Compromising

cover story

our Childrens
future

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The Supreme educaTion council (Sec)S SurpriSe deciSion laST year To SwiTch The language of inSTrucTion for Some key diSciplineS aT QaTar uniVerSiTy (Qu) from engliSh To arabic cauSed waVeS of diSconTenT and bemuSemenT around The campuS. could The Sec be abouT To bring whaT iS perceiVed Through-ouT The region aS a well-eSTabliShed and reSpecTed inSTiTuTion back 15 yearS wiTh a decree ThaT beTrayS liTTle SenSe of reSearch, or iS iT a neceSSary moVe aT a STraTegic Time To STabiliSe The counTryS culTural idenTiTy?
b y r o r y c o e n

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ffective last autumn, the disciplines of law, international affairs, media and business administration must be taught in Arabic going forward. The directive effectively scraps any English-language pre-requisites for freshmen in these disciplines, and there is no decisive comment coming from the SEC that the transition will end here. Qatar Today spoke to a group of QU students to get a sense of how they feel about this directive by the SEC and what it might mean for their prospects post-graduation. We also caught up with Prof. Sheikha Abdulla Al-Misnad, President of QU to resolve some of the key talking-points surrounding it. QUs global accreditation was largely achieved amongst other tremendous achievements because of its decision to switch its language of instruction for all disciplines to English a decade ago. It was seen as a bold but necessary move to bring the countrys workforce to the level stipulated in the National Vision 2030. Shaima*, a senior International Affairs student, argues that there hasnt been enough thought or research put into the decision. She has been a student at the university since 2007, and the first she heard about the directive was in a newspaper article last spring. Im not for or against this directive, she says. Im highlighting the fact that the

proper tools and resources for the students should be in place and a sufficient amount of research achieved - before decisions like this can be made. They seem to have made this one in a hurry. There are a number of reasons we think this. Education structurE In the past, all levels of education primary, secondary and third-level were delivered in Arabic, but as changes began to be made to address flagging standards in education, first QU and then the secondary schools changed their language of instruction to English. I think you have to look at the structure of the educational system here, Shaima continued. I studied in Arabic for 12 years before I entered state university where I was taught in English. However, I was lucky; I was good at English, but the majority of students were obviously having difficulty, till they changed the medium of education in independent schools to English. This raised the standard of the students entering the university, but the students coming from Arabic schools were still struggling. Now they are changing the university system back to Arabic! They are flipping the resolution - the next generation is going to suffer now. They really havent studied this properly. Rabea*, a Business Studies undergradu-

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ate, wonders why so much investment by parents and the country should go to waste. The majority of us knew we were going to be studying in English since 2001, he said. Parents have spent thousands of riyals the country has spent millions investing in English, and now they are going to switch it back to Arabic. My own professor is saying that his subject has no books and no references in Arabic whatsoever, so how can we study the material if we dont have primary texts? Lack of propEr rEsourcEs A big issue, as both Shaima and Rabea pointed out, is the lack of resources in Arabic. The students claim they will be unable to write to the same standard in Arabic as they are capable of in English, due to the fact that they cant get the quality required in Arabic. Shaima claims that they are told to translate their primary research from English into Arabic. Theres no safe assigned programme in Arabic. Everything can be copied and pasted from the Internet in effect after its translated from English. None of our papers can possibly be 100% plagiarism-free. I was also reading some arguments in favour of this directive: the Japanese and Chinese were doing fine without any English resources. Thats because they have their own resources in their own languages after years and years of input. We dont have that in Arabic. Its a simple basic equation. They should first invest in translation. As a college student, I would not know what to do to write an article in Arabic to an international accredited standard. There are not enough translated updated Arabic books on subjects such as International Affairs, Business and social sciences. What about non-arab studEnts? Another major issue is the sizeable number of non-Arab students in the university. If a number or the majority of disciplines are going to be taught in Arabic, what will

become of the students coming from Asia, Europe and further afield? Half my family are Qatari, added Mariam*, a Computer Science undergraduate. And when the news came through, everyone was so happy because we could all get into college without having a proficiency in English. I argued for the non-Arabic speakers and wondered what would happen to them, but they countered that Education City was there for these students. However Education City is not so cheap, so not everyone can necessarily afford it. It might teach its disciplines in English and have the finest resources and staff in the world, but it has a limitation that even the

