Chapter Two

Branching Out

After the recruitment of students and professors from foreign countries, perhaps the most visible symbol of just how much universities are bending over backward to cater to a worldwide market is their establishment of branch campuses, or satellite campuses, abroad. These campuses are quite different from the study-abroad centers sponsored for years by universities such as Stanford and New York University, which are intended primarily for undergraduates who wish to spend a summer, semester, or year studying in a foreign country. Instead, despite occasional cross-pollination between home and overseas student populations, branch campuses are typically intended to cater to students from the immediate area or region, allowing them to enroll in a foreign university without uprooting themselves from their home countries. Such campuses, usually but not always established by Western institutions, can now be found from the Middle East and China to Southeast Asia.

Why are these campuses becoming so popular? In part because of some practical facts: growing demand for Western-style higher education, rising incomes in foreign countries that allow families to afford these more expensive Western universities, and lower logistical barriers to home-campus administrators and faculty spending time at satellite facilities. Even more important is how these factors combine to allow universities to behave like for-profit firms in seeking new markets. Today’s cross-border outposts are “a classic stage in multinationalization,” the University of Warwick’s Nigel Thrift says.¹ In classic firm theory, he says, the first international activity is trade with overseas partners, which in the case of universities might involve exchanges of students and professors. Next, Thrift says, for-profit companies “start producing subsidiaries in other countries”—much as Britain’s universities of Nottingham and Liverpool have established campuses in China. While some in higher education may deplore this rhetoric of consumerism, when customers want what universities have to offer, universities will find a way to reach those customers.

Any new or expanding firm must face the prospect of failure, of course. That possibility is certainly on the mind of John Sexton, the exuberant and ever-candid president of New York University (NYU). Sexton, who is widely credited with an entrepreneurial zeal that led him first to vault NYU’s law school into the nation’s top ten during his years as dean from 1988 to 2001, then to do the same with the entire university since assuming the presidency in 2002, is now in the midst of creating one of the most ambitious and audacious overseas campuses in Abu Dhabi. When classes begin in the fall of 2010, NYU Abu Dhabi proposes to offer not just a boutique program or major, akin to those many other satellite campuses provide to overseas students, but what it calls “a comprehensive liberal arts and science college” that incorporates “the research and creative power of a major research university.” This full-service undergraduate institution will offer a wide range of majors in the arts and sciences. Still, Sexton is quick to acknowledge in one of several interviews that the bigger they come, the harder they fall. “We’re first movers, which carries with it inherent risks.” Fortunately, he adds, unlike Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, “the one great thing about NYU is its willingness to take risks.”²

That’s a good thing, because Sexton is by nature an evangelist and an optimist. In an interview in his spacious office atop NYU’s Bobst Library, overlooking Washington Square, he emphasizes the transformational possibilities of the campus he is creating rather than dwelling on risks. For starters, he bristles at the common term for universities’ overseas outposts being applied to his new creation. “We don’t call them branch campuses. We certainly wouldn’t call them satellites.” Instead, Sexton—who before attending Harvard Law School earned a PhD in religious studies—holds up the model of religious ecumenicalism, his point being that each component of the new global university he wants to create ought to be equally prized and legitimate. Thus, he dislikes “the subordination principle” that he says is implied in the term “satellite campuses,” with the “mother ship” campus viewed as superior to the overseas branches.

By contrast, Sexton is intent on creating what he calls a “global network university,” in which students can study at a number of major NYU campuses around the world. Some would be considered full-service “portal” campuses, where students who wished to could spend all four years earning their undergraduate degrees. Others would be variants on NYU’s current ten study-abroad campuses, where students spend a semester or a year studying and soaking up a foreign culture before returning to their home campuses. He says that NYU may have as many as four “portal” campuses by 2010, when its Abu Dhabi site is scheduled to open. Along with Washington Square and Abu Dhabi, additional sites might include one in Europe, perhaps in Berlin or Florence (Paris was considered seriously but was rejected, Sexton says, because of the difficulty of navigating French labor laws), as well as another in China, likely in Shanghai. Once the global network is fully established, students could crisscross the world, spending, say, five semesters in New York studying film, then continuing with a semester in Europe, another in Asia, and so forth. Sexton also envisions two dozen or so courses that would be common to all campuses, capitalizing on technology that would allow NYU students in multiple time zones to take classes together.

The end result, he believes, will be to make students of this new global university true citizens of the world—and to set a model for the transformation of other universities as well. “I feel very strongly that the top universities in the world will not be location-bound the way the Oxfords and the Cambridges and the Ivies have been,” says Sexton in an interview in a coffee shop at the Abu Dhabi Sheraton. “Of course, those universities have tremendous magnet power, and they’ll be able to draw conversations and talent to them by their tremendous magnetic power. But there’s a tide . . . 97 percent of the high school graduates in the world graduate from schools outside the United States. Of the students that study outside their country for college, we’re down to only 20 percent of them coming to the United States. What is it that makes Americans think that a preponderance of the smart professors in the world will want to move to the United States?”

Part of the global impact Sexton has in mind for his latest pet project, the Abu Dhabi campus, as well as other NYU portals, is that his university and others will help transform the cities where they are located into “idea capitals.” Urbanologists, he says, often use the acronym FIRE when describing the forces behind the twentieth-century development of cities such New York and London. It stands for finance, insurance, and real estate. Today, he argues, FIRE is necessary but not sufficient. A great twenty-first-century city must supplement FIRE with ICE—the intellectual, cultural, and educational assets that help turn a metropolis into a center of ideas.

The world is likely to have only a limited number of idea capitals, Sexton maintains—“there’s only so much of that talent at the top”—and cities that want to be contenders must not stint with cultural and intellectual resources. “The top places in the world are going to need it all. They’re going to need Lincoln Center. They’re going to need the Met. They’re going to need a couple of great research universities because they’ve got to create the critical mass at the top that then feeds down the talent pyramid,” providing an incentive to improve such vital institutions as K–12 schools and community colleges. In the case of Abu Dhabi, the critical mass will include not only a branch campus of the Sorbonne, which began classes in 2006, and a research institute affiliated with MIT, but also several cultural institutions on Saadiyat Island, the future home of NYU’s campus. The island will include a 670-acre cultural district that will feature such projects as branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums, and a performing arts institute.³ Several renowned architects will be designing these institutions: the master plan for NYU’s campus will be developed by Rafael Viñoly.

