Doha, Qatar
Over 1,200 people who work in education across the world arrived this week in this small, oil-wealthy Persian Gulf emirate. The visitors, who are scattered across Doha's five-star hotels and attended to by squadrons of PR people, are here for the second World Innovation Summit for Education, more commonly known as WISE, which bills itself as "building the future of education."
The summit is part of Qatar's continuing bid to become "a reference for education" says its chairman, Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, in an interview before the week's program began. "WISE was created to be a platform for people to network and to learn from each other."
For most of the participants, the conference is indeed a wonderful, all-expenses-paid networking opportunity. Participants are here courtesy of the Qatar Foundation, a government agency headed by the emir of Qatar's wife, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, which oversees a staggering array of educational, cultural and philanthropic activities.
"I was meeting people by the time I got off the plane," says Julian Johnson, senior vice president of Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an American mentoring program for students of color. The summit is still "embryonic," says Mr. Johnson, but "you have to give them props." The conference "does not just take inventory of the status quo, but looks at how do you propel change. And it broadens the conversation beyond the usual circles."
Freedom of Expression
A session of The Doha Debates devoted to arguing the motion "Education without freedom of expression is worthless" also takes place this week. The lively discussion program, which airs on the BBC and other channels worldwide, is yet another example of how Qatar is cultivating a reputation as an intellectual hub within the Persian Gulf.
The scholar Tariq Ramadan, perhaps best known for having his work visa revoked by the United States just before he planned to take up a post at the University of Notre Dame in 2004, argued on Tuesday's show that, in fact, education without freedom can be "counterproductive" and that young people in Muslim-majority countries are too often told: "Be quiet, get knowledge, get a salary, and don't change anything."
Nagla Rizk, a professor at the American University in Cairo, countered that "working your brain is a luxury when you can't feed your kids" and asked Mr. Ramadan if the education of the students who made up a majority of the audience was worthless.
Qatar is an absolute monarchy and adheres to a strict interpretation of Islam. Freedom of expression is limited; it is a crime to criticize the emir or religion. The audience passes the motion, 53 to 47 percent.
A Holistic Approach
This year's WISE summit focuses on reforming education systems, financing education during a global recession, and the use of new information and communication technologies in teaching.
According to Mr. Al-Thani, the summit has chosen "a holistic way of looking at things."
In some cases, that approach has worked. The interrelation between secondary and higher education, for example, has come up in interesting ways during several sessions. Delegates pointed out that not only does poor secondary education affect the success of university students, but that poor teaching colleges affect the quality of secondary education. Several participants questioned international donors' move away from financing higher education.
In other cases, connections have been harder to find, as speakers discussed projects with vastly different means and ambition
At a panel on leadership, Patrick G. Awuah talked about the university he founded, Ashesi University College, in Ghana, a small, private, nonprofit institution that intends to teach a generation of African entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, Abdullah A. Al-Othman, rector of King Saud University, in Saudi Arabia, explained his institution's planned to raise a $25-billion endowment by 2030 and rise in world university rankings by offering faculty members financial incentives to publish scientific papers.
Education City
Qatar's own situation is unique. "We are blessed with the wealth of oil and gas and also with the commitment of the leadership to education," says Mr. Al-Thani.
Doha's Education City is home to six branch campuses of renowned American universities: Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, and Weill Cornell Medical College. The University College London and the French business school HEC have just joined Education City as well.
Each university was selected for the way its programs—in engineering, medicine, museum studies, foreign service—fit a need in the Qatari economy.
The Qatar Foundation covers all the costs of the universities' operations. It is building a state-of-the-art teaching hospital as well as reportedly the largest student-services hall in the world. Many educators agree that it's an extraordinary investment to make in the 1,000 or so Qatari students enrolled here.
Mr. Al-Thani says Qatar has "learned a lot" from its partnerships with Western institutions and that it benefits from the exchange of ideas at WISE. He hopes the summit will create an active, year-round network of like-minded educators and that useful partnerships and projects will emerge.
After last year's summit, the Qatar Foundation created a partnership with the World Bank and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization to try to create a regional assessment system for the academic quality of schools and, eventually, universities.
