The Central European University is worth defending from government pressure

The Central European University in Budapest is in danger of being forced to shut down.

World’s leading economists ask Hungary to withdraw anti-CEU legislation

"More than 150 prominent European and American economists, including Presidents of European Economic Associations and more than a dozen Nobel Prize Laureates, have signed an open letter asking Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government to withdraw legislation that would force Central European University to shut down in Budapest. "
***********
And here's a Statement of solidarity with Central European University, from their colleagues at the Center for Economic and Regional Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (CERS HAS).

An interview about travel bans, and universities, and science...

NOBELPREISTRÄGER ALVIN ROTH ZUM EINREISEVERBOT

„Grenzschließung wäre eine große Schande“

von:

• Thomas Jahn

Datum:

• 14.02.2017 11:05 Uhr

PREMIUMStanford-Professor und Nobelpreisträger Alvin Roth sorgt sich um den Forschungsstandort USA. Im Interview spricht er über die Folgen von Donald Trumps Einreiseverboten und die Universitäten als Spiegelbild Amerikas.

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Nobelpreisträger Roth

„Wir haben viele Vorteile durch Einwanderung – Universitäten profitieren ganz besonders.“

(Foto: AFP)

Im Jahr 2012 gewann Alvin Roth den Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Der 65-Jährige, der an der Universität Stanford in Kalifornien lehrt, macht sich Sorgen um den Forschungsstandort Amerika.

It's in German, and it's gated, but the interviewer asked me what I thought the effects of travel bans and immigration bans would be on the U.S. I replied that universities are in some ways a microcosm of the US, in that both have thrived by being open to participation from people around the world.  Universities, American science, and America will all suffer if we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.

Academics against blanket immigration bans

As you may have heard, President Trump has signed an executive order that, among other things, temporarily bans visa entry to the U.S. for people from several countries (including Iran, which sends many students to U.S. universities, including many who remain as professors and in industry). It also takes a position I strongly disapprove about refugees (and was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, an occasion for me to recall with regret that we Americans did not rise well to the occasion of welcoming Jewish refugees from that genocide). I am among many academics who have signed a petition deploring these measures and imploring that they be reconsidered.

Here's the petition, still open for signatures.

Academics against immigration executive order

And here's a story in the Washington Post that explains some of the issues that particularly concern academics in our professional roles (and not just as American patriots committed to the freedom of ideas and many other freedoms).

12 Nobel laureates, thousands of academics sign protest of Trump immigration order
"What’s at stake, said Emery Berger, a professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is not one of the organizers of the petition but supports the effort, begins with free exchange of information.

"But there’s more. He said he has already heard academics overseas planning to avoid, or boycott, conferences in the United States. “It’s very chilling,” he said.

"Students are horrified, he said, at the prospect of not being able to get back to their U.S. university if they return to their home country.

“I’m sure it will send really promising star students across the border to Canada or elsewhere,” Berger said. The order comes just as many U.S. universities are offering admission to overseas students for the next academic year."

Harvard and Stanford compared and contrasted, in French: la guerre de l’excellence

Les Echos has the story: Harvard-Stanford, la guerre de l’excellence, by
Lucie Robequain

Ms. Robequain spent some time on both campuses, and so her article is full of quotes from people you may know, about universities and university design...

Are firearms becoming a protected transaction on college campuses?

Inside Higher Ed has the story, on the clash when a transaction that some regard as repugnant is regarded as protected by others:  Momentum for Campus Carry

"At least 11 states are considering whether to allow concealed weapons on college campuses this year, the latest chapter in a now seemingly annual legislative debate between gun control advocates and gun rights supporters.

"Bills have been introduced, at least once, in almost half of the 50 states in the past few years. Despite slow success thus far -- just seven states have adopted versions of campus carry laws -- gun rights advocates have their eyes on two very large prizes this year: Florida and Texas.

"Right now, the odds are starting to stack up in their favor. The Texas bill has passed the Senate and is on its way to House. The version in Florida has passed through two Senate committees and is headed to the Judiciary Committee.
...
"Yet for all its familiarity, the idea of guns on campus is relatively novel. Campus carry was largely a nonissue a decade ago, when the University of Utah went to court to defend its autonomy and the related right to stay gun-free. A few years later, Oregon, Mississippi and Wisconsin began explicitly allowing guns on campus.

