King Abdullah University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century?

The recently announced King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) deserves a closer look for several reasons.    First, the King has created a multibillion dollar fund to build and endow the university.  The university, a residential and commercial center, and a research park will all be constructed on a 3,200 acre site on the Red Sea. Second, the university will be merit based, open to men and women students and researchers from around the world, chosen only on the basis of academic qualification.  One of its goals is to contribute to the transformation of the Saudi society into a knowledge producing force.

One of the most interesting reasons for looking at the plans for KAUST, however, is that considerable thought clearly has gone into its formulation (there are several people on the International Advisory Council from the Washington Advisory Group, for example).  Thus, this reflects at least one thoughtful view of how one would create a 21st century university from scratch if one had really substantial resources in hand.

And indeed, this university looks very different from the universities with which it hopes to compete.  First of all, it is not built on an undergraduate core, but rather is exclusively focused on Ph.D. and Master’s education.  It will not be organized around traditional academic departments, but around interdisciplinary research institutes.  The first four of these will be: Resources, Energy, and Environment; Biosciences and Engineering; Materials Science and Engineering; and Applied Mathematics and Computational Science.   As may be obvious from the names of these centers, KAUST will have an explicit emphasis on research that applies science and technology to problems of human need, social advancement, and economic development.  There will be no tenure for faculty, but rather renewable or rolling two to five year contracts.

Considerable thought has been given to the question of globalization in this design as well.  The KAUST Global Research Partnership will have a tentative budget of $1B over 10 years. This partnership serves at least two goals.  The first is to stimulate research worldwide in the problem areas that are the focus of KAUST’s research objectives. The second goal is to help create close working research relationships among leading institutions and scientists and engineers engaged in research of importance to KAUST, and able to advance KAUST’s development as an institution and its mission of regional and global contribution. These goals initially will be advanced by funding collaborative research centers - university based, multiple investigators, with private sector participation; individual university based researchers; and postdoctoral fellows.  Additional types of partnerships may be developed in the future, so long as they serve these goals. This description seems to me to be a pretty explicit statement that KAUST views itself as being in the business of managing a knowledge chain! (see What business are we in?, March 1, 2006)

All in all, worth looking at as one muses about the directions of higher education in the 21st century.