An idea capital doesn’t come cheap, of course. The crown prince of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE), Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has made a massive financial commitment to luring the universities and cultural institutions that the ruling family sees as vital to helping the Emirates prosper intellectual and culturally. Even before NYU agreed to launch its Abu Dhabi campus, Sexton insisted on receiving a $50 million gift from the Emirates that he termed “earnest money” to demonstrate the UAE’s seriousness about the project.⁴ With an endowment significantly lower than the elite East Coast schools with which it aspires to compete, NYU is particularly conscious of the need to make sure its expansion to the Gulf does not drain resources from its other ambitious project closer to home. So it is no surprise that the Emirates are covering all the costs for the Abu Dhabi campus, from construction of a short-term and then a long-term campus, complete with athletic facilities, student dorms, and so forth, to building research labs and paying generous faculty salaries. Hefty subsidies will allow NYU Abu Dhabi to offer student financial aid that is often as attractive as the scholarship packages provided by the most highly endowed Ivy League colleges.

All these resources are intended to guarantee quality—one of the biggest concerns of top Western institutions that branch out around the world. The new NYU campus will grant degrees that are indistinguishable from those offered to Washington Square graduates. Sexton aspires to have Emiratis make up only a fraction of the student body; he aims to lure perhaps 40 percent of the student body from the United States, with the rest coming from the Middle East, India (Mumbai is a two and a half hour flight from Abu Dhabi), and other locations within striking distance of the region. To help accomplish these goals, an admissions director, Renee Dugan, was hired in the fall of 2008 from King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan, a recently established elite prep school often called “Deerfield in the desert.”

Sexton says he wants students not only to meet but also to exceed the demanding admissions standards at Washington Square, where about 24 percent of applicants were accepted for the 2008 entering class. “As we’ve talked about the admissions process, what we’ve said is that the students at NYU Abu Dhabi will be students who fit comfortably into the top 1 percent of the talent pool of the world,” he says. “We think there’s a case to be made, which will be quite attractive to a group of students that I call the ‘cosmopolitans,’ who get the value proposition of the most ecumenical education available anywhere, with a student body that is the most cosmopolitan anywhere, drawn literally from the four corners of the world, set in the Fertile Crescent, the classic crossroads of humanity when viewed from anything but an American perspective.”

Sexton’s vision may prove too grandiose to be realized even in part. But if the leadership of the new campus is a mark of NYU’s seriousness about quality, it is certainly off to a highly credible start. In the fall of 2008, the university announced that it had hired Alfred Bloom, who had been president of Swarthmore College since 1991. It would be hard to find a better pedigree for the head of a liberal arts institution that aspires to be globally distinguished.

Still, even more important to a university than a high-powered president or talented students is the faculty. Thus, attracting high-quality professors is seen by NYU as a make-or-break proposition. “The quality of this institution will stand or fall by its faculty. If you can’t get the faculty, you can’t have a high-quality institution,” says Mariët Westermann, a distinguished art historian and NYU–Abu Dhabi’s provost, who moved with her family to Abu Dhabi for the 2008–9 academic year and became the university’s senior representative on the ground as plans for the campus proceeded at a furious pace.⁵ Bringing the university’s best professors to the Gulf—and attracting other top candidates from the region or beyond—is vital to making sure that NYU’s new campus is not seen as second-best, as has happened to some other branch campuses around the world. “You want to create a club that people from around the world want to join,” says Sexton. Preserving the brand, in other words, is paramount.

While persuading professors to teach in Abu Dhabi might seem to be a hard sell, Sexton maintains his recruiting efforts are going well so far. “The faculty response is overwhelming,” he says. Some professors are attracted to the idea of being part of a new and exciting entrepreneurial endeavor. Others are drawn to the region because of their research interests in, say, Islamic art or literature. The professors who make up NYU’s advance team may have spouses who are simply adventuresome, or whose careers (banking, for instance) make a relocation to the Gulf relatively easy to manage. Moreover, many arrangements are possible that stop short of requiring professors to relocate completely to the Gulf—from taking part in short-term lecture series to one- or two-semester stints teaching regular courses. Beyond all this, of course, are the significant financial incentives available to faculty in Abu Dhabi, including the standard expatriate benefits of salary supplements (NYU declines to specify their exact amount), subsidized housing, free private school tuition for children, and an annual business-class trip back home.⁶ Sexton and other NYU officials insist, though, that many professors will be attracted to Abu Dhabi not by money and other benefits but by professional opportunities, from extensive lab facilities not available in Washington Square to the chance for interdisciplinary and global collaboration not found as easily in New York.

Sexton himself is leading by example, augmenting his presidential duties in Washington Square by teaching what amounts to a prequel class to NYU’s nascent program, a seminar on the First Amendment offered to a handpicked group of Emirati students. On a balmy evening in November 2008, Sexton arrived in Dubai with his chief of staff, Diane Yu, after a twelve-hour and forty-five-minute flight from New York in the first class section of Emirates, the airline of Dubai. Following the two-hour drive to Abu Dhabi, he sat down for a late-night dinner with a few colleagues and Democratic political analyst Bob Shrum and his wife, Mary-Louise Oates. Shrum, a lifelong friend of Sexton’s, was in town to participate in a panel discussion dissecting the results of the recent U.S. presidential elections, to be held the following evening under the auspices of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute. The institute began establishing an NYU presence in Abu Dhabi through a series of public lectures and cultural events, long before the first one hundred or so students (out of a target student body of 2000) are projected to begin classes in the fall of 2010. The institute also worked with local officials and universities to develop the Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed University Scholars Program, whose sixteen students are all enrolled in Sexton’s seminar, “The Relationship of Government and Religion.” His course focuses on the Supreme Court’s treatment of the separation of church and state. In most respects, it is identical to a class Sexton has taught to NYU undergraduates for many years (he is unusual among college presidents in routinely teaching a full load of three classes every year).

Just how different the seminar is becomes clear when Sexton teaches the two-hour course the next afternoon. Following coffee with a visitor in the lobby of the Sheraton Abu Dhabi, where several NYU colleagues join the conversation as they come and go, Sexton is driven to the Intercontinental Hotel, where his students are meeting with two teaching assistants who have flown in from New York for the class. After a group lunch in the hotel restaurant, the students assemble in a plush conference room that serves as their classroom. As the 1:30 p.m. beginning of the seminar approaches, young women in head-to-toe black abayas gather around the table (none wear veils, and several wear jeans beneath their robes), along with a smaller group of young men—one in Western clothes and several in the traditional long white robe known as a dishdasha, worn with a headdress called a tailasan. The juxtapositions seen everywhere in this region are apparent in the classroom, too, as one woman in a black abaya with bright blue sleeves begins playing with her iPhone, while others send text messages on their cell phones.