"In all, seven states have laws that allow concealed guns on campus, though the details vary on who can carry where. Twenty states still ban carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus, and 23 states leave the decision up to individual colleges."

University governance, at Harvard

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Fried and Bob Mnookin write about the increased centralization of governance at Harvard: The Silencing of Harvard’s Professors.

They make many points, here are two:
"Today’s official mantra is One Harvard. In the last 20 years there has been a vast expansion of the central administration and an increasing degree of centralization. This is hardly a trend specific to our campus. Colleges and universities across the country both public and private are grappling with this same issue. Today at Harvard, not only is there a provost, who is the university’s “chief academic officer,” there are also a deputy provost, a senior vice provost for faculty development and diversity, three vice provosts (for research, for advances in learning, and for international affairs), a senior associate provost who is the chief technology officer, and four associate provosts for institutional research, for science, for social sciences and the professions, and for arts and culture, as well as assistant provosts — all with staffs. In addition there is a cadre of high-level administrators such as an executive vice president and senior nonacademic officials with central administrative responsibilities.
...

"On everybody’s return from summer vacation we were met with a ukase imposing a single set of sexual-harassment policies and procedures, and a new central bureaucracy combining under one head compliance, enforcement, investigating, and adjudicating functions for the whole university. These policies and procedures were arrived at by a working group of administrators (some of whom were drawn from the administrative staffs of the schools) and then adopted by the president and fellows. There were no law faculty members involved. When our law faculty had a good look at these procedures at a meeting with the general counsel we made it plain that we considered the procedures inconsistent with due process and if radical changes were not made it was probable that a large majority of Harvard’s law faculty would publicly denounce them. In response the university authorized the law dean to appoint a faculty redrafting committee and now there are for the law school alone disciplinary procedures worthier of a leading law faculty. Those alternative procedures were overwhelmingly approved by vote of the law faculty."

The culture of universities (and the importance of hyphens)

I've blogged before about universities and how university culture interacts with the larger culture.
I am reminded of this by a recent Times Higher Education article that I saw in Inside Higher Education, about changes being made in some of the new universities that are trying to get going in Dubai: Adjustments in Dubai

The following paragraph illustrates the clash of cultures, and also the importance of properly placing hyphens (think about what it would mean, for the paragraph and for Dubai, if each hyphen were moved a word earlier...)

"The buzz of activity at Heriot-Watt's campus is surely exactly what was planned when the Dubai Knowledge Village, the first "knowledge free-zone" opened in Dubai in 2003. Like the country's "media free-zone" and "business free-zone," it was set up to allow organizations to operate without the constrictions of Islamic-based Emirati laws."

 The article goes on to say that a large proportion of the students at the British universities in Dubai are Indian students who are unable to go to British universities for one reason or another. One reason for this, apparently, is that within Dubai there is some difficulty in emigrating from the free-zone back to the -free zone:

"International employers in Dubai may be happy to accept courses offered via the free zone's own independent accreditation system, which is overseen by international quality review, but the powerful Emirati government is believed to favor courses that follow its own accreditation model. It is clearly a factor in deciding which institution to attend, according to one student.
"I want to study at one of the UK or U.S. universities at DIAC, but it's very hard to get a civil servant job with these qualifications," she observes. "

Stanford's endowment: I benefit directly from parts of it

An unusual thing about American universities is that they are largely financed by philanthropy. The oldest universities tend to have very big endowments. Some of those endowments yield income for general revenues, while others have very specific purposes.

Here's an article from the Stanford Benefactor about some of the endowments that have helped me personally settle in to my new job at Stanford: How to Bring a Nobel Laureate to Stanford

Prisoner's dilemma, exam grading, and social media

Long long ago I wrote an undergraduate exam that included a prisoner's dilemma question framed as the question of whether to study or not for a particular exam, with your payoff on the exam depending in part on what other people did.  Here is that story brought to life, complete with how it was organized by social media, and enforced by a contingent strategy that depended on mutual observation. (The url is more informative than the headline:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get


"Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, "that person gets 100 percent and everybody else gets a percentage relative to it,” said Fröhlich.

