A picture is here and yes they claim the finished version will have both male and female students and Western faculty. A question we’ve been asking over lunch lately is the following: how much would it really cost to set up a first-rate university — and not just a technical school — in Asia? Let’s say an Asian businessman were willing to put up $10 billion in endowment: how good would the school be? I see three major problems:
1. Many Asian governments cannot precommit to respecting academic free speech; nor for that matter can the Saudis.
2. An excellent university must be part of an intellectual network near other excellent universities. Arguably with the internet this effect is weakening over time. Still, if they tripled my salary I wouldn’t move to Saudi Arabia or for that matter Japan and that is for reasons related to network effects.
3. Such universities could not precommit to the governance systems (please don’t laugh) that have been so effective in bringing American schools to dominate the world rankings. In fact the more money that one person or government gave, the greater the commitment problem might be. By these governance systems I mean faculty control of appointments, with academic-based monitoring by the Dean and Provost, independent boards, and Presidents willing and able to raise enough money to maintain financial independence for the future. That’s a pretty tall order but you’ll find all those qualities in the successful American colleges and universities. Long-run financial independence also requires a more general culture of philanthropy which is found only in the United States.
Technical schools aside, I do not expect American colleges and universities to lose their leadership role in the immediate future. And if they do, the real competitors will prove to be Europe, the UK, and Canada, not Asia.
So, you are also pessimistic about universities in China, HK and Singapore?
>> Long-run financial independence also requires a more general culture of philanthropy which is found only in the United States. <<
Home of the brave, land of the free. God Bless America. However, your notion is pure American chauvinism and elitism. You seem to give voice to the assumption that the American model is not only best but irreplaceable. Are you also implying that the value of a school can be measured by its endowment?
At many of the leading schools around the world, and you’ll find institutions at least as old and prestigious locally as Harvard or Yale, which find means other than philanthropy to maintain financial independence.
The most absurd part of your statement is that past practices are the only model for the future. Among the other current and future means of maintaining financial independence are:
1. Government funding (donors are no less persuasive than government in advancing their agenda)
2. Licensing of intellectual property developed at the university (a successful medical research department could fund many unprofitable economics and literature departments)
3. The new American model: make those who can afford it pay exorbitant tuitions. Rather than wait for alumni donations, extract the money while the student is still reliant on the school. Who is to say what a top class education is worth to a Saudi prince?
Dan, your first and third proposals are not ways of obtaining long-term financial independence. Government funding is neither long-term nor does it lead to independence. The role of past donors in influencing the current policy of an institution is necessarily minimal, particularly in comparison to the influence of government in such a regime.
Raising tuition prices is again not a solution to long-term funding problems, since there is no guarantee of tuition revenue. The school would be at the “mercy” of market forces. Moreover I question whether that is the model at any American university. If anything the trend is towards free tuition, funded by endowments. I also imagine a Saudi prince would be willing to pay little more than the cost of an education at the best American university.
Quite a lot to disagree with today:
1. I imagine they would set up the technical school first, and later expand it. If I remember correctly, once upon a time MIT only taught mechanical and civil engineering.
Also, arguably the most important areas are the professional ones (engineering/business/law/medicine), and related areas (science/econ/other assorted subfields). Would the world really care if Harvard/Yale/Princeton all simultaneously dropped their english/womens studies/philosophy departments?
2. I’d go to Saudi Arabia for a year or two if they tripled my salary. Of course, they will only make such an offer to good people, rather than deadwood.
Also, the intellectual network need not include only other universities. Connections to industry are just as useful, if not more so.
Of course, I’m a little skeptical of this particular university. Everyone in the pictures is wearing a suit! I certainly could not work in the desert wearing a suit.
An excellent university must be part of an intellectual network near other excellent universities. Arguably with the internet this effect is weakening over time.
My sense is that as more and more academics are part of two-academic-career couples the importance of being near other universities is increasing: a college/university can make an attractive offer to an academic, but if there aren’t attractive opportunities for the spouse in the area, that offer is going nowhere.
“the governance systems (please don’t laugh) that have been so effective in bringing American schools to dominate the world rankings”: that gives insufficient credit to Hitler.
Man, the comments accompanying that NY Mag article are laughable. It seems that far too many Americans, even sophitimacated Noo Yawkers, can’t comprehend that the UAE is not Saudi Arabia.
Tyler, I would look at the example of medical education in the U.S. as a past historical precedent.
In the 19th century, medical education in the U.S. was backward. Doctors graduated without ever seeing patients or practicing on cadavers. There were no entrance requirements for medical school (no college degree required). The best science and medicine was practiced in Europe, specifically Germany. Like Saudi Arabia today, the vast majority of endowments were parked in theology departments. Medicine got a small fraction of what theology got.
Then Johns Hopkins University opened in the 1870s, modeled not after American institutions like Harvard (which was atrocious), but after the finest German institutes of higher education. Its med school opened in 1893 but its labs opened immediately, at first staffed by professors who though American, had gone to Germany to study and learned their laboratory techniques there. Within 20 years, the students who came out of Hopkins were running the Rockerfeller Institute (set up around the same time and quickly the preeminent research institution in the world) and modeling other American medical schools along the Hopkins model.
