Job Discussion Forums

[globalnomad2]

Avoid the school at all costs. I said that a year ago; then things began to get better, but this school seems doomed to failure now. For one thing, the students were hoping for a mirror campus of the education they'd get at the home campuses in Virginia. Dream on. Not even close.

GMU RAK has failed miserably in this regard. They can't pay the salaries of top-notch American faculty, and their strategy has been to ignore the qualified American PhDs who do apply, and hire Indians and Arabs with local degrees or distance degrees from Liverpool and pay them Dh. 7000 a month (compared to 12,500 for the native-speaker EFL Foundation people). As if this weren't enough, the campus director has fired several people summarily, including a well-liked Dean of Students while she was out sick with a life-threatening illness! And that was not related to her length of absence; she was to return after only two weeks' sick leave. I have a graduate degree in higher-education administration, but I missed the class that covered sacking people while they were out sick and almost died.

There are other abuses, but you get the gist. The quality of the students has been essentially open admissions, and I know of a math professor who was told to revise grades upwards OR ELSE and teach eight or nine hours of classes on certain days OR ELSE. He took the or-else. I would say, take a pass from Mickey Mouse U in RAK. One hopes NYU will do a more professional job when they set up in Abu Dhabi.

[scot47]

What did you expect ? An educational Disneyland in the Gulf ?

[globalnomad2]

Not sure what you mean. GMU is not a Disneyland at the home campus.

[scot47]

I am sure that the original is a real university. Did you expect to see an exact replica created in the Gulf ? With academic standards ? Not possible.

[globalnomad2]

I agree in terms of students. But look at the behavior of the campus director. She apparently gets a blank cheque for abuses from Virginia. It will be really interesting to see how a far more prestigious college--NYU--will do in Abu Dhabi.

[veiledsentiments]

I doubt that anyone at GMU in Virginia has even limited understanding of what is going on over there.

GMU is a very good university actually - took a few courses there through the years I lived nearby. But, they have no Middle East studies department... though I did see an Islamic Studies minor or certificate program on the list now. They should have consulted with the American University over in DC who has done quite a good job of managing AUS... with a large hands-on team of professionals. Of course, AUS had big start-up problems and quickly hired AU on a pure management contract. They had nothing to do with organizing the university at the beginning and do not purport to be giving American University of Washington DC degrees. I expect that they probably have a bigger, better funded budget.

I always wonder how it is that these places jump into these educational partnerships with so little understanding of the realities.

VS

[globalnomad2]

Some people suspect that GMU gets $1 million or so a year just to lend its name to the campus and that's about the extent of the GMU education in RAK. Campus officials vehemently deny this, however.

If you're a regular Chronicle of Higher Ed reader, you'll know that Aussie universities are also having troubles around the world, and retrenching or closing. There was one in--where was it, Singapore?--that had to close after less than a year due to insufficient matriculations. A special science unit of Johns Hopkins had to close in Singapore as well. They were not able to attract any quality scientists to the Nanny State.

The American campuses that were established in Japan in the late 1980s (about 40 of them!) and some in Malaysia too were managed well enough(unlike Mickey Mouse U/RAK) but nobody there got the big picture: that no matter how good they might be, they were irrelevant to Japanese society, just as hardly any American students in the USA would want to get a Japanese college education--in Japanese. Today only the venerable Temple University in Tokyo survives.

I am beginning to think that most of these ventures aroung the world are doomed to failure and even if not, students will never get anything approaching the quality of the home campus. What's going on in Qatar might be an exception, I don't know. I can't imagine Cornell setting up a shoddy medical school! But these are carefully established, specific programs, not intended to be comprehensive small universities.

BTW, here's an interesting student-life factoid:

Princeton Review ranks the GMU Fairfax campus as the unhappiest college in America. Students are the most depressed there and the highest rate of attempted/successful suicides take place there. Probably one big factor is that it's a big commuter campus, an impersonal place without a great community feeling. (For those non-Americans who are reading and are interested, in the U.S. it is widely assumed that college campuses with large numbers of students living on or near campus are socially a much better experience for students than so-called "commuter" campuses that have few or no residence halls on campus.) I know there are other factors but I don't know what they are without merely speculating.

[veiledsentiments]

GMU is definitely NOT a party campus... a large proportion being part-time adults adding courses or degrees as I was. They have a decent MA in ESL, but it tends to be more bi-lingual education oriented.

It seemed bizarre to me when I even heard that they were entering the Gulf and in RAK, of all places.

VS

[scot47]

Other franchises - in the non-educational field - like D******* D*****ts, or P***a H** have problems transferring their activities to the Gulf. Imagine how much more complex operations - like universities - will fare !

[Longton]

Shouldn't it be D***** (D****** with apostrophe) D***ts ?

[scot47]

D*****' D***ts if you prefer.

[globalnomad2]

I hate cryptic puzzles that make me feel stupid. I get the Pizza joint, but I can't think of what company has two names starting with D.

We can mention company names here. Every consumer has the right to post negative reviews of products s/he consumes or uses.

[Longton]

Dunkin' Donuts, and in the UAE there is now Krispy Kreme

[veiledsentiments]

I think it was meant as humor, knowing our Scot. I remember how surprised I was to encounter a Dunkin' Donuts in the Gulf... I have never been in one in the US, why would I want to visit one in a foreign country? Donuts? Fried dough with sugar? ugh...

What were we talking about?

VS

[kiefer]