As the class gets under way, Sexton begins a steady stream of affectionate banter with his students (who, at his request, call him by his first name). For starters, he tells them to turn off their cell phones and urges one woman, who is drinking a Red Bull energy drink after staying up all night studying for an exam, to be sure to get some rest before she attempts her long drive home after class. Then it is on to business. “What’s our basic text?” he asks. “I want you in the mode where you’re thinking the sixteen words and nothing more than the sixteen words.” He is referring to the so-called establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The two landmark cases under discussion today are Engel v. Vitale, the 1962 ruling that said state officials could not require public school students to recite an official school prayer, and Abington Township School District v. Schempp, a ruling issued the following year in which the Court said that school-sponsored Bible readings in public schools were unconstitutional.

It soon becomes clear that Sexton is a masterful teacher, prodding students with repeated questions about different scenarios that might or might not trigger a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, and entertaining them with vignettes about the politics of Supreme Court nominations. He urges students to interrupt him with questions or if they disagree with something he has said. At times the class resembles U.S. Civics 101 as Sexton coaches students on some basics: “Remember, what’s the most important number in the Supreme Court?” “Nine?” offers one student. “No, five!” replies Sexton, referring to the number required for a majority decision. Throughout the seminar, the Brooklyn native gestures expansively and speaks in a dense, layered style, full of lengthy meanderings. He makes no secret of his liberal politics, mocking what he characterizes as the intolerance and homogeneity of 1950s Ozzie and Harriet America as he establishes the sociological framework for pre-1960s First Amendment jurisprudence. (He does not appear attuned to the irony of delivering this judgment around a seminar table of Emiratis in traditional dress. Some of the young women in his class would never be permitted by their families to travel out of the country without a male escort. And, needless to say, separation of church and state is truly a foreign concept for these students.)

Sexton demonstrates particular concern about showing students how the ecumenicism he favors in U.S. civic life ought to apply to the world stage: “How do we create a world where we don’t look at things through a single window, but embrace all the ways of looking? That’s going to be the challenge of your century. Will it be a clash of civilizations? Or interconnected elements of a watch where we have a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts?” He returns to discussions of court rulings and dissents, then concludes the class by saying “For Thanksgiving, I want to thank the Lord for the gift of you people.”

The appreciation is reciprocated by the undergraduates, who seem to value this taste of a U.S.-style Socratic seminar for a combination of reasons: pedagogical, political, and social. Afterward, twenty-two-year-old Ayesha Alateeqi says that the class is much more challenging than what she is used to at HCT in Al-Ain, one of sixteen institutions that make up the Higher Colleges of Technology at assorted locations around the UAE. In Sexton’s seminar “we get to think outside the box,” she says. “We’re more active in this class. In our other classes [at the students’ universities] we’re more passive—we’re spoon-fed.”⁷ Another undergraduate, Alia Rashid Al-Shamsi, a fourth-year student at Zayed University in Dubai, says she has had some experience with interactive classes in her public relations and advertising major. Still, she says Sexton’s approach is distinctive. “He captures your attention, definitely. He has charisma. He is an amazing storyteller.” His only flaw, she adds, is a tendency to launch into interesting digressions that aren’t easy to connect—at least right away—to his central subject.⁸

One of the perks of the Sheikh Mohamed Scholars Program is a full scholarship for graduate study at NYU’s Washington Square campus for those who excel.⁹ That is definitely an attraction for students like Alia, though it comes with one important catch. When asked whether her family would permit her to study in New York, she says the answer is yes, “but it would probably mean that one of my family members has to come with me.” True, not all parents would insist on an escort, but many young women in this traditional society must balance a sometimes uneasy tension between their lives outside the family fold and the restrictions placed on them at home. “The families here are very overprotective, especially of females,” Al-Shamsi says. “I mean, we’re very modern and up to date, but when we go back to our families . . . we have certain things in our culture that have not changed. . . . It’s very similar to, like, the Victorian era.” For this reason, she thinks NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus will fill an important niche for female students whose families would never let them study overseas. “Basically, instead of us going somewhere, it’s coming to us,” she says. “So this is perfect.”

On the political front, too, the freewheeling approach taken by Sexton—and presumably by professors of future NYU courses—has great appeal to some Emirati students. Khulood “Eternity” Al-Atiyat, a twenty-one-year-old public relations major at Zayed University, says the “healthy disrespect for authority” preached by Sexton reminded her of the university classes she took in the United States under a State Department–sponsored summer program. By contrast, she says, her professors (many of whom come from outside the UAE) tend to self-censor and avoid potentially touchy subjects. “The professors at our university . . . there’s this notion or idea that they cannot say whatever they want because ‘Oh, we might get deported from the country, or maybe the government will hear about it and then we can’t delve into this topic of so and so,’ ” or “ ‘No, we can’t talk about this topic, about politics—no, we can’t.’ So there are certain guidelines that are not written on paper, but it’s just in the air.” Al-Atiyat believes that the support Abu Dhabi’s crown prince, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahvan, has given to NYU’s new campus is a healthy sign that the ruling family wants to encourage greater political liberalization.¹⁰

Still, NYU’s critics, both within and outside the university, are deeply skeptical about whether the 51,000-student university can or should establish a presence in places like the UAE. At NYU, critics of Sexton’s mission have decried everything from the Emirates’ treatment of women and gays to its lack of a free-speech tradition appropriate to the open inquiry that students and faculty ought to expect from a Western university. The political part of this debate falls along familiar lines, writes Andrew Ross, a professor of American studies at NYU: “Is it better to try to influence the political climate in illiberal societies by fostering collegial zones of free speech, or is it the instinct to engage student elites in such societies a naïve or, at worst, colonial instinct?”¹¹ Then there is the criticism that Sexton, an impressive figure who can also be needy and voluble, is on a mission to build an empire. A harshly critical New York magazine story about the project was titled “The Emir of NYU.”¹²

Sexton and others who are part of the NYU Abu Dhabi project reply emphatically that their new campus is part of the solution, not part of the problem. For one thing, Sexton says, many of the questions critics have raised about the lack of political and social liberalization in Abu Dhabi apply equally to places like Singapore, China, and Ghana. “It’s an argument that doesn’t apply in a unique fashion here,” he says. But after conversations with NYU faculty and with Emirati officials, he concluded that Abu Dhabi was in fact a place where an “iterative process” of liberalization was most likely to take hold with NYU’s involvement. Moreover, he says, bedrock academic values will not suffer in the Gulf kingdom. “There can be no compromising of free speech in NYU Abu Dhabi.”

