It looked boring: square, monochrome desks and whiteboard-covered walls, decorated only by two flat-screen plasma televisions. Eight new students sat at attention circled around Professor Janet Key.
“Go for it,” she said.
They had an assignment: interview each other and write. Freshmen Nazneen Zahan and Sara Al-Thani giggled while they talked and scribbled in their notebooks.
This could be any classroom—maybe one in Fisk Hall. But it’s not. It was the opening week of classes at the new Northwestern University campus in Qatar. For the first time, pure Northwestern undergraduate degrees are being offered half-a-world away.
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It started online. One day in early 2006 President Henry Bienen opened an e-mail that asked him: Would Northwestern be interested in setting up a campus in Qatar?
“I was getting a lot of e-mails—there was a boom in the Gulf,” Bienen says. The boom was based on two things the Gulf region has in abundance: space and money. Historically, students have traveled to the U.S. to reap the benefits of American higher education, but with Gulf countries now loaded in oil money, they can afford to bring U.S. higher education to them.
Bienen considered projects in Tunisia, Morocco, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, but he says he ultimately chose Qatar because of Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Doha. Education City is home to branch campuses of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, Weill Cornell Medical College, Texas A&M University, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University, all members of The Qatar Foundation. The Foundation (a private nonprofit founded in 1995 by His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the Emir of Qatar) built Education City as part of its mission to open research and education opportunities to Qataris. Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, who visited Northwestern in May, chairs the foundation.
Most of the people who have enrolled in the Qatar school have made the country their home, though it draws a swath of students from all over the world. Doha is an international city, after all, which helps explain why the government is spending huge amounts on importing schools with built-in credibility. “You know you can build a university from scratch, the way this one was built,” says Richard Roth, the senior associate dean for journalism at the Qatar school, from Evanston. “Or, what Sheikha Mozah apparently decided was not to build them because it takes too long, but to just buy them. And I think this is genius. Instead of having some great schools, she went out and said, ‘Let’s go find the best schools.’”
Within a few months of approaching Bienen, representatives of Education City began visiting Northwestern to discuss the two schools they were most interested in: the School of Communication and the Medill School of Journalism. The Foundation wanted to combine the two curricula into one school: NU-Q.
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Photo by Hannah Fraser-Chanpong / North by NorthwesternBefore accepting the Foundation’s proposal, Dean John Lavine says Northwestern carefully considered press freedom in Qatar. Though freedom of the press is part of the Qatari constitution, the media still suffers from self-censorship. It’s habit, not government, according to Professor Roth, that keeps existing journalists in Qatar from seeking out controversy. And just because the Qatar Foundation is writing a blank check doesn’t automatically mean it’s also willing to accept the ideas that Medill represents. After all, becoming a stalwart against press restrictions and censorship isn’t exactly in the government’s favor.
Lavine’s outlook is more optimistic: He thinks Northwestern can contribute for the better to the region’s media landscape as it changes—maybe even help build a free press from the ground up. When he met with members, he says he “candidly” asked them if they really wanted his school’s journalism curriculum. “I remember along the way them saying first of all that we should remember that they started Al Jazeera,” Lavine says. “They knew what journalism was. And it was rough-and-tumble journalism.” (The Emir of Qatar founded Al Jazeera in Doha in 1996 as an Arabic-language news channel. It has since expanded to include an English-language channel and a children’s channel.)
One major reason the Foundation invited Medill to Education City was because it hoped the school’s graduates would improve Qatar’s already-existing English and Arabic newspapers. “There’s a clear need already in the working press over there. There’s some appetite or hunger,” Roth says. “I read some of those papers and some of the stories, and they’re not very good.”
NU-Q freshman Nayaab Shaikh, 20, has experience with journalism in the area. She spent a summer working as a “trainee” journalist at the Gulf Times, one of country’s English-language dailies. Though she enjoyed her experience, she had difficulty with interviews. “The level of covering news needs to grow,” she says.
Qatari NU-Q freshman Mariam Al-Darwish says NU-Q’s debut in Education City drastically changed her plans for her future. Before Northwestern came to Qatar, she had never thought of majoring in film or communication. “I wasn’t sure as to what major to pursue, but when this came out, I said to myself I am definitely going to be a part of Northwestern,” she says.
Nazneen Zahan, 19, also says she was “lucky” that Northwestern came along. Originally Bangladeshi but born in Doha, Zahan always planned to stay in Qatar for university. Her choices were medicine and business, which she studied for a year at CHN University in Doha. But her opportunities for television journalism looked better once Northwestern showed up. She thought specifically about career opportunities at Al Jazeera in the city. “Whenever I think about media, the first thing I think about is Al Jazeera,” she says.
