Last month Northwestern sent a delegation of nearly 80 administrators, students and faculty 7,000 miles to Doha, Qatar, to commemorate the opening of NU’s new Middle Eastern campus there. They traveled halfway around the globe to a small nation flush with oil and culturally worlds apart from Evanston to foster and promote a sense of unity between the two campuses.
The trip was paid for entirely by the Qatar Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization that has single-handedly bankrolled the country’s emergence as a coveted location for foreign education programs. When the NU campus in Qatar, known as NU-Q, officially opened its sparkling, new doors for the March 23 ceremony, it became the sixth American university with a satellite campus in Education City, courtesy of the Qatar Foundation.
This proliferation of higher learning institutions in Qatar is encouraging for its progressive potential to improve education and expand democratic ideals in one of the world’s most tumultuous regions. We must also consider, however, the ramifications of relying so largely on a foreign organization whose ability to sustain itself must be considered carefully. For NU alone, the Foundation financed not only the 2,500-acre school and all travel expenses for the students and staff who attended the celebration, but it will also sponsor NU’s journalism and communication building, to be completed in 2013.
Further concerns remain about Qatar’s lack of a completely free press, and the potential roadblocks that presents for the journalism students studying there. The Qatari campus offers only two programs, journalism and communication. If journalism students from the United States and elsewhere are hesitant to study in Qatar because of these societal constrictions, the program could be damaged.
The Qatar Foundation is making an admirable and inspiring attempt to drastically improve education not only in Qatar, considered one of the more liberal Middle Eastern states, but in the entire region. The organization’s financial sustainability, however, raises eyebrows. Right now, it writes the checks for American universities in Qatar, while the universities maintain control over the school’s curriculum and administration.
What happens when the Foundation no longer has the funds (or inclination) to float the facilities, personnel and travel expenses upon which the universities and students currently depend? And what happens if their support is only intended as a short-term subsidy? One of Northwestern’s goals is to maintain a student exchange program between the Doha and Evanston campuses, paid for by (you guessed it) the Qatar Foundation. That’s great news for this year’s inaugural freshmen class, but what will happen in the future?
The specter crouching in the shadows is a possible retraction of funding by the Foundation. This would leave Northwestern, in a shaky economy, paying for two campuses with dramatically different interests. If Foundation money is cut, the two schools could grow apart and lose that feeling of togetherness for which President Henry Bienen and the other Evanston delegates were striving when they journeyed to Qatar.
Hopefully, this situation is averted and they don’t become two campuses that share a name and little else, like the Northwestern Evanston and Chicago campuses. NU didn’t have to drop a dime on travel expenses, but hopefully those present at the inauguration suggested a sincere connection anyway. The purpose of the trip, after all, was to paint a picture of oneness between the two campuses, and not just be a symbolic formality put on someone else’s tab.