On the gender front, many Americans have misconceptions about just how constricted the role of women is in the Emirates, says Mariët Westermann. “Everybody has asked, ‘Do you wear an abaya?’ ” she says. Women in particular were curious about how Westermann—who is tall, striking, and blonde—would fare in an Arab culture. “It was amazing to me, frankly, how parochial some of the reactions were,” she says. “It made me realize how poorly understood this region is.” Westermann wears normal business dress to appointments, she says. “I would be laughed out of court if I were wearing the abaya.” And as the senior NYU official on the ground, she says she is treated with great deference because of the norms of Arab culture. “The thinking is so hierarchical, for better or worse, but for women there can be an advantage,” she says. “When I show up in a meeting—it typically is a bunch of guys—and they will turn to me first, because I’m the boss.” That isn’t always true in the United States, she notes, where she has occasionally attended meetings at which her interlocutors assumed that her lower-ranking male colleagues were the ultimate decision makers.

As for unfettered free inquiry, it was a nonnegotiable matter for NYU, Westermann says. “The key walk-away issue for us was academic freedom. That’s, after all, what’s essential to operate an academic institution. And if we are going to be some kind of positive change agent, which the Emirates understand us to be, they understand that we come with that risk. They know what NYU is.” At the same time, however, she acknowledges that NYU walks a fine line in just how broadly its freedom is defined. “We have to be able to exercise academic freedom, but that comes with responsibilities, too, as it does in the United States. And just as we can’t give a blank check to anyone in Washington Square to do whatever they wish without regard for the laws of the land, we can’t have that immunity in any of our abroad sites—including Abu Dhabi.”

Her statement could be seen as an evasion—or just a statement of reality. But Westermann also insists that NYU is committed to recruiting students and faculty according to no other principles than “standards of academic quality and promise to succeed in the institution.” Immigration restrictions may be a problem, she concedes, just as it would be hard to bring an Iranian physicist to teach in the United States. What about Israeli passport holders? In the short term, she says, the best way to make that happen is by using backchannels rather than direct confrontation with Emirati authorities. “We will advocate and make a point that we need a person, and then offline I will say that I am very hopeful that we will be very successful in bringing Israelis here.” In fact, she says, NYU has already done so, bringing Ron Robin, associate dean of NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development—and an Israeli citizen—into Abu Dhabi. “It isn’t a cake walk,” she says. “He had to be whisked through. You end up not even showing your passport because it isn’t recognized. . . . Nobody wants to come in that way, but he came, and he was fine with it.” Indeed, NYU officials note that its Abu Dhabi campus has received support from the likes of Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League¹³ and Itamar Rabinovich, Israel’s former ambassador to Washington (and an NYU “global professor”¹⁴).

For now, the initial model of Sexton’s seminar certainly suggests that Emirati students—at least an elite segment of those students—are experiencing an intellectual atmosphere that is, by the standards of the region, remarkably open. Still, these questions are likely to linger until the NYU campus is up and running and boosters and critics alike have an opportunity to see how their hopes and fears play out in practice.

EDUCATION CITY

The sort of active learning and liberalization that NYU says it has in mind is already on display in Doha, Qatar, another oil-rich kingdom that lies 187 miles northwest across the Gulf from Abu Dhabi. On the 2,500-acre grounds of Education City, a similarly lavish experiment in bringing elite Western higher education to the Gulf is well under way. Six American universities—Texas A&M University, the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Weill Cornell Medical Center, Northwestern University’s School of Communications and Medill School of Journalism, Carnegie Mellon University, and Virginia Commonwealth University’s School for the Arts—have been invited by the royal family of Qatar to establish outposts designed to provide the best of American education for students from Doha and around the region.

On the edge of the construction-filled, traffic-congested boomtown of Qatar, Education City is itself filled with dust and cranes as it adds buildings to house its growing number of university tenants. In addition to the six campuses already in the complex (which includes many other buildings, including the opulent headquarters of the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, two schools, a RAND office focusing on education research, and the offices of Al Jazeera Children’s Channel), the foundation is in advanced talks with a major American law school and one other university.

Just as in John Sexton’s Abu Dhabi seminar, the juxtaposition of cultures here is hard to miss. At the entrance to the Texas A&M building, three young women in black abayas leave through an impossibly tall doorway that looks as if it were modeled after the entrance to an ancient Mesopotamian temple. Yet the street they approach outside the building is adorned, Texas-style, with banners that say “Welcome Home, Aggies.” Once inside the lavish structure, made of more than 44,000 square meters of rosa travertine marble mined in the mountains of Turkey, more Aggie banners are soon in evidence. So is a prayer room, with separate entrances for men and women, that helps students meet their obligation to pray five times daily. Yet perhaps in deference to the ubiquity of American fast food in the Middle East and beyond, student dining options are distinctly non-multicultural. The Carnegie Mellon building next to Texas A&M houses a Subway sandwich shop, while the Liberal Arts and Sciences building features a Starbucks where guys in traditional robes and young women in abayas chat happily while sipping their lattes.

Beyond these surface impressions, the Qatari government’s motivations for establishing this academic outpost are serious indeed. The royal family, which funds Education City under the auspices of the Qatar Foundation (which is headed by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al Missned, wife of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani), is well aware that the tiny nation’s vast wealth from gas reserves will not last forever. Thus, through a range of reforms that encompass K–12 education, its own university system, and the importation of handpicked U.S. university “franchises,” the government of Qatar is attempting to move “from petrodollars to human capital,” in the words of Robert Baxter,¹⁵ a former journalist who now serves as a communications adviser to the Qatar Foundation. This human capital strategy involves both improving the educational pipeline for all students and ensuring that enough elite educational opportunities exist to keep the nation’s most talented students in the country.

To make this happen, ensuring quality is vital. Baxter points to significant differences between the Qatar Foundation’s approach and the freewheeling “shopping mall” reputation of Dubai’s higher education complex. Known as Dubai Knowledge Village, or DKV, when it was established in 2003, the complex was widely viewed as an academic free trade zone where any rent-paying foreign university was welcome. To address these concerns, a new entity, Dubai International Academic City (DIAC), was created in 2007, with DKV continuing as a center for professional training. Dubai officials insist that selection procedures for foreign branch campuses are rigorous, but concerns about regulatory oversight remain. For their part, Qatar Foundation officials in Doha researched U.S. university partners exhaustively and cherry-picked programs that they viewed as among the best in the world. Thus, rather than offer a full-service smorgasbord of majors, each university in Education City offers the typical variety of general-education classes, after which students major in one of the subjects for which the campus is renowned: engineering at Texas A&M, foreign service at Georgetown, and so forth. Over time, Education City officials hope to promote cross-registration between campuses, creating something like a super-university.

