A SAUDI PRINCESS has criticised the country’s flagship university promoted by her own uncle, the king of Saudi Arabia, by calling it a “disaster” because it does not educate enough local students.
Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz Al Saud told Times Higher Education her country needs to embrace mass higher education rather than bringing in Western scholars to educate an “elite” — a model she claims devised by the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), which started teaching in 2009 backed by a $10 billion (Rs.59,000 crore) endowment from the monarch himself.
Princess Basmah lives in London and has previously called for legal gender equality in the kingdom, where women are banned from driving and must be accompanied in public by a male chaperone. Educated in the UK, Switzerland and Beirut, she is the daughter of King Saud (and reportedly his 115th and last child), the elder brother of the current king, who ruled between 1953-1964.
At a conference on Gulf education held in London, she said KAUST is for the “elites of the elites of the elites of the elites — of not even Saudi Arabia”. The graduate institution has set up a generous scholarship programme to attract foreign students and has managed to draw in international faculty, reportedly offering top salaries and in some cases tailor-made labs. It was established by the king with the aim of rekindling science and learning in the Arab world, and is free of many of the discriminatory laws against women in force in the rest of the country.
But Princess Basmah asks why the university isn’t educating more Saudis. “It’s a disaster… you see Japanese and Chinese coming to learn in Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Arabian (students) have no… right to go there,” she says adding that those Saudi students who attend are drawn from a tiny elite. Brian Moran, dean of graduate affairs at KAUST, counters that at the university’s most recent commencement ceremony in December last year, 37 percent of the students were Saudis.
Speaking during a debate at the Gulf Education Conference 2014, held in April, Princess Basmah also argued that the region is going “backwards” by attempting to attract more scholars from abroad. Instead, the Gulf nations should use “the people we have” and that there are “beautiful minds in our countries that we (do) not recognise”.
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)