"This approach, Fröhlich said, is the "most predictable and consistent way" of comparing students' work to their peers', and it worked well.

"At least it did until the end of the fall term at Hopkins, that is.

"As the semester ended in December, students in Fröhlich’s "Intermediate Programming", "Computer Science Fundamentals," and "Introduction to Programming for Scientists and Engineers" classes decided to test the limits of the policy, and collectively planned to boycott the final. Because they all did, a zero was the highest score in each of the three classes, which, by the rules of Fröhlich’s curve, meant every student received an A.

“The students refused to come into the room and take the exam, so we sat there for a while: me on the inside, they on the outside,” Fröhlich said. “After about 20-30 minutes I would give up.... Then we all left.” The students waited outside the rooms to make sure that others honored the boycott, and were poised to go in if someone had. No one did, though.

"Andrew Kelly, a student in Fröhlich’s Introduction to Programming class who was one of the boycott’s key organizers, explained the logic of the students' decision via e-mail: "Handing out 0's to your classmates will not improve your performance in this course," Kelly said.
"So if you can walk in with 100 percent confidence of answering every question correctly, then your payoff would be the same for either decision. Just consider the impact on your other exam performances if you studied for [the final] at the level required to guarantee yourself 100. Otherwise, it's best to work with your colleagues to ensure a 100 for all and a very pleasant start to the holidays."

"Kelly said the boycott was made possible through a variety of technological and social media tools. Students used a spreadsheet on Google Drive to keep track of who had agreed to the boycott, for instance. And social networks were key to "get 100 percent confidence that you have 100 percent of the people on board" in a big class.

"Fröhlich took a surprisingly philosophical view of his students' machinations, crediting their collaborative spirit. "The students learned that by coming together, they can achieve something that individually they could never have done," he said via e-mail. “At a school that is known (perhaps unjustly) for competitiveness I didn't expect that reaching such an agreement was possible.”
Although Fröhlich conceded that he did not include such a “loophole” in the policy “with the goal of students exploiting it,” he decided to honor it after the boycott.

"Despite awarding As to all the students who participated in the boycott, the experience has led Fröhlich to alter his long-held grading policy.
“I have changed my grading scheme to include ‘everybody has 0 points means that everybody gets 0 percent,’ ” Fröhlich said,  “and I also added a clause stating that I reserve the right to give everybody 0 percent if I get the impression that the students are trying to ‘game’  the system again.”

Istanbul Bilgi University, and its rector

I've written before about the culture of universities and the obstacles that face new ones. The 2012 game theory world congress was hosted by Istanbul Bilgi University, which turns out to be quite a new institution. Its Rector Remzi Sanver is a well known member of the game theory/social choice/economic design community, and his opening address refers to some of the difficulties he faces as the head of a new, secular university in Turkey.

"Istanbul Bilgi University, since its foundation, has taken clear and unequivocal positions throughout the democratization process of our country. That encompasses a long list of conferences held within our offices when no one wanted to host such conferences, as well as students accepted in classes when sartorial conditions were imposed almost everywhere else. We have been harshly criticized for most of our positions and deeds. We are still sometimes severely criticized, but we continue to abide by our values, which are universally and largely accepted, to safeguard our liberal and pluralistic stance." 

The university (Stanford) as a marketplace of ideas and innovation

Writing in the New Yorker, Ken Auletta thinks about what makes Stanford the heart of silicon valley, and whether this is an entirely good thing... Get Rich U.: There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?

"Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy.
...

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said, Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a successful former entrepreneur. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing has licensed eight thousand campus-inspired inventions, and has generated $1.3 billion in royalties for the university. Stanford’s public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.” They include Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
...

"But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune. Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities. A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning, between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery for its own sake."

College admissions exams in China

The NY Times reports: Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination


"In a country where education is so highly prized, the score that a student earns after the days of testing at the end of high school is believed to set the course of one’s life. The score determines not just whether a young person will attend a Chinese university, but also which one — a selection, many Chinese say, that has a crucial bearing on career prospects.

"But debate appears to have grown more heated lately over the value of the gaokao (pronounced gow-kow). Critics say the exam promotes the kind of rote learning that is endemic to education in China and that hobbles creativity. It leads to enormous psychological strain on students, especially in their final year of high school. In various ways, the system favors students from large cities and well-off families, even though it was designed to create a level playing field among all Chinese youth.