Beyond the choice of U.S. partners, perhaps the most important step to ensuring quality is the Qatar Foundation’s insistence that every degree issued by a university in Education City be identical to those issued at the home campus. “Your diploma doesn’t say Georgetown-Qatar, or Georgetown-lite,” says James Reardon-Anderson, dean of Georgetown’s Qatar campus.¹⁶ With no indication on a diploma that it was issued in Doha rather than in Evanston or Pittsburgh, the reasoning goes, American institutions will have a strong incentive to self-police to ensure that their brand is not diluted. “That condition was put there for a reason—in order to guarantee that these universities have something at stake here,” says Sheikha Al-Misnad, the president of Qatar University and an influential figure in the establishment of Education City as a board member of the Qatar Foundation.¹⁷ In principle, admissions standards are just as rigorous as those at the universities’ home campuses. In practice, however, professors and administrators acknowledge that the curve of abilities is a bit lower than at home, partly because of the uneven preparation of students from the region.

Another factor influencing quality is pressure to enroll Qataris: American administrators and Qataris alike insist that there are no rigid quotas, but those paying the bills would like to see at least 50 percent Qatari enrollment. A few professors say that it can be hard to insist on academic rigor for some wealthy students, mostly young Qatari men, who have grown up with a strong sense of entitlement. For now, most students are non-Qatari; they tend to come from a range of other countries in the region. When Cornell University’s Weill Medical College graduated its first class in May 2008, for instance, the class comprised nine women and six men from Bosnia, India, Jordan, Nigeria, the Palestinian territories, Qatar, Syria, and the United States.¹⁸

Further complicating matters is the question of language. Education City classes, with the exception of foreign language instruction, are all taught in English. But while many students have attended English-speaking private secondary schools, their written English often lags behind their speaking abilities. “They struggle at learning to write in English to our standards,” says Richard Roth, associate dean at the Medill School of Journalism’s Qatar campus.¹⁹ “We’ve put in many more hours as a faculty than we would in Evanston.” Still, he stresses that his students are intellectually curious and in some ways far more worldly than their counterparts in Evanston.

As at NYU, bringing home-campus faculty to universities’ Gulf locations has been a priority in Education City, part of the push to keep standards comparable to those in the United States. Generous compensation packages, which include salary boosts (one Texas A&M professor reports nearly doubling his compensation; a 30 percent increase is more typical), free housing, round-trip travel home, and more, are designed to make a posting of one, two, or more years in Doha attractive. In part as a result of such benefits, more than 50 percent of Georgetown’s Qatar faculty comes from its Washington, DC, campus. “It would be disingenuous to say that anybody in Education City, whatever role they’re playing, is not here in part because of the material rewards,” says Reardon-Anderson, whose own $600,000 salary in 2007 (a figure that includes housing and other benefits) was approximately the same as the president of Georgetown’s, according to nonprofit disclosure forms.²⁰ Faculty recruiting has been less of a problem than he expected, Reardon-Anderson says, with some top Georgetown professors willing to transplant themselves to Doha.

Still, Reardon-Anderson acknowledges that money isn’t enough to lure most of his colleagues to the Middle East. “It’s striking to me how few of my colleagues at Georgetown consider this a sufficient reason to come. Because most people don’t want to come here,” notwithstanding the incentives. In addition, he is concerned that it has been easier to recruit home-campus professors in fields such as English and philosophy than in the program’s core areas of international politics and economics. At Texas A&M, some say faculty recruiting has fallen short of expectations. According to John Bryant, an engineering professor who moved to Qatar from College Station, administrators never succeeded in realizing their plan of attracting a critical mass of professors from Texas to Qatar.²¹ The result has been a heavier reliance on faculty from the region who are hired on short-term contracts—the equivalent of the adjuncts often used to supplement core faculty on U.S. college campuses. That in turn raises questions about whether the experience offered at A&M’s Qatar campus is truly equivalent to what Aggies find in College Station. For his part, Mark H. Weichold, dean and CEO of Texas A&M–Qatar, says he is pleased to have some 25 percent of his faculty members from College Station.²² The remainder of the faculty is hired directly into the Qatar campus. Most, he notes, have U.S. or British PhDs.²³

Along with aiming for high standards for students and faculty, Qatar Foundation officials make no bones about their hope that their educational experiment can shake up the Gulf nation’s sometimes conservative establishment. Accordingly, political liberalization is very much a part of their agenda. “The vision of the leadership was that education is the best leverage to make change possible,” says Dr. Fathy Saoud, president of the Qatar Foundation, speaking in his office in the foundation’s lavish building on the Education City grounds.²⁴ The high quality that Education City sought from the beginning (it had talks with Oxford, Harvard, and Yale, among others) would never be possible “except if you have the right environment, where people can talk freely, can debate, can express their opinion, you see?” says Saoud. “We believed, actually, that this was part of preparing the country for the democratic process.” From the U.S. universities’ point of view, guarantees of academic freedom were a must. In a country where potentially sensitive or controversial Web sites are still blocked by the government, for example, no such restrictions exist on computers at branch campuses. Deans and professors say they haven’t been subject to any kind of political interference.

Indeed, the Qatar Foundation is intent on fostering the kind of debate for which this part of the world is not famous. Posters at various buildings around Education City advertise a series of monthly debates in the format used by the Oxford Union, featuring prominent speakers and televised by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The debate proposition for November 2008 was hardly low-key: “This house believes Gulf Arabs value profits over people.” Perhaps even more surprising, it passed by a margin of 75 to 25.²⁵

In a similar, if less visibly provocative, vein, the presence of North-western’s journalism school in Education City is intended to bring freewheeling American-style journalism—and thus gradual social transformation—to a country that has little tradition of a robust free press. Already, since Medill’s journalism program began in September 2008, Roth has visited many local newspapers and, in his words, “agitated for a more free press.” He notes that until just twenty-five or so years ago, a censor literally sat next to the editor in the newsroom. But although the Emir outlawed censorship when he took power in 1995, self-censorship remains widespread: “There’s still stuff that’s not being published,” says Roth, himself a seasoned journalist at various U.S. newspapers. He has quietly lobbied the newspapers—many staffed by Indian journalists—to stop such practices as running a picture of the Emir on the front page every day. Some have even run controversial stories.

Roth believes the Qatar Foundation is serious about improving the Qatari media. A senior foundation official, he says, told Northwestern administrators that “if we wanted to have a controlled press, we wouldn’t have [invited] a school of journalism.” Indeed, the Qatar Foundation’s Saoud, who is sometimes called the father of Education City, says emphatically that opening up a traditional society was a key goal of inviting Medill school to Qatar. “You know what media power is in making change,” he says. But, he is asked, is the foundation really ready for robust investigative reports that criticize government officials, when public questioning of authority has not previously marked the region’s political culture? He does not hesitate. “That’s what we want to do here. We want to change that culture.”

