Boasting one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, a team of top scientists and a campus where female and male students can mingle freely, Saudi Arabia’s new multibillion dollar university aims to break both scientific and social barriers.
Officially, the goal of this week’s launch of the sprawling new facility is to propel the kingdom into the heady global ranks of technological research.
But with women on campus not having to shroud themselves in the black abaya and allowed to drive cars, an unstated aim is to chip away at the strict restrictions on Saudi women imposed by hardline Muslim clerics.
On Wednesday, the monarch, in a keystone of his attempts to power his country into the 21st century, will open the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), probably the only postgraduate research university ever built from scratch.
Both the ambition and the billions of dollars thrown at the project have sparked deep interest in the global science community.
In just three years the Saudis have constructed a high-tech campus of huge modernist buildings on a 36km² desert plot on the Red Sea coast, and recruited hundreds of scientists and students from around the world.
KAUST has already launched joint research programs with institutions ranging from the National University of Singapore to France’s Institut Francais du Petrole to Britain’s Cambridge and Stanford in the US.
It has created its own research operations on nanotechnology, solar energy, bioengineering and other topics.
“Two years ago it was nothing but sand and sea. Today there is one of the best infrastructures for research,” KAUST president Shih Choon Fong said.
Classes, all taught in English, opened this month at the campus 80km north of Jeddah, with 71 professors and 374 post-graduate students.
The masters and doctorate degree students represent more than 60 countries, with some 15 percent from Saudi Arabia itself.
The Saudis drew on top-caliber scientists and science educators, especially in the US, to spur the recruitment process.
Money for research will be key, said Fawwaz Ulaby, a US-based professor who served as KAUST provost during the start-up period.
With about 15 percent of the incoming student body women, all having studied at universities outside the kingdom, mixing is absolutely necessary for successful research, experts say.
People involved in KAUST’s development say Abdullah hopes its culture will spill outside the campus, where women must be accompanied by a male relative outside the home and have to wear an abaya.
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