But the project is still in its infancy, says Mourad Ezzine of the World Bank, and governments "are reluctant to assess because that leads to accountability for government performance."
In October, WISE also hosted a seminar for 12 university presidents from developing nations and territories, including Pakistan, Palestine, and Sudan. Experienced university presidents shared their insights about heading institutions facing challenges or turmoil with the participants.
More from The Global Chronicle
SIGN UP: Get Global Coverage in Your Inbox
JOIN THE CONVERSATION: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn
Comments
1. colin11 - December 09, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Actually, it is incorrect to say that Qatar is an absolute monarchy. Under the Emir, since 1995 H.H. Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, Qatar has experienced a notable amount of sociopolitical liberalization, including the endorsement of women's suffrage; the launch of Al Jazeera, the leading English and Arabic news source which operates a website and satellite TV news channel; and the transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy with the ratification of a permanent Constitution.
Qatari citizens approved the new Constitution via public referendum in April 2003, and it came into force in June 2005. The new Constitution provides for some separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, including the popular election of 30 of the 45-member legislative Al-Shoura Council, an independent Judiciary, and also makes the Emir-appointed Cabinet Ministers accountable to the legislature. The Emir does still hold ultimate authority in Qatar, however, including the appointment of the other 15 members of the Al-Shoura Council.
2. alittleheresy - December 16, 2010 at 02:01 pm
Actually colin11, you are incorrect (oh, and if you're going to plagiarise text for your argument, use better sources than Wikipedia).
Qatar IS still ruled by an absolute monarch. The political reforms of which you speak were in name only, and have changed little in reality. The Emir remains effectively a dictator, albeit a somewhat benign one (I don't deny that he has used Qatar's immense oil and gas wealth to build an extensive welfare state for his people). It remains illegal to form a political party in Qatar or to criticize the state in public, local newspapers contain mostly state propaganda, the internet is censored for "moral" and political content, and the prospects for democracy remain extremely bleak. Migrant laborers who reside and work in Qatar, drawn mostly from South Asia, suffer terribly; their condition - under the sponsorship laws - is similar to modern day slavery and there is little sign that this will change soon (how many will suffer in the building of soccer stadiums for 2022?). Qatar is effectively like an apartheid regime; the men from South Asia are not treated equally in public, and are frequently denied access to malls, parks and other public spaces.
Qatar is only socially "liberal" in comparison to places like Saudi Arabia (which isn't saying much). And while Al-Jazeera operates from Doha, and is doing a good job of reporting on contentious issues in the Arab world, it is muzzled by the Qatari state and operates at its mercy. Al jazeera very, very rarely reports directly on Qatari affairs, and when it does so they are usually fluff pieces approved by the state. I have watched Al jazeera for several years and can only remember one or two occasions on which it tried to report on the condition of migrant laborers in Qatar (and it was a very tepid piece).
The picture on the ground in Qatar is very different to how the country has recenly been portrayed in western media, both in connection with the world cup bid, and in accounts of education city (I know it well, I used to live there, and have lived elsewhere in the Gulf region). This is partly because few people know what it's really like there, and also because the Qatari state knows a thing or two about effective public relations management
3. eaffairs - December 27, 2010 at 04:06 am
Qatar Foundation has certainly learned a lot from their partnership with western institutions -- that they are too costly with no real benefit other than boosting tourism. As it was mentioned in the article, around 1,000 Qatari nationals are studying at all of these western institutions. Is it really worth the billions they're investing in these institutions to offer second class education? If we're talking about unique fields such as medicine and nursing then may be, but if we're talking about business, IT, and engineering then no for sure. Take Carnegie Mellon for example -- the senior admin may be senior faculty from CMU main campus, but faculty who are teaching in the program are either retired faculty members from other institutions (too old to be productive anyway) or faculty recruited on short-term contracts and stationed in Qatar (they're not tenure-track or tenured CMU faculty) and hence second class education. They're just paying for the brand and it is not worth it. They'd better off to invest in their national universities.