Build It And They Will Learn

South Korea, for its part, has upped its higher-education spending to 2.6 percent of its GDP—a level second only to the United States', and more than twice the Western average. Seoul is pumping more than $2 billion over the next five years into research programs at existing universities and is building a 20,000-hectare business and education zone that has already attracted schools like the State University of New York at Stony Brook and North Carolina State University. Still, despite its massive outlay, just 22,000 foreign students enrolled in South Korea in 2006 (compared to more than 66,000 in Singapore), and 218,000 Koreans opted to study abroad. The country has also struggled to attract Western professors.

Most analysts agree that the region with the best shot at truly threatening the West is the oil-rich Persian Gulf. "The gulf is definitely the buzzword of the moment," says Veronica Lasanowski, the author of a recent report on student mobility for the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. The tens of billions of dollars in government money being spent on education projects there dwarfs the investment in any of the other educational centers. Enormously wealthy and relatively stable, Dubai and its neighbors have already dethroned cities like Cairo, Baghdad and Beirut, creating one of the more bitter internecine rivalries within the larger global education race (following story).

Together, the emirates have devoted more than $20 billion to cultural and educational projects. Symposiums, independent media, art shows, book fairs, film festivals and other hallmarks of intellectual life are now regular features in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, transforming the gulf coast into what Daniel Balland, director-general of the Sorbonne's Abu Dhabi campus, describes as "a modern-day Andalusia"—a reference to the great intellectual center in southern Spain that flourished 1,000 years ago through the interaction of Western and Islamic culture.

A bottomless reserve of oil wealth is helping woo prestigious universities to the region. Qatar began the trend by persuading top-tier American schools such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Texas A&M and Northwestern to open branches in the sprawling Education City complex. Not to be outdone, Abu Dhabi has already opened a complete new campus for the Sorbonne and plans to open one for NYU in the fall; ambitious joint projects with INSEAD, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins are also in the works. Dubai, meanwhile, has partnered with Harvard, the London Business School and Boston University, as well as building the new Michigan State campus. "Others may have the vision, but they don't have the resources" for such projects, says Zaki Nusseibeh, vice chair of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage and a member of the Sorbonne-Abu Dhabi's board of trustees. "We can do it."

Indeed, the existing partnerships represent just the tip of the iceberg. Since last year, Qatar, with a population of less than a million, has begun spending $1.5 billion a year on scientific education and research. Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, recently started a $10 billion foundation—in one of the largest charitable donations in history —to "develop world-class knowledge" in the region. His emirate, along with Abu Dhabi and Qatar, is building multibillion-dollar science and technology parks to jump-start research efforts. Abu Dhabi is also pouring millions of dollars into an ambitious book-publishing project, hoping to almost triple the number of books published in Arabic every year—from about 300 to about 800—and translating up to 500 books annually, starting with authors like Milton Friedman, Stephen Hawking and, perhaps most surprisingly, Isaac Bashevis Singer.

While the sheer magnitude of academic spending makes the gulf impossible to ignore, this investment is just one factor shifting the intellectual landscape of the Middle East. Violence and instability have largely spared this corner of the region. And the benevolent and forward-looking leaders of countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates stand in sharp contrast to the autocrats who rule Egypt and Syria. Though the gulf states each have their own peculiarities, the emirates generally permit broad freedoms of speech and expression—especially when compared with neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which still practice draconian censorship. The emirates' governments also afford great social liberties to foreigners, with hardly any legal restrictions on dress, alcohol or gender roles.