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Other initiatives are also helping. The heavy investments many of these states have made in airlines and hotels have made them unusually accessible. Visa restrictions (for everyone but Israelis) are among the most liberal in the world, and places like Dubai even offer "smart cards" to regular visitors, allowing them to pass effortlessly through "eGates" without showing a passport. This ease of travel has made conferences like last year's Festival of Thinkers in Abu Dhabi—which brought together 16 Nobel Prize winners and more than 160 intellectuals from around the world—an almost daily affair in the gulf. Last year 140 conferences took place in Qatar alone.

The ethnic and national diversity now found in the gulf has also helped attract American universities. "You can find people from South Asia, the Far East, Africa, Europe and the whole Middle East [there]," says Hilary Ballon, a former Columbia art history professor recently appointed an associate vice chancellor of New York University's Abu Dhabi campus. "That kind of cosmopolitan intersection is what drew NYU to the gulf, and it will be a great stimulus to intellectual growth."

The gulf model has drawbacks, of course, and there's no guarantee that what works in America will work there. A good school does not just "borrow a curriculum or a few teachers from another prestigious university," says Mourad Ezzine, a Middle East specialist for the World Bank who oversaw its recent report on Arab education. With a limited pool of high-caliber students, he warns, the region may run into difficulty. Mary Ann Tetreault, who taught at many of the gulf's new schools on a Fulbright scholarship, says she could offer only "light versions" of her international-affairs courses, and warns that U.S. schools are "putting in programs that [local] kids can't succeed at" due to "basic skill issues," including limited math and science training and poor study habits.

None of those issues is unique to the gulf, however, or is likely to slow its push into higher education.

And there are signs that the boom will benefit everyone. "There are more people around the world in universities today than probably went to university in all of human history combined," says Allan Goodman, president of the New York-based Institute of International Education. "These new places will be competing with America for the best and the brightest, but there are a lot more best and brightest out there." In other words, competition may be growing—but the world is growing even faster.

© 2008

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  • Posted By: goodi @ 08/22/2008 11:15:31 PM

    As you maybe know , according historical events and documents that is not gulf or Arabian gulf . It's Persian Gulf. So please use the correct word.

  • Posted By: andy_f90 @ 08/16/2008 6:49:30 PM

    NIce article Newsweek. But alas, our nation and its higher learning institution has fallen by the wayside during the Bushie years of militarism, record defense-budget spending and deficits against stateless criminals, and in wars of aggression against Muslim nations of the Middle East.

    Its ironic that an Arab Islamic city of Baghdad was once the jewel of the world, the Harvard of its days, and bombed by Bush and the neocon pro-Israeli, PNAC crowd is being replaced by other Arab Muslim cities in the Middle East such as Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai.

    The only downside I see is still the dearth of high-caliber students who'd be able to take advantage of such world-class, cutting-edge research and education facilities.

  • Posted By: comradeyap @ 08/13/2008 6:00:31 AM

    Hello Inche nawawimohamed, Greetings from an ild countryman ! As usual you Malays always get your terminology in a twist. I am not a coward but a partiot of Malaysia. You in Malaysia always say to your Chinese citizens to "balek tonsan (go back to China), and as a true partiot of Malaysia I encourage all Chinese to migrate to foreign lands so that Malaysia will in time be left with no Chinese, now is that not what you Malays want ?

    Malaysia really has no need for Chinese people because we are a people who cherish learning from way back from the days of Confucious. We love the study of science, medicine, mathematics and in Malaysia there is no call from trined people in these disciplines, and to demonstrate what maths mean to a Chinese, we in China graduates 375,000 engineers per year; whereas in Malaysia you hardly even gratuade a single engineer who can function as an engineer. Yes it is my mission to encourage our Chinese youths to migrate and leave Malaysia. In this 21st centruty the world will be very short of people who are skilled in the sciences. Malaysia does not have any of the industries nr the need in their industries to use such highly trained people; so all in all my mission is to encourage them to leave or even go back to tonsan. I have to have my dinner, I will continue later.


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