Some of the world’s most fantastical higher education systems are in the countries that make up Gulf Co-operation Council, or GCC.  Among them, no system is more unique than Qatar’s.  And over the last few years, it has been on an ever-stranger course.

Qatar is one of those tiny gulf emirates that entered the modern world under treaty protection of the British Empire.  Along with Bahrain, Qatar chose to remain independent rather than join the United Arab Emirates in 1971, and it quickly joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) even though its oil reserves were not especially large.  Its real asset was natural gas and it was not until the 1990s and the development of significant Liquid Natural Gas exporting facilities that Qatar become truly, mindboggling rich.

Around that time, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, who in Gulf terms was a radical modernizer with significant ambitions, removed his father in a bloodless coup and set about using all that new money to try to turn Qatar into a regional and even global power, mainly through soft power projection.  It funded the now-global TV Network al-Jazeera.  It brought many international sports to Doha, and then began sponsoring major sports teams (e.g. FC Barcelona) or buying them outright (e.g. Paris St. Germain). Eventually, they won the rights to hold the 2022 World Cup. 

All of this soft-power stuff requires a well-educated populace, but twenty-five years ago, all the country had was a single university (Qatar University) that was not particularly well-suited to engaging in research or projecting the forward-thinking image that Qatar’s soft superpower image demanded.  So, the country got creative.  The Qatar Foundation (QF) – a massive charity run by the then-Emir’s wife Sheikha Moza bint Nasser – built something called “Education City” by bringing in a number of top American institutions to each run one “school” at the institution: Weill Cornell the medical school, Texas A&M the Engineering School, Georgetown the International Relations School, etc.  This didn’t come cheap.  But it did buy a lot of attention and brain power for a small Gulf State.

(Canadians were not invited to Education City, but we did get in on the game.  The College of the North Atlantic was asked to run a new community college, and the University of Calgary ran a Nursing school.)

The interesting thing about the Qatari strategy was it went beyond using prestige institutions to teach a few classes using contract faculty (which is more common across the bay in the UAE).  The whole QF strategy is about making sure the country still has good universities after the hydrocarbon money dries up.  Various tactics ensured that knowledge and expertise transferred to Qatar University, so that some expertise might remain even if Education City didn’t work out (QU has also hired some very sharp people over the last few years and is looking more like one of the Arab World’s few genuine global presences).  It also created a serious stand-alone graduate school (Hamad bin Khalifa University), which is the only one of its kind in the Arab world, in Education City.

However, just dumping a bunch of smart profs in a mid-sized Gulf city doesn’t necessarily create any innovation “magic.” Funding for research, plus partnerships with external groups with whom technology transfer can happen, is also needed.  So, as I wrote back here, about fifteen years ago the Qatar Foundation started getting into new, ancillary ventures.  A research wing was created, consisting of the Qatar National Research Foundation (QNRF), which is a large (relative to the country’s size) competitive research fund and the Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP). QSTP is both a landlord to some major engineering and technology companies, such as Cisco, Vodaphone and Siemens, and a space for business incubation and entrepreneurialism.  The idea was that putting all this money and business infrastructure directly adjacent to Education City would mimic the environment of major American research universities and drive more research (both basic and applied) and innovation.

This situation is genuinely unique.  Think about it: two different branches of QF (Education City and the research branch made up of QNRF/QSTP) essentially held the country’s entire innovation system in its hands.  There is nowhere else in the world where a non-governmental agency has this kind of power, nowhere else where, in theory, innovation activities could be co-ordinated quite this closely.  Yet while there has been the odd success here and there, all this money and effort hasn’t come close to generating the envisioned self-sustaining innovation cluster. And while this is not the kind of thing one speaks of in a Gulf country, there may be at least some genteel finger-pointing within QF as to why things have not turned out quite as hoped.

Things started to change in 2013, when the Emir retired and handed over power to his son.  In an instant, the Qatar Foundation was no longer answering to the Emir’s wife but to the Emir’s mother – and really, what self-respecting absolutist monarch wants to listen to his mom?  It’s difficult to prove anything directly, and in Gulf States no one writes openly about this stuff, but if you look at the QF and Education City websites, it’s noticeable how full they are of policy initiatives up until about 2014 and how quiet they have been since then.  The implication, I think, is that these institutions are less in favour under the current Emir that they were under his father.

Now to be fair, the new Emir and his government have had a lot on their plate over the past few years, what with interfering in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, being placed under embargo by the Saudis and their ilk, and above all working out how to host a World Cup in two years’ time.  But it was pretty clear from the most recent National Development Strategy, covering the period 2018-2022, that the new Emir was less than enthused about the results of QF.  Out of that strategy came a new Qatar Research, Development and Innovation (QRDI) Council, a somewhat shadowy body whose only public presence is a one-page static website, which in effect usurped QF of its co-ordinating role in innovation.  Publicly we are told that the Council developed a 5-year national strategic plan earlier this year, but so far as I can tell it is not a public document.  Which makes you wonder a bit what’s in store for QF.

On the one hand, one can portray QRDI as a step forward in the sense that it broadens the innovation system outside the hands of a single powerful NGO (and, as near as I can tell, portends an increase in Qatar University’s role, which is probably a good thing).  At the same time, QRDI’s secrecy is in contrast with the relative openness one normally sees at QF.  That’s not good news and signals a retreat from collegial western norms of higher education governance towards less collegial ones. 

Now maybe this all turns out ok.  Maybe once the country gets the World Cup out of its system, it’ll turn back to knowledge investments.  Maybe the 2023-2027 National Development will put QF and Education City in a more favourable light.   But at the moment, one cannot help but get the feeling that some the optimism that surrounded the explosive development of Qatari higher education in this century’s first decade is gone.