Qatar university has been successful in meeting these standards and in achieving accreditation...as long as we sustain and continue to improve our quality standards, i am confident of our ability to remain on a par with the best universities as evidenced by our accreditation achievements. prof. Sheikha abdulla al-miSnad
Qu president

most resourceful and innovative student might not be able to overcome. My idea is to have two sections and run them in parallel, English and Arabic, Mariam continued. You cant force somebody to do a course in a language they are

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not confident with. Maybe this would be a solution? sEnsE of rEaLism rEquirEd The students are pragmatic in that they are staunchly proud of QU and of the Arabic language in general but their sense of realism transcends this. They know they will get a better education in English, and they know they will be better prepared for further education or employment should they study in English. Qatar deserves a state university that teaches in Arabic this is fair, but they should not destroy something which is really good and something which so many people have worked so hard to achieve, said Shaima. Qatar University paid millions for the best online database. I dont know how much we have spent on our new library, which is the best in the Middle East. Are all these books going to waste? Its as if theyre just giving up. As an International Affairs student in the twenty-first century wanting to be seen in a global context, how are we going to be able to perform and enter this arena without the basic language skills? Some majors I can understand, but International Affairs? Qatar University is trying to teach us that we should share our ideas, not keep them bottled up, so how can we share them if we cannot articulate them in the worlds language? Im not pro-western or pro-English; Im just saying theres a balance to everything. We have to accept that the global context is English and not Arabic. qu: accrEditation not affEctEd The students were quick to point out that the university would lose the global accreditation it worked so hard to achieve - and thus leave their qualifications in limbo - but the President of QU, Prof. Sheikha Abdulla Al-Misnad, said this is not the case. They were keen to bring some clarity to matters regarding the directive. Language of instruction does not

They should first invest in translation. as a college student, i would not know what to do to write an article in arabic to an international accredited standard. There are not enough translated updated arabic books on subjects such as international affairs, business and social sciences. Shaima*
Qu Student

directly impact a universitys accreditation, she said. Accreditation is based on a set of standards that the accrediting agency expects the institution to meet regardless of the language of instruction. Qatar University has been successful in meeting these standards and in achieving accreditation and membership in some of the worlds most competitive and most prominent accreditation commissions, such as ABET for engineering and AACSB for business and economics and many others. As long as we sustain and continue to improve our quality standards, I am confident of our ability to remain on a par with the best universities as evidenced by our accreditation achievements. So the ball will be firmly in QUs court to maintain the rich standards it was able to achieve through English. The students pointed out that they felt their current lecturers and professors were of an exceptional standard and raised performance levels in every discipline. Whether or not QU will be able to find the same level of expertise in the Arab world remains to be seen. With English being the established global language for business, engineering and science, how will this switch affect a students ability to seek further education or indeed gain suitable employment in their area of expertise in the future? It should not affect it, Professor Sheikha Al-Misnad replied. Although the language of instruction in the disciplines of law, international affairs, media and business administration will become Arabic, English language continues to be an important skill that we are committed to equipping our students with. References in English will still be used and language courses through the core curriculum will be offered to all students regardless of their majors to strengthen their communication skills in a way that preserves their competitiveness in a globalised labour market. We will make sure that our students have the advantage of strong Arabic language skills in addition to English language proficiency.

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post-Graduation Its been noted by Qatar Today recently that many companies feel that graduates need to be re-trained to do basic industry work. They feel universities are not giving students practical preparation for the workplace and, as graduates, they are overtrained on theory but not able to manage core industry programmes and procedures. How does QU keep pace with the growing expectations of corporates? QUs academic philosophy is very much based on preparing students for the workplace, said the President. This is achieved through making internships part of the coursework in many programmes, hosting guest speakers from the industry/sector that the student is studying, ensuring our curricula reflect the changing needs of the labour market through various means including having industry representatives on our college advisory boards, establishing industry-sponsored faculty chairs which serve as a link between the classroom and the workplace, field visits, international

travel experiences...the list is long. We survey employers on a regular basis in addition to receiving both casual and official feedback from employers. Like every university we have our niches but I can confidently and proudly say that our graduates are often not only meeting but exceeding expectations in the workplace. When the reform started in 2003 it was in part guided by the feedback of the job market. Having listened to what employers needed and where they found areas of weakness, we worked on them with students, whether in hard or soft skills. As a result, I think you will find today that employers are much more satisfied and impressed with our graduates. The labour market is fast-changing, and there will always be need for more preparation and training. Nonetheless, thanks to QUs close collaboration with the local labour market, our graduates have the advantage of understanding the specificities of the local industry and sectors and are as a result often chosen over graduates of international universities.