"Last month, a 12-minute television segment railing against the exam by Zhong Shan, a well-known talk show host in Hunan Province, gained popularity on the Web and became a focal point for fury against the gaokao in particular and the Chinese educational system in general. Also widespread on the Internet were photographs taken in a Hubei Province classroom of students hooked up to intravenous drips of amino acids while cramming.

Comparing countries through their universities

Comparing universities is hard enough, and it's harder if they are in different countries, so imagine the caveats that must accompany the attempt by Universitas 21 to create a ranking of national systems of higher education.

But it would be boring to start there, so here's their ranking:

1 United  States
 2 Sweden
 3 Canada
 4 Finland
 5 Denmark
 6 Switzerland
 7 Norway
 8 Australia
 9 Netherlands
 10 United  Kingdom
 11 Singapore
 12 Austria
 13 Belgium
 14 New Zealand
 15 France
 16 Ireland
 17 Germany
 18 Hong Kong SAR
 19 Israel
 20 Japan
 21 Taiwan
 22 Korea
 23 Portugal
 24 Spain
 25 Ukraine
...
There are of course lots of ways to parse the data, here are some:

"Government funding of higher education as a percentage of GDP is highest in Finland, Norway and Denmark, but when private expenditure is added in, funding is highest in the United States, Korea, Canada and Chile. Investment in Research and Development is highest in Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. The United States dominates the total output of research journal articles, but Sweden is the biggest producer of articles per head of population. The nations whose research has the greatest impact are Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United States, United Kingdom and Denmark. While the United States and United Kingdom have the world's top institutions in rankings, the depth of world class higher education institutions per head of population is best in Switzerland, Sweden, Israel and Denmark.

"The highest participation rates in higher education are in Korea, Finland, Greece, the United States, Canada and Slovenia. The countries with the largest proportion of workers with a higher level education are Russia, Canada, Israel, United States, Ukraine, Taiwan and Australia. Finland, Denmark, Singapore, Norway and Japan have the highest ratio of researchers in the economy.

"International students form the highest proportions of total student numbers in Australia, Singapore, Austria, United Kingdom and Switzerland. International research collaboration is most prominent in Indonesia, Switzerland, Hong Kong SAR, Denmark, Belgium and Austria. China, India, Japan and the United States rank in the bottom 25 percent of countries for international research collaboration. In all but eight countries at least 50 percent of students were female, the lowest being in India and Korea. In only five countries were there at least 50 percent female staff; the lowest being in Japan and Iran."

Here are some of my earlier posts on universities.

There's a market for economists

The WSJ takes note: Battle for Academic Economists Is Heating Up

Starting a new university

Inside Higher Ed has an article on the Minerva Project, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom, about an attempt to start a new, elite, for-profit university: An Elite University ... From Scratch?

Some of the ideas sound interesting:
"Minerva plans to define elite differently, he said. Its students -- roughly 200 in the first year, planned for 2014, and it hopes many more in later years -- will be selected through a rigorous two-step process based on academic credentials (grades, test scores, essays, etc.) at a first, statistical level and then -- for those who move on -- an interview process focused on testing an applicant's drive, analytical skills and goals.

"Factors that may help a student get admitted to Princeton or Williams -- athletic skill, alumni connections, money -- won't play any role at Minerva, Nelson said. And because the process won't factor in geography, either, he said he expected that the vast majority of its students will come from outside the United States. "We won't discriminate based on state or country of origin, and the idea that the majority of the smartest English-speaking kids live in the U.S. is absurd," he said. "We're going to have the most racially diverse student body of any elite institution."

"But the real test of its eliteness will come in its curriculum, which Nelson compared to "1950s University of Chicago." It aims to hire top professors to create their own online lectures and course materials, and students will also dig into that material in 25-student interactive seminars led by instructors (Ph.D.s who favor teaching over research, for instance, not grad students). While the formal curriculum will be delivered online, students who choose to will live in dorms in major cities around the world, where they will gain from the same kind of peer encounters that enhance the education at liberal arts and other residential colleges."

