Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah has been a passionate voice for education reform for years, realizing that the challenges of the future will need innovative solutions from the world's best minds.
Minds are shaped by society and culture, but the quality of education determines who will excel and who will fall behind in the global march for progress. The king has promoted educational reform throughout the entire Saudi system, from kindergarten to graduate school.
Initiatives include important changes in curriculum, better training for teachers and greater resources for them to employ, ensuring that high-school graduates possess the skills needed to join the work force or to continue on to college or university and that the Kingdom has graduate schools second to none.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is the capstone of these reforms. Thanks to the efforts of Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Al-Naimi and an extensive team of Saudi Aramco engineers, researchers, and some of the world's leading academicians, KAUST is more than a vision.
“As a new house of wisdom, the university shall be a beacon for peace, hope, and reconciliation and shall serve the people of the Kingdom and benefit all the peoples of the world in keeping with the teachings of the Holy Qur'an, which explains that God created mankind in order for us to come to know each other,” King Abdullah said in his remarks at the groundbreaking ceremony.
He said KAUST would be an institution that would help shape the future of the nation and higher education around the globe. “In its design, construction and operations the university will conserve natural resources and demonstrate by precept and example the value of responsible environmental stewardship. Since universities striving for excellence depend on an atmosphere of exploration and initiative, nurturing and protecting freedom of research, thought and discourse related to scholarly work will be among the primary objectives of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology,” said King Abdullah.
“Our intention is to create an enduring model for advanced education and scientific research. A complete residential and academic compound will permit the faculty, staff, students, associates and their families to enjoy a rich and broad range of educational programs and social amenities. In providing a strong foundation for all aspects of life and work in the university, we aim to ensure its success in promoting the economic development and social prosperity of the people of the Kingdom and of the world.”
Indeed, King Abdullah's vision in launching KAUST was nothing short of historic. It sets out as an international center of excellence where students and their professors have been selected purely for academic qualities and potential and they will be 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 Arab 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 has already drawn 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 scholarships that King 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.
As an independent university governed by a self-perpetuating board of trustees and supported by a multibillion-dollar endowment, KAUST convenes the best minds — based strictly on merit — and creates a collaborative community of passionate and talented researchers from around the world. The university acts as a catalyst for research that applies science and technology to problems of human need, social advancement and economic development.
Charles M. Vest, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, underlined the role of the research university in the 21st century at KAUST groundbreaking ceremony two years ago. “Great universities seek to understand the past, engage the present, and shape the future. Universities that have a strong focus on science and technology have a particular responsibility to engage the present and shape the future, but they too must understand the past and learn its lessons. They must do so in order to clearly understand that they are at the core of the flow of human history and essential to human progress.”
Vest said KAUST was breaking the mold and taking a bold, new step. “This is a noble and farsighted undertaking. It is also a voyage into the unknown. KAUST has set its compass by consulting widely and learning lessons from the experiences of great research universities throughout the world. But the founders of KAUST also understand the value of a fresh start, the uniqueness of its location, the necessity of its engagement with the world community, and its orientation toward the future.”
The former MIT chief said the potential benefits the new university brings with it are almost limitless. “Research universities create opportunity. They create opportunity for individual students by inspiring them, educating them, orienting them toward the future, teaching them that they are responsible for their own lives, and preparing them to advance the human condition,” Vest said.
Vest said that KAUST might become part of a new, virtual entity that will shape higher education in the decades to come.
“In my view, a global meta university is emerging. This meta university consists of the cyber-infrastructure, scholarly digital archives, open-access teaching materials, and virtual communities of scholars and researchers,” Vest said. “It is the substrate on which the 21st century research university will be built. Like the computer operating system Linux, knowledge creation and teaching at each university will be elevated by the efforts of a multitude of individuals and groups all over the world. The meta university will rapidly adapt to the changing learning styles of students who have grown up in a computationally rich environment. The greatest benefits of the meta university will accrue to developing nations because such shared resources can accelerate and reduce the cost of the development of new schools, colleges, and universities.”
Unlike a meta university that will exist in cyberspace, KAUST sits on the Red Sea coast with students in the labs, lecture halls and classrooms and professors at the lecterns. KAUST's vision is of a bright future for the Kingdom and its people.
Wishing to rekindle and spread the great and noble virtue of learning that has marked the Arab and Muslim worlds in earlier times, King Abdullah said: “It is my desire that this new university becomes one of the world's great institutions of research; that it educates and trains future generations of scientists, engineers and technologists; and that it fosters, on the basis of merit and excellence, collaboration and cooperation with other great research universities and the private sector.”