my idea is to have two sections and run them in parallel, english and arabic. you cant force somebody to do a course in a language they are not confident with. mariam*
Qu Student

* Students did not want to have their full names disclosed

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reality CheCk:

Closer to a knowledgebased eConomy?

ThereS no doubT ThaT QaTar iS working TireleSSly To achieVe iTS knowledge-baSed economy. The word knowledge iS menTioned more TimeS Than any oTher in The 2011-2016 naTional ViSion. educaTion ciTy iS populaTed wiTh Some of The worldS moST decoraTed uniVerSiTieS. buT doeS all ThiS neceSSarily mean ThaT QaTar will achieVe iTS ViSion? doeS a will mean Therell be a way?

When you dont have resources, you become resourceful. Unfortunately the opposite of this is also true. When you have resources, theres a tendency to let these resources work for you. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recently revealed the findings of an intriguing study regarding the above sentiment. It mapped students motivation to study in a particular country against the total earnings of the countrys natural resources as a percentage of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It basically assessed how smart kids were in countries that had an abundance or a lack of national provisions. It looked at the performance of 15-year-old students in 65 countries on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which tests maths, science and reading comprehension every other year. The coun-

tries which were involved in the study ranged from Singapore and Hong Kong to Qatar and Kuwait to Brazil and Mexico. No African countries were used in the study. Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the PISA exams in OECD countries, said the findings concluded that there was a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from natural resources and the knowledge and skills of their high-school population. Theres definitely a global pattern which is evident across the 65 countries that were assessed. Schleicher went one step further. Students in Singapore, Finland, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan stand out as having the highest PISA scores with few natural resources, while Qatar and Kazakhstan stand out as having the highest oil-rents and the lowest PISA scores. The only deflection from the norm was

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with Australia, Canada and Norway, who have high levels of natural resources and also score well on PISA. So when analysed, Schleicher says that knowledge and skill have become the global currency of 21st century economics, but there is no central bank which prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print. Limitations of Labour markEts Further to this, the Brookings Center Doha recently published a study on the career attitudes and motivations of university students and recent graduates in Qatar and the UAE. Its aim was to identify the range of obstacles that exist in the transition between education and employment. The paper found that policies must address the limitations of labour markets and the effects these limitations have on employment choices of young people. Otherwise high salary differentials between public and private sector employment and limited awareness of entrepreneurial support mean that the status quo of high public sector employment is likely to persist. It reveals that there is a need to reform the public sector itself - create more stateowned enterprises which comply with market-oriented, performance-based management rules while encouraging mobility between public and private sectors and taking other measures such as introducing greater parity between public and private sector pay, increasing young peoples employability and soft skill levels, and removing barriers to business start-ups and female employment. The study concludes that a new strategic framework should be introduced to facilitate young peoples transition from education to employment, and this should go beyond the objectives of nationalisation targets and address barriers such as salary level and a lack of training, while also seeking to enhance productivity, mobility and innovation in the workforce, as well as ensuring that all policies and programmes include systems of monitoring and evaluation which have been conspicuously absent in the past. a sLippEry sLopE? When looking at the above in isolation, the picture certainly does look pretty bleak for Qatar as a whole. The OECD report indicates that the countrys youth are too relaxed in their ap-

proach to education because its vast reserves of oil and gas will sustain their lifestyles, while Brookings understands that they are happy to land themselves a cosy public sector job, knowing they will earn more there than they ever will in the private sector. Qatar seems to be a society which has no instinct or motivation for learning or honing skills to compete. Everette Dennis, Dean and CEO at NorthWestern University in Qatar (NU-Q) says: I think theres a lot of effort through the Supreme Education Council to assess and evaluate performance going all the way back to grade school and high school. Thats conceivably very visionary, depending on how its all carried out. Theres a desire to get up to speed with the rest of the world and thats a positive thing. Theres a lot of emphasis on the teaching of language, a lot of emphasis on arts and culture, the kind of education that has relevance to the society, whether its preparing people for careers in ex-

