couple hundred students."
Fixing Mistakes
Despite the false start � and administrators admit they have made plenty of mistakes � George Mason says the worst is behind them.
The university parted ways with a management company they had been partners with early on. Mr. Stearns says he is not sure of the exact reason why, as university officials dealt indirectly with the company through the Emirati foundation that is financing the operation. But he suspects there were "differences about financial prospects."
A nursing program was shuttered after the first semester. Just two students had enrolled, contradicting optimistic predictions from consultants. (The two students have moved to Virginia, at George Mason's expense.)
"We've clearly learned that you need to allow a little more time to let the growth take hold," Mr. Stearns says, diplomatically.
Most critical of all, the university is now seeking accreditation from the UAE's ministry of higher education.
"It was something that should have been done when you got here and turned on the lights," says Mr. Ansari, who was hired last year from Morehouse College to secure both a government license to operate and government accreditation, before he found himself filling the vice-president's chair.
The university had assumed that because it operates in an economic-development zone free from Emirati government regulations, it didn't need such approvals. But it later learned that its graduates require degrees from locally accredited institutions to be eligible for government jobs.
"We've done a lot of this stuff in retrospect," says Mr. Ansari. "And it is daunting. There were days when I would go home and tell my wife, 'Um, do you know where the suitcases are?'"
Mr. Stearns expresses confidence that the campus is now on the right track.
"We're on the cusp of a very exciting and dynamic operation, and I don't want to say that it couldn't fail," he says. "It could. But we have no intention of closing."
Mr. Shuhaimy, at the American University of Sharjah, offers a final word of caution. To those universities willing to negotiate these shifting sands, he says, remember where you are.
"You are transferring an American experience into a region that may act in the exact opposite way from your experience," he says. Some colleges "come with this expectation that everything will be just as it was back home. But this is not a reality in this place."

[veiledsentiments]

Link to source?

Think of the time, money, and aggravation that could have been saved if these educational institutions were 'educated' enough to ask the people who know the country and culture before diving in. duh...

VS
(I hate when the paragraphs get crammed together like this. It makes things so hard to read... this seems to be happening from many news websites now...)

[globalnomad2]

I crammed in the paragraphs together myself, VS, in a perhaps feeble attempt to minimize the space I'm taking up here. I didn't link to the source since a subscription is required to read beyond the first two sentences.

[veiledsentiments]

OK...sometimes the articles have comments which can be as interesting as the article itself.

VS

[Gulezar]

[uaeobserver]

[globalnomad2]

Yes, indeed, SS/Gestapo rule ended several months ago, due to her incompetence and uncollegial--to say the least--practice of summarily firing people while they were out sick--and many other "questionable" (understatement of the year) actions. The original ESL/Foundation director was despised by most, as well, and she was darn well part of the failure. George Mason in Virginia is getting paid for their name in RAK--simple as that. I never liked those urban commuter universities anyway (ah, give me the leafy, green pastures of a rural college) and here's one that should have stayed on its own turf of the greater DC area.

[oncebitten]

It is interesting to compare this article with an NY Times article on American satellite campuses in the Gulf. That appeared in February earlier this year, and was copied into this forum by Kiefer. See what they both say about George Mason in RAK.

Yes, Globalnomad. What you say is entirely true. That first appalling woman, RR, was unfit, unprofessional, and should never have been appointed.

But remember that she; then the next part-time, visiting, unhealthy dean; then the scholar from France who decided not to stay on as dean after two minutes in RAK; then SS--ALL were appointed on Provost Stearns' watch. In his replies to journalists from the NYT and the Chronicle he sounds bemused and befuddled.

Little wonder that GMU-RAK campus has been a disaster from the first day till now. A cautionary tale that the wider educational community should be made aware of.

[globalnomad2]

Absolutely. As for the NY Times article, it was more like a travel feature (travel features are intended to be upbeat and are never supposed to be exposes) than any kind of indepth examination of the facts. A friend of mine wrote to the NY Times author asking why she didn't take GMU to task. She responded by saying yes, indeed, GMU was the weakest of the lot she visited, but that wasn't really the focus of the article.

Some highly selective US universities have programs in Qatar, but word on the street is, they only enroll a handful of qualified students. Which is better than Wollongong in Dubai simply giving away its three-year degrees for money and never failing anybody (there's an indepth thread about this somewhere).

Now, New York University, which these days is extremely selective, is setting up in Abu Dhabi and of course that begs the question, where will all the REAL students come from? Certainly not the Gulf. Their answer is that they'll recruit from around the world. Yeah? Well guess what--aside from possibly India, students from around the world don't WANT to study in Abu Dhabi--hello!! A huge chunk of our foreign students in the US come from East Asia. Do you really think they'd opt for ABU DHABI? Ha ha! NYU will besmirch its good name in this endeavor, just as the Sorbonne will. Promises of academic freedom? Sure--until some nitwit local "student" goes in and complains about what "die kleine Oskarschen" does to the woman in The Tin Drum and that literature class will bite the dust and the professor will be on the next plane.