A few points:
For areas such as basic science, the Saudi’s might have success. It’s hard and tedious to get grant money for research in say . . . medicine, which is expensive to research. There’s a whole lot of scientists at the NIH fretting about funding (I used to work there). Also, depending on the research, scientific research may be less “political.”
I would also note that the Saudis have committed to such far reaching reforms as . . . letting women be educated! If you’re going to spend $10 to try to imitate the west, you might as well do it right. You can’t clamp down too much.
Let’s not forget the unbelievable subsidies that higher education gets in the United States … grants, financial aid, student loans, student visas, etc.
The US federal government has a bigger pocketbook!
“the real competitors will prove to be Europe, the UK, and Canada, not Asia”
What about Israel?
I go to the University of Toronto, and I would second your comment about competition from Canadian schools. My American friends tell me that they came up to Canada because their money goes further here – apparently, U of T can offer higher-quality education for about the same tuition as their public universities.
Incidentally, I also spent last year at the University of Edinburgh, which has been positively invaded by American students. I’m not sure what that’s about – tuition is quite high and the quality of education is pretty low – maybe something cultural.
Vedanta University in India aims to “join the ranks of the world’s greatest Universities such as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.”
http://www.vedanta.edu.in/
They plan to spend $3.2 billion in setting up the university.
Let me go ahead and ask: Why do you think that US/European schools are bound to retain their leadership role?
I wouldn’t be so confident.
The biggest factor in determining a school’s reputation, especially at the graduate / research level is how much money they have in the bank. $10 Billion dollars would put this university among the top in the world. They will certainly draw students and faculty.
I can’t imagine that other universities in Asia or the Middle East couldn’t do the same thing.
Of course, Dubai and the other UAE countries seem more interested in drawing in branch campuses of US-based schools, but they could just as easily start building their own.
A.C.: Modern American medical education began at UPenn, and they modeled their school on the University of Edinburgh (which emphasized clinical teaching with real patients).
UPenn’s medical school was founded in 1765, more than 100 years before Johns Hopkins was founded. Johns Hopkins’ innovation was in research, not teaching.
I hate to dominate the conversation here:
But Allison: I also spent some time as an undergrad at the University of Edinburgh, and I am very interested to know what faculty you studied in? I found the academic program to be quite rigorous (well, at least as rigorous as undergrad can be), and I didn’t encounter that many American students at all.
I suppose there could be more Americans over there than there were in 2005, but I would doubt that the quality of education would’ve decreased significantly.
I don’t understand. I’ve always been under the impression that schools like Tokyo University or IIT-Bombay are first rate.
I recently finished reading “Titan”, a bio of John D. Rockefeller, and there are some interesting chapters on his founding of the University of Chicago 100+ years ago. He faced similar problems to an institution like this in setting up.
karl,
I think dearieme was simply pointing out (a bit too tersely and cryptically) that Hitler decimated the quality of German universities when he came to power (which until the 1920s were arguably the very best in the world for science and math and a number of other subjects) by expelling Jewish professors and stifling academic freedom, and later created conditions that drove talented people (not just academics) across the entire continent to flee overseas. This continued even after he was gone: the economic doldrums of the war-ravaged economies in the immediate postwar era and the long Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe were also effects of which he was the indirect cause, and also contributed to the brain drain. Europe’s loss was America’s gain.
Surely you Jest!
Of our “excellent universities,” will it take more than ten fingers to count those which “respect academic free speech?”
That must not rate as an essential criterion.
And “governance?” What makes American Universities (and colleges) effective is the self-seeking, or goal-seeking orientation and drive of those who go to learn, many from abroad; and, who do find ways to learn despite what passes for the “governance” that exists through the self-perpetutating, predisposed oligarchies, which like all such, descend ever too slowly, into mediocrity in membership and effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law
Someone left blockquote on.
An evolutionary psychologist makes the same point against Geoffrey Miller here.
Wow, that is one completely retarded not to mention racist and reductionist “paper.” Again, I ask is that tongue in cheek? Asians won’t excel in a field because they can’t speak English?
WTF???
I wouldn’t wipe my ass with that.
In American universities Jews make up a disproportionate part of the faculty, particularly in the hard sciences and mathematics. Would they be welcome at a Saudi university? And would they want to live in Saudi Arabia? I have a feeling that in many countries the university would have to be surrounded by an extraterratorial enclave in order to attract a first rate faculty.
I vaguely note that the tribunes of academic freedom are very much exaggerating its importance for the quality of a university; the Soviet Union had *excellent* universities.
Slightly uncomfortable question: does the target market want good universities, or prestigious ones? If people want prestige, college costs are high enough that travel isn’t much of a barrier. Good but non-prestigious faculty can probably be had much cheaper and with faculty drawn from the local population.
I’d add India to your list: it has a large demand for education and a plentiful supply of locally produced researchers. That’s an environment where you could spend money on more than impressive stonework.
Tyler,
What about branch campuses of US universities? I wonder how George Mason in Ras Al Khamaih is doing.
http://rak.gmu.edu/
One of the students in the banner at this link is wearing an Economics t-shirt.
GM-RAK states it awards GM degrees.
That was the stumbling in the Yale-Abu Dhabi deal that recently fell through (shameless plug that links to several news articles; doesn’t seem to have made the news in the UAE):
http://emirateseconomist.blogspot.com/2008/04/yale-university-exits-abu-dhabi-deal.html
Is it realistic?
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