 *******************

That being said, it's a big task to found a new university, let alone an "elite" one.  As I wrote in an earlier post, Rankings of universities: vintages and coordination of expectations, regarding the rankings of American universities:
"the first place goes to the oldest American university, founded in 1636, and spots 2 and 3 go to universities established in 1746 (as the College of New Jersey), and 1701. Two universities that opened more than a century later, in 1861, and 1891 , are tied for 4th place. The two universities tied for 6th are of different vintages, 1891 and 1755, as are the three tied for 8th place, 1754, 1838, and 1892. The top dozen ranks are filled out by universities open for business since 1769, 1855, and 1856.

At number 17, Rice University, opened in 1912, seems to be the highest ranked university on the list to have begun in the 20th century."

A language is a marketplace: Defending local languages versus teaching in English

A headline in Haaretz takes a strident tone on a sensitive issue, but the story presents both sides of a complicated argument, that revolves around the fact that not only are universities marketplaces, but so are languages: Israel's Academy of the Hebrew Language declares war – on English

"Tali Ben Yehuda, the academy's director-general, said "demands that students study in English represent the gravest expression of the trend" of minimizing Hebrew's role in academia. Demands that students speak or study in English constitute a phenomenon "that is expanding considerably."

"Unless steps are taken, she warned, "academic departments will instruct solely in English, and this will spread to the high schools, because a conscientious parent will not send his or her child to a high school that doesn't prepare the youngster for university study.

...

"Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's chemistry department has sent a letter in English to students saying that research papers written in Hebrew will no longer be accepted. It said advanced research seminars would be conducted in English. This is because "the language of science is English."

Yehuda Band, the head of the university's chemistry department, said last night that this English-use requirement did not apply to undergraduates. He said that "if someone tries to record research results in Hebrew, that consigns his or her work to oblivion - nobody will read the research summary. Every person who deals in science today in Israel reads English."

...

"According to Band, another argument in favor of English is Ben-Gurion University's desire to recruit foreign students. The moment there's a student in a class who doesn't speak Hebrew, the lesson has to be conducted in English.

"Of course, these circumstances make things harder for people whose native tongue is Hebrew, and yet the use of English is something that any scientist has to master to advance in his or her work," Band said. "If a researcher doesn't know English, he's finished. If he doesn't know how to write in English, he won't be able to publish on his own and will depend on the largesse of others."

German university admissions

I'll be teaching the first class of the semester of Experimental Economics today, so readers of this blog may see more of the intersection between market design and experiments, like the following paper on the university admission system in Germany, and how it might be redesigned...

Implementing Quotas in University Admissions: An Experimental Analysis

Sebastian Braun

Nadja Dwenger

Dorothea Kübler

Alexander Westkamp

 
Abstract:     
Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions, which first allocates seats in the quota for top-grade students before allocating all other seats among remaining applicants. The second is a modified version of the student-proposing deferred acceptance (SDA) algorithm, which simultaneously allocates seats in all quotas. Our main result is that the current procedure, designed to give top-grade students an advantage, actually harms them, as students often fail to grasp the strategic issues involved. The modified SDA algorithm significantly improves the matching for top-grade students and could thus be a valuable tool for redesigning university admissions in Germany.

The culture of science, and its absence. The dog that hasn't barked in many years in the Arab world

In connection with my series of posts on the market for universities, and how easy or hard they may be to transplant, the following long and interesting article caught my attention. It suggests that the decline in science in the Arab world coincided with the end of a period in which foreign writings (in this case Greek) were often translated into Arabic: Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science

"As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential figure in contemporary pan-Islamism, said in the late nineteenth century, “It is permissible ... to ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.”

Just as there is no simple explanation for the success of Arabic science, there is no simple explanation for its gradual — not sudden, as al-Afghani claims — demise. The most significant factor was physical and geopolitical. As early as the tenth or eleventh century, the Abbasid empire began to factionalize and fragment due to increased provincial autonomy and frequent uprisings. By 1258, the little that was left of the Abbasid state was swept away by the Mongol invasion. And in Spain, Christians reconquered Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.

