doha puts education first, unlike dubai

Gyus, I foudn this in the Huffington Post today, It is interesting to see how gulf states compete for disinguish each othr in different areas and Doha, qatar has chose educationa and sport.

In the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi and NYU have collaborated on a deal to create NYU Abu Dhabi, a liberal arts campus. In Dubai, Michigan State has established a world-class research, teaching and scholarship facility. In Saudi Arabia, KAUST, an international, graduate-level university is sprouting up with the hopes of inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the conservative country. Set to open this year, the school has teamed up with two notoriously liberal universities, Stanford and University of California Berkeley, to contribute faculty members to develop a world-class curriculum for master's and doctoral programs in this conservative country.

But Doha may take the cake since Virginia Commonwealth University, Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M, Carengie Mellon, Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and now Northwestern are all collaborating with Qatar Foundation to run branch campuses in Education City.

This spirit of collaboration was manifest at a design conference held earlier this month at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar. The five day design conference known as Mousharaka - the Arabic word for collaboration - featured design professionals, filmmakers, and students from across the world, including Mira Nair, the famed Hollywood filmmaker.

On the drive back from Education City to Doha, it is hard to miss the dozens of signs that line the Corniche reading "Hand in hand for Education...For Qatar!" printed on top of a photo of an adult's hand guiding a child's hand as he writes with a pen.

Sure, the glitz, glamour and general over-the-top approach that these oil-rich countries have become famous for is still visible in Doha. Just a few blocks after the banners advertising Qatar's education initiative are enormous billboards reminding drivers that "Venice is now in Doha!" - referring to Villagio Mall, a gaudy megamall designed to give shoppers the idea that they are in Venice, equipped with an indoor Venetian style canal, gondolas and sky-blue and twilight black painted ceilings (not to mention the ice-skating rink which while oddly placed, is still a less pronounced and somewhat more practical version of Dubai's indoor ski slopes).

But in Doha, the emphasis on culture and education is manifested in a series of initiatives launched this year such as the arrival of the Tribeca Film Festival in November, the birth of a national symphony orchestra and the Museum of Islamic Art, one of the world's most comprehensive collections of Islamic art.

With such an emphasis on cultural and educational institutions, Doha cannot be the new Dubai. Can it? Well, maybe on the outside. Its true that it has the overworked and underpaid migrant workers, the burgeoning skyline littered with cranes, the sandy desert dunes, the luxurious hotels (including the first W hotel in the Middle East), and even its own man-made island shaped like a palm tree, but Doha seems to have a key ingredient that many would argue Dubai lacks - depth, or at least the desire for it.

As the global financial crisis halts development projects across the region in their tracks, in Qatar, universities, hotels and office towers are still being built by the throngs of overworked and underpaid migrant workers at a steady pace. Moreover, the emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who staged a bloodless coup in 1995, has since been shaping Qatar as a relatively progressive political powerhouse, if a controversial one.

Perhaps aware, now more than ever, of the problems facing Dubai as a result of its frenetic pace of growth and development, Qatar is investing in its education system, its health care system and in sports (it launched its official bid for the World Cup, after an unsuccessful bid to host the Olympic games) in ways that differ from the Dubai model.

Of course there are those who say that you can't just import universities, a curriculum, and professors and expect a university to succeed in the east the way it does in the west. Or that these countries may be buying the brands, but not the quality of education. But after visiting Education City, having conversations with some students, and sitting in on a Q&A event between Seymour Hersh and students at Northwestern university it is hard not to conclude that in a lot of ways Doha may be playing most of their cards right.

If we see the glass as half full instead of half empty, it is plausible, maybe inevitable that universities, professors, students and curricula coming from the west, may bring with them ideas and a general openness that this traditionally conservative and extremely young region may benefit from as it modernizes.

If liberalism arrives through educational institutions funded, framed and fixed as part of Qatar's foundation (the actual name of the foundation behind Education City itself) it may facilitate a more organic shift towards sustainable modernity that is in harmony with Qatar's rich traditions where collaborations and cooperation between east and west is natural necessary and welcomed.