A further sign of liberalization is the fact that all courses offered at Education City campuses—except physical education and Islamic studies—are taught in coeducational classrooms. “Women are the big beneficiaries,” says Sheikha Al-Misnad. Undergraduate classes on her own campus, she notes, are completely segregated by sex. Like NYU’s campus, Education City also offers young women from traditional, protective families the opportunity to study at elite U.S. universities, which many of them could not otherwise do because of cultural barriers against traveling solo overseas.

While the different cultures on the Qatar campuses of Texas A&M, Georgetown, and other universities generally blend harmoniously, there are nevertheless occasional clashes. During a campus interview, John Bryant of Texas A&M lamented that students don’t always show the same willingness to learn to function in a transplanted Western environment that professors from the West are expected to show in the Middle East. “To me it’s largely a one-way street,” he said. Bryant spoke ruefully of an incident in which, by the engineering professor’s account, his hand accidentally brushed a female student’s hand while he was reaching for a computer mouse to demonstrate something to his class. After the young woman complained, Texas A&M reprimanded Bryant for sexual harassment. “I’ve gotten myself in major hot water a couple of times culturally here,” he said. Despite his disappointment with the way the incident was handled—he said he received “zero advocacy” from administrators—he later added that it was “isolated” and shouldn’t be overblown. “In the cultural context, I’m sure that the Qatari female student thought she had been ‘violated’ by an unrelated male and was upset and/or embarrassed,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “The only recourse through the Texas A&M system is through the sexual harassment route.”²⁶ Bryant says he is glad he retained the protection of tenure at the main campus, but he emphasizes that he has enjoyed his time in Qatar and has no immediate plans to return to College Station. After four years in Qatar, he recently extended his contract for another three years.

As Education City shows much early success, but also weathers some unavoidable growing pains, one of the biggest questions for its long-term success is whether its model is financially sustainable. For one, its lavish facilities don’t come cheap. Nor does its policy of giving Qatari students free tuition and offering interest-free loans to expatriates through the Qatar Foundation. The costs of salaries and lavish benefits for faculty, staff, and administrators are enormous, too. By design, there is no cost to home campuses for any of their Qatar satellite costs—and in fact, departments at U.S. universities may save money if a professor spends one or two years at Education City where his or her salary costs are covered. “The price per student for running this operation is beyond any rational analysis,” says Reardon-Anderson. “If I had to give a gut number, I’d guess it’s a half million dollars a year per student.”

Given the investment required to keep Education City going, the key factors behind the survival of this experiment in transplanted Western education are both economic and political. “One never knows—the price of oil and gas could change dramatically and priorities could change as a result,” says Mark Weichold of Texas A&M–Qatar. A related question, of course, is just how committed the government is to retaining and sustaining the campuses it has recruited. “Right now, today, I would bet that in thirty years we’d still be here.” Reardon-Anderson shares that optimism, based on Georgetown’s experiences so far. When his university was negotiating with the Qatar Foundation, “there were five areas of risk,” he says. “That we wouldn’t get faculty, that we wouldn’t get students, that we would suffer financial risk, that there would be a security problem, and that the reputation of the university would be harmed.” So far, he reports, “none of that has come about.”

EXPANDING OUTPOSTS

While U.S. universities are major players in the satellite-campus world, institutions from many other nations are extending their presence in regions well beyond the Middle East. These branch campuses are numerous—and take many shapes and forms. To complicate matters, there are multiple definitions of what constitutes a branch campus. According to two Australian academics, Grant McBurnie and Christopher Ziguras, authors of Offshoring Higher Education, a “full-service” branch campus can be defined as a “bricks and mortar presence, wholly or jointly owned and operated by the awarding institution, providing degrees face-to-face, supported by traditional physical infrastructure including library, laboratories, classrooms, and faculty and staff offices. Ideally research and community engagement should be part of the profile, as well as teaching.” Some fall far short of this standard, they note, ranging from storefront operations that function primarily as marketing offices for enrollment at the main campus to online course offerings that have no in-country physical presence beyond a local P.O. box.²⁷

Using a fairly rigorous definition, the London-based Observatory on Borderless Higher Education reported around 100 branch campuses worldwide as of June 2005.²⁸ A more recent study by the same group found there are now 162 such campuses; an increase of about 60 percent in just a few years.²⁹ Established mostly since the mid-1990s, the largest concentrations are in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with particularly strong growth taking place in India, China, and Central Asia.³⁰ American and Australian universities sponsor the largest number of satellite campuses, McBurnie and Ziguras report, with a smaller number of branch campuses operated by British, Malaysian, and Singaporean institutions.

To take just a few examples of non-American universities now active in the branch-campus boom, the Sorbonne has joined NYU in establishing an outpost on Abu Dhabi, while Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University has a campus in Dubai, and another Scottish institution, Queen Margaret University, has a branch in Singapore.³¹ For its part, Australia’s Monash University has a campus in South Africa in a suburb of Johannesburg³² (in addition to its branches in Malaysia and Italy).³³ Another Australian institution, RMIT International University, which is associated with the Australia Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, has about 3,800 students in its campuses in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.³⁴

In China, where huge numbers of students have shown an interest in acquiring Western diplomas, U.S. and non-U.S. universities alike have flocked to fill the demand. Britain’s University of Nottingham established a branch campus in the port city of Ningbo in 2005, billed by the Economist as “the first foreign-run university campus in China since the Communist takeover in 1949.”³⁵ Noteworthy for a campus that aims to replicate the British architecture and atmosphere of its home campus, the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, offers courses entirely in English and represents an effort by the parent campus (which also operates a branch in Malaysia) to expand its global profile. Among American universities, probably the best-known presence in China is a joint Johns Hopkins–Nanjing University program that has been in place for twenty years. The State University of New York–Stony Brook has initiated a dual-degree partnership with Nanjing University in which students divide their time between SUNY–Stony Brook and Nanjing.³⁶ And in the for-profit sector, Kaplan, Inc., said in December 2007 that it would be significantly expanding its educational programs in China.³⁷ Between the pure satellite programs—still relatively rare—and the much more numerous partnership efforts, the Western university presence in China has become very large. One report found that as of August 2006, more than 1,300 joint programs were in operation, with another 378 in the works.³⁸

Another massive market for university education can be found in India, whose extraordinary economic growth has created a significant middle class and a hunger for higher learning. With the exception of a relative handful of elite institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management, Indian universities are generally of middling to poor quality. They also have a woeful lack of capacity to enroll the soaring number of young people seeking degrees. Little surprise, then, that India is the world’s second-largest sender of students to overseas universities after China³⁹ and the single largest source of international students in the United States.⁴⁰ Like the Middle East and China, India has attracted enormous interest from foreign universities hoping to set up shop on India soil as well. But regulatory obstacles are particularly significant in India. For starters, foreign universities can’t operate independently. Georgia Tech, for instance, hopes to establish an offshore campus in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, offering several undergrad degrees. But it can’t do so until Parliament passes new legislation permitting a freestanding satellite campus. Meantime, many institutions—130 by one count—have entered the Indian market through partnerships or “twinning arrangements,” whereby students study in India with local private institutions for part of their program (usually using the U.S. college’s curriculum) and in the United States for the rest. Participants in such programs range from North Dakota State and Western Michigan University to Carnegie Mellon and Clemson.⁴¹