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The real negotiations kicked off after Bienen approached James Hurley, the Office of Budget Planning’s associate vice president, in fall 2006. That’s when Hurley started developing project proposals to present to the Qatar Foundation. Though exact numbers remain confidential because of the Qatar Foundation’s policies, Hurley says the creation of the Doha campus involves a budget not unlike those for individual schools on the main campus. Some of the major considerations are things like cost of faculty, support staff and student services.
One new budget consideration, besides the considerable travel expenses between Doha and Chicago, is NU-Q’s need for an independent central administration with its own finance and human resources staff. “Because they’re so far away, they have to build their own expertise,” Hurley says. “We’re trying to have them as self-reliant as possible.”
But the biggest difference, of course, is where the money comes from. The Qatar Foundation is footing the bill for the entire operation. It may be a blank check, according to Hurley, but not one the administration treats lightly. “We are frugal here at Northwestern and we will be frugal with the Foundation’s money,” he says. “That’s part of our Northwestern culture.”
Regardless of spending practices, however, it is difficult to overstate how lucrative for Northwestern the deal really is. While the Qatar Foundation pays for all faculty, staff, building, utilities and technology, the American university still collects every Middle Eastern student’s tuition.
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There’s one area where the Qatar Foundation still has no model for the new school: construction. The Foundation will build the classrooms, studios, labs and offices from scratch, but Hurley is confident that whatever it looks like, the architecture will have to be one-of-a-kind. “There’s a new term for them called ‘starchitects,’” he says, referring to the master plan that was designed by well-known Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.
Until NU-Q has a physical campus, it will share space with the TAMU-Q building (first opened in 2003) for the first year of operation, and then move into the CMU-Q building for the second and third years. This kind of tenant status is characteristic of Education City’s newcomers and, according to Hurley, it gives administrators more time to plan. “We get to continue to fine-tune our space needs which are really critical for these two programs. We need television studios. We need radio stations. We want to be really careful,” he says.
At the moment, temporary studios are being built in TAMU-Q for introductory lighting and cinematography coursework, and each program will also have its own media lab, says Mimi White, the senior associate dean for communications.
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Photo by Hannah Fraser Chanpong / North by NorthwesternThe inaugural class of 2012 is composed of 38 students—21 in the communication program and 17 in journalism. 14 of the students are Qatari, while the other 24 represent other countries. Just eight members of the class are male. NU-Q received 126 applications, and White spent two-and-a-half weeks interviewing five to seven applicants a day. “We were looking for what we look for here—for students who had the capacity to do the academic program that Northwestern has to offer,” she says.
Before he came to Doha for the first time, Assistant Professor Ibrahim Abusharif was worried about students’ ability to write idiomatically. But after grading the first papers of the year, he became a little more optimistic. “Each one of the papers I read, I can see the students can write,” says Abusharif, who teaches Introduction to 21st Century Media to journalism students. “They’re trying. Some of them are overtrying, but they’re trying. You can work with effort.” Abusharif will work with students mostly on grammar and writing drills throughout the first semester. In 16 weeks, he says, they’ll try out writing and reporting.
While about half of the applicants were Qatari nationals, most people who applied to NU-Q have taken up permanent residence there, regardless of nationality or passports. Because culture and student demographics are completely unlike those in Evanston, small changes to the curriculum have to be made.
The communication program is a combination of both the communications studies and radio, television and film curriculums that already exist in Evanston. Roth says the core journalism classes will remain the same, but modifications will be made to fit students’ cultural and media backgrounds. While there are some students who have worked in television stations, there are others who have almost no experience with any kind of media. “Part of the issue right now is looking at our curriculum and looking at some of it through the eyes of someone who is of or who knows that culture quite well,” Roth said. “Saying, you ought not talk about this in the classroom because they won’t understand it or you would be better off spending your time talking about that.”
Roth says plagiarism is one topic that will be covered with more depth. He found that some admissions essays from NU-Q applicants had been plagiarized. When confronted, some students were unaware that such practice was even a problem.
He recognizes that some norms of Islamic or Middle Eastern culture will inevitably affect the way students react to assignments. Female students may want to sit in the back of the classroom or may not want to interview men alone. Students may face restrictions in who or what they can photograph. Whether or not these issues will actually end up being problems is not yet clear. “People say that could be a problem, but then again, I talk to some of these young girls and they said, ‘It’s not a problem. If that’s my job, I do it,’” Roth said.
Small changes will also be made to fit NU-Q’s semester system, as opposed to the quarters here. Semester-long courses will allow NU-Q’s schedule to fit better with the rest of Education City, and NU-Q students will take classes in other nearby schools to fulfill distribution requirements.
NU-Q will also have its own Arabic-language journalism labs. Students will be able to rework weekly assignments in Arabic for feedback. “Many don’t speak it at all but for those who do, Her Highness asked if we could offer at least labs in Arabic so that they would come out bilingual journalists,” Lavine says, “which I thought was, of course, a terrific idea.”
