In the Middle Ages, the Arab world contributed a great deal to the fund of global knowledge, not least in science and mathematics. But the torch of research then passed to Europe, later North America and is now being grasped in India and China. The tide of innovation and investigation has passed our region by. Our most brilliant minds have to go abroad to find the stimulation, academic rigor and research opportunities they need.
King Abdullah’s vision in launching the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is nothing short of historic. When it opens its doors to its first students in 2009, it will be setting out as an international center of excellence where students and their professors will be selected purely for academic qualities and potential and given a liberal campus in which debate, research and innovation can flourish. KAUST will be like no other university, either in the Kingdom or in the Arab world. Until now our institutions of higher learning, especially in their science and technology faculties, have all been utilitarian. They are designed to equip their students with the exacting qualifications they will need for the workplace. There is little time in their academic programs for original research. They teach what is already known. They are not set up to discover new knowledge, even though masters and doctoral dissertations do, from time to time, throw up new insights and understandings.
KAUST is configured the other way round. It is designed to draw in the very best academic teachers to work with the very best young male and female minds gathered from all over the world. King Abdullah has said that KAUST will serve as a lighthouse of knowledge for all mankind. And there is one very important factor that will underpin this ambition. Over and above the 24 scholarships that Abdullah himself is endowing each year, the new university will be one of the most, if not indeed the most, generously endowed academic institutions in the world. The constant clamor of research scientists everywhere is for more funding. The pace of scientific investigation is often limited by its commercial potential. The frequent complaint is that pure science is at the back of the queue when research grants are being handed out. Projects with a high possibility of failure understandably struggle for funding, even though the knowledge thrown up by failure will, of itself, almost inevitably underpin future success somewhere else.
KAUST will have the deep pockets, the brilliant minds and the outstanding research facilities to advance both mainstream and arcane academic research. The cooperation agreements that are now being signed with premier academic research institutions elsewhere will enable overseas academics to tap into the resources — human, technical and financial — that KAUST will be deploying. We can only hope that academic rivalries which disfigure the sciences as well as the more argumentative humanities will have minimal impact on KAUST and its exciting vision to reignite the beacon of original research in the Arab world.