Another model lets Indian students earn an American degree without ever leaving the country. The highly regarded S. P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, for example, has partnered with Virginia Tech to offer a dual master’s degree program. Students accepted into the program spend two years earning an S. P. Jain diploma in systems management while also studying for a master’s in information technology from Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. Students don’t need to spend any time at Tech’s Blacksburg, Virginia, campus; instead, they attend all of their classes in S. P. Jain’s modern building in the northern suburbs of Mumbai. U.S. professors work with “co-instructors” from the S. P. Jain faculty, make use of audio software to offer some lectures with slides, and fly in once per semester for an intense week of in-person classes and meetings. All final grades are determined by Virginia Tech faculty. While class sizes tend to be large by U.S. standards—sixty-plus in some cases—the program has proven extremely popular so far. S. P. Jain officials say applications rose from around 100 for the first cohort of students to some 2,000 for the fourth cohort. And they note that the placement rate for graduates of the program has been very high.

On a late January morning in 2008, Virginia Tech professor Steven Sheetz—jet-lagged after flying in for a week of classes—says Virginia Tech’s motivation for the partnership is less about grand notions of globalization than dollars and cents. “I can speak to why we do it: it’s generating revenue,” he says. With state appropriations dwindling since 2001, Tech is scrambling to find new ways of funding its operations. Catering to student demand in India helps fill the budget hole. For its part, S. P. Jain touts numerous virtues of the arrangement, including allowing students to receive a U.S. degree while avoiding the visa restrictions that periodically make travel to the United States difficult. “Sitting in India, we get the top professors from Virginia Tech to teach us about the latest technology and trends,” says student Anamitra Ghatak.⁴² (Despite these benefits, the partnership was terminated after the 2007–8 academic year. According to Sheetz, the Indian government refused to let the arrangement continue because it objected to a foreign university taking profits from such a venture outside the country. With a new higher education minister more friendly to foreign universities now in office, Virginia Tech officials remain hopeful that the alliance may be revived.)

Even as they proliferate, and notwithstanding tuitions that are often lower than the amount charged on the universities’ home turf, branch campuses have faced plenty of obstacles. These range from financing and luring home-campus faculty to remote outposts to gauging student demand and ensuring that the valuable brand identity of well-regarded universities is not diluted in the process of creating new branches. Branding, while a term that university officials don’t always care for, is often a major consideration, especially for top-tier institutions.

Yale’s negotiations with Abu Dhabi officials broke down over whether a proposed Yale art institute in that striving Emirate could grant degrees identical to those earned at the university’s home campus. “We told them right from the outset, ‘We’re not going to give Master of Fine Arts degrees, normal Yale degrees there, because we can’t provide a faculty of comparable quality to what we have in New Haven,’ ” said Yale president Richard Levin in an interview in his office at the heart of Yale’s campus.⁴³ More broadly, he counts himself a skeptic of the satellite model as currently conceived. “The fundamental problem is universities are communities of scholars that build up over decades. And to really get a critical mass of high-quality faculty to go to some new location, it’s going to take a long time to build up a teaching faculty of the quality you have at the top schools. And so I’m somewhat skeptical that we can actually do that effectively.”

College presidents who are less skeptical than Levin may nonetheless find their branch-campus dreams dashed. One potential stumbling block: home-campus worries over human rights and free speech. Such objections don’t apply only to illiberal regimes in the Middle East. The University of Warwick, which prides itself on an entrepreneurial, globally oriented culture, spent months in prolonged discussions with officials in Singapore over what it hoped would be the university’s first satellite campus. Ultimately, however, it abandoned the plan in 2005 after the faculty senate voted to reject the proposed 10,000-student campus, amid concern by students and faculty alike about maintaining academic freedom in a nation that limits freedom of speech, assembly, and the press.

Concerns about political freedom were intertwined with disagreements over finances in preventing Warwick officials and their Singaporean interlocutors from coming to terms. “We got about 65 to 70 percent of the way,” says Edward Harcourt, head of Institutional Relations at Warwick.⁴⁴ But a long-term, secure source of funding from Singapore was particularly important to Warwick. Unlike some heavily fee-driven Western universities in China and Malaysia, it wanted its first outpost to be above all research oriented. “The proposition they put to us wasn’t particularly attractive, because we would only develop a campus overseas if we could be as research intensive and as excellent and as high-end an academic proposition over there as we were here,” Harcourt says. “They wouldn’t commit to a funding methodology that would give us the confidence to go forward. And the fact that they wouldn’t do that raised the academic freedom concern that we would become closely aligned with Singaporean public policy, because they would only fund stuff that they liked.” With a Singapore campus off the table, Warwick has no other plans to establish satellite locations.

Other obstacles can include not only financial risks but also regulatory, cultural, and logistical problems. In China, such barriers are legion. The Chinese Ministry of Education is notoriously slow to grant approvals, and identifying the Chinese institutions required as partners can be difficult. The University of Montana, for instance, had so many problems getting approved that the campus for 2,000 Chinese undergrads it planned to open in fall 2006 still hasn’t started classes. Neither has Kean University, which announced in May 2006 that in September 2007 it would be the first American university to open a brand-new campus in China.⁴⁵

The difficulty of gauging student demand is a further barrier. One of the most spectacular flameouts to date occurred when Australia’s University of New South Wales, which opened a brand-new campus in Singapore in 2006 with hopes of enrolling 15,000 students, shut its doors a year later having enrolled only 150 students. Some attributed the failure to the significant competition the Sydney-based university faced from the numerous other Western institutions that have established partnerships in the city-state in the past decade. (As Singapore has sought to become a center for global higher education, it has forged collaborations through its own universities with many Western institutions, including U.S. universities such as Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, the University of Chicago, Duke, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford, and the California Institute of Technology.)⁴⁶ Perhaps the most notable failure of branch campuses came when American universities flocked to Japan in the 1980s and 1990s, when that nation seemed to be the next model for world economic prosperity. Yet the popularity of U.S. branch campuses was short-lived; today only one satellite campus, that of Temple University, remains.⁴⁷

For other institutions, moving overseas simply isn’t part of their core mission. Philip Altbach points to his own university, Boston College, which has frequently been approached about establishing a satellite campus but decided against such a move. “It’s too complicated and we do well enough in our own markets,” Altbach says.⁴⁸ Instead, Boston College pursued a different internationalization strategy, sending more students abroad and recruiting more foreign students.

