The Los Angeles Times runs a story on King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST and the potential it holds. The piece also notes the obstacles it faces and raises the question of how it will interface with the traditional Saudi society around it. Doubts are raised that a new ‘Western enclave’ will achieve very much, but there’s strong opposition to some of the school’s goals, such as co-ed education. Worth a look.
New Saudi Arabia university will have a Western feel
Jeffrey Fleishman
THUWAL, SAUDI ARABIA — Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.
Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.
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