Same goes for Michigan State in Dubai.

[kiefer]

GNomad,

It's not lost on me that you are being glib by suggesting how the students might react to Oskar's abilities to sate his paramour in Die Blechtrommel (which would probably be a rare find on reading lists for most undergraduate sophomore level survey courses in the U.S.), but let's say, what if. . .?

A more interesting question for examination as American universities open satellite campuses is how students would react to the chapter "Faith, Hope and Love" in which Grass describes the horrors of the Kristallnacht, rendering a beautitfully written passage about a Jewish trumpet player whose name was Meyn (and "he played the trumpet too beautifully for words.")

In the US, I suspect a student might in one way or another be censored for suggesting that the night of the broken glass gave its victims what they deserved. In the Gulf, a student would probably find many classmates in agreement--obviously, but do you think a homegrown US literature professor would be willing to rollover and accept this point-of-view? Freedom of speech on US campuses is subject to many litmus tests. Why should it be shocking if the same were true here?

My point is that its not only lowered expectations of student performance which highlight glaring differences between campuses there and satellite campuses here, but careful restructuring of curriculi that will certainly have to accomodate the student body. No room for Kafka. No room for Singer. For Bellow. etc. What does it say about US universities willing to accept this diametrically opposed geo-political correctness?

[globalnomad2]

kiefer, your response is condescending and pretentious. With your superior intellect and academic prowess, it is obvious that you wouldn't be teaching English in the Gulf, now, would you? And by the way, I read The Tin Drum (no need for me to show off my German here) as a sophomore in college. I question how much you know about American universities, even if you're American. You're talking to somebody with an M.S.Ed. in higher-education administration in addition to the usual EFL nonsense, but then, what do I know?

What the satellite campus situation says about US colleges is that some have common sense and others either don't or don't care. Yale thought about Abu Dhabi (or Dubai, I forget which) and dropped the idea completely. There is no way you could get a Yale experience in the Middle East, they said. On the other end of the spectrum is the befuddled George Mason U, which simply gets money for lending its name to a bunch of blighted prefab buildings among the car repair shops in Ras al Khaimah. Perhaps NYU and Michigan State are still naive and politically correct about the Gulf. As for Qatar, well, Cornell is Cornell, an Ivy League university that I'm sure does not compromise with its medical school selectivity--much. Of course, certain races and religions are not allowed in the country, and therefore the satellite campus--an inherently racist situation. And I wonder how the accrediting agency can overlook that little fact.

North Carolina Central University got its satellite campus in Georgia, USA (located in rented church rooms) shut down and its degrees voided by accrediting authorities because the branch campus had never been authorized, and such an inadequate facility can never pass accreditation. (The university was under the false impression that any branch campus would automatically be accredited as long as the main campus was! They could have called me and I would have told them that branch campuses must be accredited separately. Not only that, but crappy branch campuses can endanger the accreditation of the main campus.)

Yet inherently racist (in terms of admissions) and intellectually restrictive campuses in the Gulf can get accredited if they have nice buildings and internet access. George Mason Ras al Khaimah doesn't even have a library beyond 2,000 volumes and they expect accreditation because they have internet!

There may be a modicum of political correctness at Stateside campuses but tenure does protect academic freedom. What must be corrected is the notion that students are guests in a five-star hotel and must feel pleased and comfy with every word the professor utters.

[eha]

'bemused and befuddled'

Actually, these are the QUALIFICATIONS for development planning. Haven't you noticed--- there isn't exactly a plethora of rationality and clarity in the field, is there.

[kiefer]

"die kleine Oskarschen? not showing off German?

No need to get personal old boy.

My pretentiousness only parallels the low brow supposition about how students might react to little Oscar's bedroom sports.

That there is a modicum of political correctness festering on US campuses is debatable.

[globalnomad2]

Fair enough and a truce, old boy. But there's absolutely no question in my feverish mind that Gulf students, particularly female, will zoom straight to the Dean and complain bitterly about any bedroom antics in a novel they have to read.

[kiefer]

GNomad
Yes. Truce.
And I am eternally grateful for you having pointed out my lapses in judgment and misguided attempts to question the differences between western and Arab standards of political correctness and how this might affect a transplanted liberal arts canon into local curricula. Indeed, we should be more concerned with how students might react to dwarf-on-dwarf lovemaking and the consequences this might have on the career of a dedicated academic.