It is only a two and a half hour flight from Beirut to Doha, the capital city of Qatar, one of the Persian Gulf Emirates. The city could not be more different from Beirut, which at least in the seaside portions that survived the 2006 Israeli bombing, is a complexly beautiful old city, now quite modernized. Doha, on the other hand, appears to have been built in the past decade (mostly it has). It is a city of high rises built on a desert, facing the Gulf. I am in a hotel on a point of land in the Gulf, surrounded by nothing but new construction. The pace of building quickened a couple of years ago as the Qataris built up capacity in response to the Asian Games, which were held here a year ago. But it is a small country of enormous strategic importance, partly because of its mammoth reserves of natural gas and partly because of the huge U.S. military base here.

This is my third or fourth trip here, to work with the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service program in Doha. The Qataris, due mainly to the influence of the ruler’s wife, the Sheikha Moza, have made a very large investment in establishing American higher education in Qatar, through the recently established Qatar Foundation. Seven or eight American institutions have established campuses here, all awarding their graduates American degrees. In some ways the most impressive is Cornell University, which operates a full-scale medical school, awarding New York State MD’s. There are also programs run by Texas A&M, Carnegie-Mellon, Virginia Commonwealth University and, soon, Northwestern. I confess that I do not have the list before me, and have probably forgotten one or two.

The Georgetown program is quite impressive, I think. They began three years ago with a small freshman class (around 25 students) and now have three classes, so that by next year they will graduate students with a Georgetown School of Foreign Service degree. They have promised the Foundation to provide a fully equivalent SFS degree here, and they are doing it. The bulk of the faculty come from the main campus in Washington, D.C. (amazing!), the curriculum is the same, and soon they will have a new building worthy of their institutional prestige. The students, and Georgetown is shooting for a total enrollment of about 200, are almost entirely from the region, with about half coming from Qatar. More than half the students are females, in part because of the reluctance of local families to send daughters away from home.

I was recruited to advise the School on an American Studies program — in D.C. each SFS student has to select a foreign area to study, but in Doha all the students study the U.S. as their special foreign area — since the dean here is my friend James Reardon-Anderson, a China specialist with whom I worked when I was at ACLS. Jim has developed a very solid program, though he is faced with the problem of recruiting faculty (mostly American) in the face of increased regional competition — readers of The Chronicle will be aware of the steady flow of new announcements of U.S. higher educational efforts in the Gulf. Money talks, and there is plenty of money in this region.

I now serve as a member of the Joint Advisory Board of SFS-Q, along with a few other Georgetown representatives and representatives of the Qatar Foundation, led by the impressive Sheik Abdulrahman (an important member of the ruling Al Thani family). We will be having our meeting on Monday. It has been fascinating to someone like myself, a higher education junkie, to play even a small role in recreating American higher education in this fringe of the Middle East.