Saudi 'Freedom University' breaks new ground

Saudi Arabia's 'freedom university'

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That the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is to be positioned on a remote, reclaimed peninsular and segregated from the rest of Saudi Arabia comes as no surprise. The institution will be a cultural anomaly within wider Saudi society, exempt from the state’s Islamic legal framework.

The kingdom’s religious establishment restricts opportunities for women to enter higher education and rarely tolerates coeducation in line with Sharia Law. There is currently only one Saudi university where women and men can study side by side, while in the state’s public institutions they must enter classrooms through different doors and are separated by partitions during lectures.

In addition, research into advanced genetics and stem cells is tightly controlled.

Such constraints will not apply within the walls of the KAUST campus, where men and women of any ethnicity are welcomed and where the zealous Saudi religious police will have no jurisdiction.

KAUST will not be the first example of a privileged enclave existing within the kingdom. The university's status mirrors that of the secure compounds that have housed Western oil workers in the country for decades, and is the latest manifestation of the conflict within Saudi Arabia between the state’s commitment to its traditional constitution and its aspirations as a global power.

Although the workers’ compounds remain subject to Sharia Law, their existence is an anathema to religious conservatives in the region and the buildings have been subject to terrorist attacks.

But the skills and knowledge of their residents, and the international collaboration they represent, are vital to securing the oil profits upon which 75 per cent of the country’s economy is dependent.

The venture has, as its name suggests, been fully endorsed by the King. Significantly, he has charged the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco with building and staffing the institution on a pro bono basis.

Those involved in leading the enterprise have been remarkably candid about its purpose.

“There is a deep knowledge gap separating the Arab and Islamic nations from the process and progress of contemporary global civilization,” said Abdallah S. Jumah, the chief executive of Saudi Aramco.

“We are no longer keeping pace with the advances of our era.”

King Abdullah himself stopped short of directly echoing these sentiments, but hosted a lavish, high-profile foundation ceremony last year. At the event he is reported to have said: "We hope that the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will be a lighthouse for knowledge and a bridge connecting civilizations and nations to exercise a sublime humanitarian message."

However, the wider significance of KAUST’s establishment within Saudi Arabia should not be overemphasised. The appointment of Aramco as the university’s developers leaves the Saudi education ministry entirely out of the loop, and the institution will only target elite and international students, offering them a narrow range of science and technology courses.

Nonetheless the institution’s inception forms part of a drive, led by the King, to reform higher education in Saudi Arabia. He aims to expand opportunities for Saudis to study at university level, and to shift the tertiary education sector’s emphasis from religious scholarship to scientific research.

The initiative is to be combined with a programme of economic liberalisation, to ready the private sector for the growing stream of domestic graduates.

However, time will tell whether significant social change will accompany these reforms. The philosophy behind KAUST is an important exception to a general consensus among educators in the kingdom that the pursuit of international standards in Saudi universities need not entail any cultural ‘Westernisation’.

Professor Usama S. Tayyib, President of the King Adulaziz University in Jeddah, said: “We will be faced with strong sweeping currents that will lead to even more powerful competition among academic and commercial institutions and will require from us high level development standards to enable us to cope with such rapid changes in a way that will preserve the culture heritage and identity principles on which we have been raised.”

The university’s ‘vision’ mission statement reads: “Beacon of knowledge: Islamic values, old college traditions.”

Experts are predicting a political backlash against the king, who will face criticism from conservatives, particularly for curbing the reach of Sharia Law at the university.

As Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi newspaper editor has observed, “there are two Saudi Arabias, the question is which Saudi Arabia will take over.”

It is a tension neatly symbolised by copies of The Economist distributed at KAUST’s foundation ceremony. The edition contained an expensive advertisement for KAUST that appeared as an extra cover, but an article on legal reform in the Middle East had been individually torn out of all the copies by state censors.

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