Northwestern President Henry Bienen announced new initiatives on NU’s Qatari campus Monday, including expanding current programs to encompass graduate education.
After his visit last week to Doha, the country’s capital, Bienen said he was impressed with the physical spaces of Education City, a 2,500-acre education complex.
“I’m really pleased with the Qatar initiative after having spent three days there,” Bienen said. “The scale of what’s going on is really amazing.”
NU’s journalism and communication school, set to open this fall to about 40 students, will occupy Texas A&M’s old buildings until construction begins for NU’s buildings.
There are five American universities currently there: Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth universities. All five are fully funded by the Qatar Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1995 by Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the emir of Qatar.
Education City is “bottlenecking … they’re doing so much building that just getting supplies and labor there is a problem,” Bienen said.
There is space in Carnegie Mellon’s buildings as well, because its business and computer science school will move into a new, large building that is scheduled to open in September, he said.
NU will eventually have its own buildings, but those details have not been decided, he said.
Education City also will add a teaching hospital that will open in 2011.
One of the reasons for Bienen’s visit was to discuss NU’s expansion beyond journalism and communications on its Qatari campus.
Although the details have not been worked out, Bienen said he thought everyone agreed to have a branch of the Media Management Center on the campus, “which will be a joint Kellogg and Medill enterprise as it is here,” he said.
“Hopefully Kellogg will go in there in some way,” he said. “I don’t know what the exact form will be – some kind of executive education.”
Administrators also discussed the option of bringing NU’s medical school to the Doha campus to focus on research. Weill Cornell Medical College, which focuses on teaching medicine, has been in Education City for six years. Although the teaching hospital is in the works, Bienen said NU’s medical school would need research space and it would require more building.
Dr. Larry Jameson, the dean of NU’s Feinberg School of Medicine, accompanied Bienen on his trip, along with James Hurley, Qatar’s budget director; Prof. Leigh Bienen, the president’s wife; and Associate Provost John Margolis, who will be “the über dean in operations,” Bienen said.
“I thought they were very, very productive discussions. I was very pleased,” Bienen said. “I think the universities are very collaborative.”
Though The New York Times reported Sunday and Monday that other universities received large monetary gifts in exchange for establishing Education City campuses, NU did not go to Qatar to make money or to compete with other universities, Bienen said.
However, he did not doubt the move would increase NU’s profile, as Kellogg’s international presence has done in the past.
“We went to Qatar because we thought it was an interesting place for us to expand the international aspects of the university,” Bienen said.
He also had another agenda: to help train students and to bring a set of high standards regarding communication and journalism, he said.
“If we can help bring a set of standards so it’s not just a political rat race … I thought there was an advantage of doing that in the home of Al-Jazeera,” he said. “That’s why they wanted to come to what they heard was the best journalism school in the country.”
Qatar’s sheikh has said he agrees with Bienen’s vision, and that he sees NU’s Qatari campus expanding regionally and internationally, according to Bienen.
“(Students) will make an impact and they’ll improve the world,” Bienen said. “Now if that sounds like do-goodism, then I plead guilty because I believe it.”