According to Roth, some of the faculty members headed to Doha already have experience with Arabic language and customs. Janet Key, a former Medill lecturer, will be one of the main journalism teachers abroad. She has worked in the Gulf and joins Northwestern from the American University in Cairo. “She knows the culture, she knows the language, she knows journalism,” he says.
Six other faculty members come from both inside and outside of Northwestern. They’re joined by one professor from Georgetown in Qatar and another from CMU-Q. Roth says that though several members of Medill’s current faculty have expressed interest in moving to Doha, he chose the journalism faculty for their ability to work with freshmen and sophomores.
Dean and CEO of NU-Q John Margolis says the current faculty is just the beginning for NU-Q. Right now, they’re only teaching freshmen, but things will get a lot more complicated as time goes on. “I confess that I do wake up occasionally in the middle of the night worrying about this or that and recognizing that there are a lot of pieces to this puzzle,” he said in June, prior to his move to Doha.
For now, the only noticeable effect NU-Q will have on the Evanston campus is the missing faculty members. “We’ll be able to facilitate movement into this part of the Middle East,” Bienen says. “But who knows how this will evolve over time?”
Margolis hopes that in the next few years, there will be a more direct exchange of knowledge between Doha and Evanston. With the faculty rotating between the two campuses, students can expect to hear more about Arab media culture in their classes. And more faculty will be hired to replace those lost in Evanston.
For his part, Lavine expects there to be a constant flow of students, as well as faculty, between the two campuses. “It’s terrific. Simply terrific,” he says. “If we start to put Qatari students in newsrooms in Amman or the West Bank or Tel Aviv, why can’t we put Evanston students in newsrooms in Amman or the West Bank or Tel Aviv?”
Evanston students can’t yet study abroad at NU-Q, but Lavine calls it a “real goal” and a real possibility. When and if the program is setup, those who choose to study at NU-Q will get to be abroad without really leaving campus, he says. Northwestern requires students to spend a certain number of academic quarters on the Northwestern campus in order to graduate, but because NU-Q is campus soil, despite its foreign location, Evanston students could study in Doha without using their allowance for time away.
The Qatar Foundation assured the Northwestern administration that, regardless of sexual orientation, religious preference or nationality, Northwestern students would be welcomed to Doha. “We should do what we do here and represent the values we have here,” Lavine says. “So, if we had Israeli students who wanted to come to school in Education City and wanted to go to NU-Q, terrific. If we had American or Canadian or Filipino or Korean-Jews, and there are all of those who wanted to go to school in Education City and do journalism, fine.”
Plus, of course, there is always the lingering prestige factor of building a global brand. Over the summer, Northwestern moved up a few spots to the twelfth rank on the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings. That kind of good press doesn’t go unnoticed abroad. “Northwestern has grown from a more regional to an international university,” White says.
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When the deal was finalized, Dr. Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, vice president of education for the Qatar Foundation, wrote a welcome letter to Northwestern. In it, he said he hoped NU-Q would “promote a maturing of our society into one where everyone can have a voice and everyone is accountable. A vibrant, healthy media scene will bring about greater transparency and accountability, and these are hallmarks of successful, participative societies.” He recognized Northwestern’s unmatched excellence in the two programs in the region and saw “their establishment here as evidence of Qatar’s real commitment to progressive social change.”
Justifying Northwestern’s grab for global status isn’t hard for Margolis: “Doesn’t one want to have more impact rather than less?” he says. But even if the Foundation’s intentions are genuine, the concern stands that when Arab governments promote a slightly more open media it can become a substitute for real political participation. The Arab media hasn’t completely rid itself of the traditional role as a basic propaganda machine used to rally support for regime policies and target other critical governments, and outlets generally still follow a “news-receiving” rather than a “news-gathering” method. Even private media are not independent because they do not operate in truly free markets.
Press freedom in the Middle East isn’t universally supported, either: While a Pew Global Projects attitude survey found that those in Muslim countries overall placed a high priority on press freedom, in some countries only one-third thought the press should be free from censorship. The question then becomes, even if there are professional, trained journalists in the Middle East, will they be able to act as agents for political or social change?
Bienen says no one is expecting Northwestern’s participation in Education City to bring peace or democracy to the region, but they are still aiming high. “Our job is to matriculate students, but we’re going to stand for something,” he says. “We’re going to stand for, I think, ethical ways of going about your business; we’re going to stand for doing your job well, for being able to write and communicate well, and various values. Hopefully we’ll stand for values of open society, freedom, democracy and no censorship. Whether those values can resonate broadly in Qatar and even more broadly in the Middle East, I don’t know, but one can hope.”