A clear possibility is that the global economic downturn will lead to the expansion of branch campuses as some students decide to stay closer to home for financial reasons but are still eager to earn degrees from Western institutions. However, that expansion might not be a good thing if it severely compromises quality, as Olcott of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education believes it might. “I suspect some institutions that are desperate for alternative revenue streams will consider playing in the global sandbox,” he says. “Many of these institutions have no business in the business of global higher education.” These universities are underresourced and won’t be able to sustain programs over the long term, he suggests, and many lack any expertise in delivering their courses off-campus.⁴⁹

Indeed, some analysts argue that location itself is a crucial part of what gives a university its identity. Kris Olds, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, says even his university’s long tradition of overseas programs and research initiatives, not to mention the sixty-eight languages taught on campus, doesn’t mean it has strayed from its origins as a public land-grant university. “I’m remarkably struck by how rooted in place it is,” says Olds,⁵⁰ who runs a well-regarded blog, Global-HigherEd, together with a colleague at the University of Bristol.

What’s more, proponents of any significant branch-campus initiative at Wisconsin would have to jump through many hoops to get approval: the faculty senate, the Board of Regents, the state legislature—not to mention negotiating the university’s famously contentious campus politics. “I just don’t think we have the resources and institutional culture and capacity to do it,” Olds says. Costs alone could sink even more modest joint degree projects, let alone full-blown satellite campuses, he says.

“I think American public institutions aren’t really going to get significantly involved overseas unless somebody is going to bankroll it from outside the institution—for example, state economic development initiatives or the State Department,” says Olds. “In Europe, millions are going into the Erasmus Mundus initiative to facilitate the establishment of joint degrees with European institutions. In Asia, lots of funding comes through ministries of education. My sense is that unless some other actors with larger-scale resources start getting involved in the United States, I imagine all we’re going to see are niche, well-resourced initiatives by interesting universities like NYU.”

Still, amid this uncertainty it is worth noting that even in the face of branch-campus failures, determined universities often find ways to continue forging cross-cultural partnerships. A good case study involves George Mason University, a fast-growing institution in Fairfax, Virginia, about thirty minutes from Washington, DC, that has made a conscious effort to spread its offerings both close to home and overseas. In addition to the university’s main campus, which offers a range of general subjects, it has a nearby campus in Arlington, Virginia, devoted largely to law and public policy. Another branch in the exurbs of Prince William County, Virginia, focuses on the biological sciences. And in 2005, after much debate among its trustees, it decided to expand its presence still further by opening a small satellite campus in Ras al Khaimah,⁵¹ one of the United Arab Emirates.

George Mason’s president, Alan Merten, says he and his colleagues felt it was important to treat the new campus as just one more component of its network. “We created the concept of the ‘distributed university,’ ” he boasts.⁵² “We’re almost fanatic,” he adds, echoing NYU’s John Sexton. “We don’t like the word ‘satellite.’ When someone refers to one of our campuses as a satellite, no matter if it’s Arlington or if it’s United Arab Emirates, we correct them because we believe that how you name something, particularly in higher education, sometimes has more of an impact than we’re willing to admit.” In a March 2008 interview, Merten said this integration across national boundaries can occur in ways large and small. The night before, he explained by way of example, the George Mason men’s basketball team was taking part in the NCAA Selection Show. Along with the crowds of supporters on the Fairfax campus, a group of students in Ras al Khaimah joined the festivities via satellite link. “They were cheering,” say Merten, “and our players were cheering when they cheered, and everybody cheered here.”

This vision of cross-cultural understanding (at least on the basketball court) came to an abrupt end a year later, however. In February 2009, the university announced that it was closing its small but closely watched Gulf branch, largely because of disputes between George Mason and its Gulf partner, the for-profit firm Edrak, over who would provide academic oversight and how soon the campus could reasonably be expected to become profitable.

Merten was undeterred, however. In a conversation five months after the closure, he spoke energetically about the success of a U.S.-China program collaboration known as the one-two-one program, in which George Mason and other U.S. universities participate. It works as follows: Chinese students attend any of 1,200 or so participating universities in China for their first year of study, then travel to George Mason for their second and third year before returning to their home campus for their final year. “It seems to be working,” Merten says. “It gives us exposure all over China without having to have a lot of overhead—we don’t have to set up a campus in China.”

George Mason isn’t shying away from new satellite campuses either. Merten also waxes enthusiastic about Mason’s role as one of seven or eight Western institutions (including the University of Delaware and North Carolina State) that will create branch campuses in South Korea’s Incheon Free Economic Zone. The new complex being created around a massive new international airport about one hour from Seoul is in an ideal location, says Merten. While the collection of campuses—analogous to Qatar’s Education City—initially aims to cater primarily to South Koreans, it hopes to eventually lure students and research from all over Asia to attend U.S. university campuses. “You’ve got to have the right partner when you do it internationally,” Merten says. “We think that this South Korean enterprise has much more of a government commitment and much more money behind it than maybe what we saw in the United Arab Emirates.”

Whether the obstacles and complications facing branch campuses are sufficient to thwart their growth will not become clear for some time. Decades of experimentation will likely take place along the way. For example, while collegiate entrepreneurs in the West explore ways to spread their offerings closer to potential students, more traffic is also beginning to develop in the opposite direction. Non-Western countries are improving their own postsecondary capacities, both in the traditional research university sector and in more targeted markets. Thus, new “reverse branch campuses” may emerge in the future. Already, a Malaysian for-profit university, Limkokwing University of Creative Technology, has opened branches in seven countries, including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, with twenty more in the works over the next five years. Its recently established London branch is the first non-American foreign university to open a campus in the United Kingdom.⁵³

Meanwhile, as evidenced by the plans of George Mason and others, the rise of the new global campus is likely to create a range of other permutations and combinations, some more radical than anything being contemplated today. Continuing his analogy between universities and the business world, Nigel Thrift of the University of Warwick argues that the next step for universities “ought to be to think about some form of consolidation with other universities around the world to get an organization that really works.” This would be a giant step beyond campus-to-campus partnerships, which he calls “an intermediary stage.” If universities behave as firm theory would predict, he concludes, “the logical end point of what’s going on in higher education at the moment is that institutions will actually start merging across borders.”

Whatever new forms the global presence of the world’s most successful universities may take—up to and including international mergers—some bumps in the road are certain. But in an ever-flattening world, the sweeping popularity of Western institutions, along with the ideals and excellence they represent, seems only likely to grow.