To understand this anti-rationalist movement, we once again turn our gaze back to the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. Al-Mamun picked up the pro-science torch lit by the second caliph, al-Mansur, and ran with it. He responded to a crisis of legitimacy by attempting to undermine traditionalist religious scholars while actively sponsoring a doctrine called Mu’tazilism that was deeply influenced by Greek rationalism, particularly Aristotelianism. To this end, he imposed an inquisition, under which those who refused to profess their allegiance to Mu’tazilism were punished by flogging, imprisonment, or beheading. But the caliphs who followed al-Mamun upheld the doctrine with less fervor, and within a few decades, adherence to it became a punishable offense. The backlash against Mu’tazilism was tremendously successful: by 885, a half century after al-Mamun’s death, it even became a crime to copy books of philosophy. The beginning of the de-Hellenization of Arabic high culture was underway. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, the influence of Mu’tazilism was nearly completely marginalized.

In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
...
"The greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites was the medieval theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died 1111). In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked philosophy and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their followers in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna). Al-Ghazali was worried that when people become favorably influenced by philosophical arguments, they will also come to trust the philosophers on matters of religion, thus making Muslims less pious. Reason, because it teaches us to discover, question, and innovate, was the enemy; al-Ghazali argued that in assuming necessity in nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic teaching, which recognizes that nature is entirely subject to God’s will: “Nothing in nature,” he wrote, “can act spontaneously and apart from God.” 

Foreign universities in Qatar

A story* about University College London setting up an outpost in Qatar makes clear some of the difficulties, and how they are addressing them.

"For several years American institutions have been a part of Qatar’s Hamad bin Khalifa University, the gas-rich Gulf state’s attempt to create a world-class institution in Doha. But now, in the surreal complex of buildings – some resembling giant white eggs, another an octagonal Aztec temple – the first British boxes of books are being unpacked.

"From August 2012, students will be able to enroll in master's courses at University College London Qatar. By focusing on archaeology and museum studies in a region where much of the study of antiquity is conducted, UCL thinks it can attract the caliber of academic needed to establish a credible center of research.
"Six American universities – Northwestern, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth – and one French business school, HEC Paris, have already set up shop at Hamad bin Khalifa University, which used to be known as Education City until it was renamed in May to honor Qatar’s Emir.

"How to convince the best academics to come to Doha "was one of the main questions when we talked to the U.S. universities three to four years ago," says Thilo Rehren, the director of UCL-Q, now in his new office on the second floor of Georgetown University’s state-of-the-art building. "They still have some problems recruiting good staff. They still have people at the end of their careers and others probably looking for a bit of sunshine," he says.

"For many subjects, for example the visual arts, Qatar is "not the center of the earth," Rehren acknowledges. But for museum studies, "it pretty much is," he argues. "You don’t have to fly seven hours to get to Syria or Egypt."

"So far, four faculty members are in situ. Later this year two Ph.D. students will fly in to join them, and they will be followed by three to five more in the course of the year. Over the next 12 months, the plan is to expand the number of research staff to eight, in addition to three postdoctoral students.

"All staff costs are covered by the Qatar Foundation and the Qatar Museums Authority. UCL is also going to train staff at the authority, who have "little formal training but years of experience," Rehren says."

*Times Higher Education, via Inside Higher Ed

Can new science universities flourish in Saudi Arabia? In Egypt? In China?

I've written before about the difficulties of breaking into the top ranks of universities, and so it will be very interesting to watch what becomes of well funded attempts to create first rate technical institutes that will concentrate on subjects which shouldn't be religiously or politically controversial.

There's a well-funded attempt in Saudi Arabia, and also a post-revolution proposal for something similar in Egypt, although a pre-revolution attempt at a new technical university appears to be running into trouble. And finally there's China, which seems much more likely to succeed.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on Saudia and Egypt:

 Saudi Arabia's $10-Billion Experiment Is Ready for Results

A Promising Egyptian Research University Gets Tangled in Post-Revolutionary Politics

Here's the Saudi story:

"King Abdullah University of Science and Technology is an anomaly many times over: a spectacular campus in the middle of nowhere; an international, co-ed institution in a gender-segregated society; and an aspiring world-class research graduate university created virtually overnight.

"Kaust, as it is known, also faces a unique challenge. It must convince the world that through a combination of wealth and vision, it can flourish in one of the most restrictive countries in the world. Many here believe that the next year will be a critical one in its development.
...
"King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's absolute ruler, donated the university's $10-billion endowment in the hope that Kaust will make his country "a player in global science," says Kaust's president, Choon Fong Shih, who formerly headed the National University of Singapore.
...
"The university is organized around nine research centers, which focus, for example, on advanced membranes and porous materials, plant-stress genomics, and solar and photovoltaics engineering. The work of all these centers feeds into three fields key to Saudi Arabia's future: solar energy, water desalination, and drought-resistant crops.
...
"Yet while the university has been able to attract established senior academics ready for another challenge before retirement, as well as promising young faculty taking what they hope will be a career-making gamble, it remains difficult to lure tenured professors in the middle of their careers (especially since Kaust, in line with Saudi Arabia's labor laws, can offer five-year rolling contracts but not tenure).
...
"The university has also made every effort to attract a bright cohort of international students. Admission comes with free housing, insurance and a yearly round-trip ticket home; students receive $20,000 to $30,000 stipends.
...
"The institution is particularly concerned with attracting Saudi students since one of its main goals is to create a new scientific elite for the country. Saudi students make up between 15 and 20 percent of about 300 students now at Kaust. The university plans to eventually enroll 2,000 graduate and 1,000 postdoctoral students.

"The number of Saudi students with the required English and science skills is limited, and Kaust must compete for them with international universities. And it must teach some of those skills itself."
...
"Several Saudi observers expressed doubts about the university's future, saying there is no guarantee that whoever succeeds the 87-year-old King Abdullah will share his vision for it."
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That last line brings us right into the story about the Egyptian university:

"When Nile University opened four years ago, it offered something unusual in Egyptian higher education. In a country with weak research infrastructure, the small private nonprofit engaged students and professors in applied research in high-demand fields, such as information technology and construction engineering. Over time, it has developed global partnerships and international support.

"But today the university finds itself in the cross hairs of post-revolutionary politics. The government has repossessed its soon-to-be new campus. Uncertain about the institution's fate, many corporate and philanthropic backers have stopped their donations.

"A high-placed government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the state was "rectifying" the improper allocation of public land and funds to a private university. Supporters say the university is a target because it was supported, and is thus now tainted, by the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak.
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The story goes on to say that there's a new, post-revolutionary plan for a technological university in Egypt.

"Mr. Zewail, the Egyptian-American Nobel laureate, says he was contacted by Egyptian government officials shortly after the revolution and asked to revive his 10-year-old proposal for a city of science and technology that will combine a university, research centers, and a technology park. In a few months, Mr. Zewail has raised over $100-million in donations. The university that will be part of the planned city will have a different, more ambitious mission than Nile's. "It will be a national project," says Mr. Zewail, "not a private university. But I do feel very strongly we should help students and first-rate researchers" from the troubled university, he says, by absorbing as many of them as possible."
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In China, there are also political restrictions on universities, but there shouldn't be any problem finding technically well qualified and motivated students, although there may be other cultural barriers to overcome (aside from political ones). Here's a Chronicle story on that:

News Analysis: China Looks to Western Partners to Reshape Its Universities

"Last year the University of Nottingham, which runs the oldest foreign branch campus in China, was approached by government officials from Shanghai asking if it would consider opening another location, this one 140 miles north of its undergraduate campus in Ningbo.

"The project would involve a substantial donation by a wealthy Chinese philanthropist, along with a host of government perks, including enough land to support an enrollment of 4,000. In return, Shanghai municipal officials hoped Nottingham would build a research-oriented campus in Pudong, Shanghai's major development zone. There, graduate students and professors could work on such subjects as drug development, stem-cell research, and regenerative medicine.
...
"Through speeches and policy papers, the Ministry of Education has made clear in recent years that it is unhappy with the widespread use of rote learning and narrowly defined academic programs at its universities. Last year it came out with a 10-year plan for educational reform that outlined what it viewed as the system's deficiencies.

"With China's booming and increasingly modern economy as a backdrop, the plan proposed to introduce Western-style critical thinking and interdisciplinary work into the college curriculum, and expose students to other Western concepts, such as experiential learning and professional training. The government also wants to introduce more programs taught in English."