Theres a desire to get up to speed with the rest of the world and thats a positive thing. Theres a lot of emphasis on the teaching of language, a lot of emphasis on arts and culture, the kind of education that has relevance to the society, whether its preparing people for careers in extractive industries or the cultural sector. eVereTTe denniS
ceo at northwestern university-Qatar (nu-Q)
tractive industries or the cultural sector. A lot of what we are doing here is of course tied to the Emirs 2030 goals, the National Vi-

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sion, of building a knowledge-based economy. We think that our students will be part of the content creation for knowledge-based industries in the non-fiction and journalistic sector. We try to be close to whats developing and we want to be part of it. All these growing enterprises in Qatar need a media and a communications connection, so we want to ride on their wave and contribute as much as we can. Robert Monroe, Associate Dean at Carnegie Mellon University, says that Qatar has incredibly ambitious goals for the education of its people and they are acting on those goals with strength and vision in a very impressive way. There are few countries in the world investing as much energy and resources into building a great education system as Qatar, he claims. The improvements are being implemented from K-12, to the Community College of Qatar and the College of the North AtlanticQatar, all the way through improvements and expansion at QU and the Education City campuses. It will take a decade or longer for the benefits of all of these efforts to become obvious, but if the efforts are sustained over time they will provide producErs, not consumErs Its clear that there is optimism from the corridors of Education City regarding Qatars prospects of overcoming its perceived defects in education standards. These colleges have brought a wealth of experience and knowledge here, coupled with an ability to transfer knowledge to willing and able students. But as Abdullah Zaid Al-Talib Chairman of Qatar University Wireless Innovations Center (QUWIC) said in his keynote speech at QITCOM 2012, even this may not be enough. In the Arab world, he contends, people have become consumers of knowledge instead of producers of it, and the producers love them for it. They dont want us to be producers, they only want us to consume their knowledge, he said. We are the same though. We only want them to consume our oil and gas. The Chairman of Google was in the region recently and somebody asked him how we can change from being consumers to producers and his candid answer was Get up and do it. Qatar has placed 2.8% of its GDP on research and development and has employed some highly qualified people to manage this pool. We have established an Education City where the best universities in the world are coming to work. This is a major advantage to lead us to our knowledge-based economy. This is our chance this opportunity might never come again. taLEnt transfEr Talent is the most important thing talent will be the driving force behind the knowledge-based economy, and the engine for this is education, education, education, he continued. We keep talking about knowledge transfer and technology transfer, but we should be focusing on talent transfer. Technology is safe, as it can be bought; knowledge is accessible on these devices; but developing talent will be the key to the knowledge-based economy. Talent can produce technology and knowledge and if you want proof of this, look to India and China. There are supremely talented people in these countries that went to the United States, got the knowledge and came home to their home countries and applied this there and helped their countries grow and compete. They didnt come up with technology or knowledge, they produced talented students who understood how to learn, how to work, how to set up a profitable company.

it will take a decade or longer for the benefits of all of these efforts to become obvious, but if the efforts are sustained over time they will provide Qatar with the people and expertise needed to build the knowledge-based economy envisioned in the Qatar national Vision 2030. roberT monroe
associate dean, cmuQ

Qatar with the people and expertise needed to build the knowledge-based economy envisioned in the Qatar National Vision 2030.

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Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US Presidents Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley says: The global landscape for innovation has been transformed over the past decade. Ours is now a world in which many emerging-market countries have made advancements in science and technology a top priority and in which multinational companies research and development (R&D) investments have become much more mobile. As the US and other developed countries embark on austerity plans to contain their debt, they must heed these changes in the innovation landscape and boost their investments in R&D and in science and engineering education even as they make painful cuts elsewhere. Qatar is indeed one of these countries that is seeking to make advancement in science and education, and it sees education as the catalyst. What are the new universities at Education City doing to impress this talent transfer mantra that is now becoming so important in developing entrepreneurs and innovators who will produce knowledge, and not perpetuate an economy of consuming it? Qatar is interested in the process of knowledge creation; it doesnt just want to produce engineers or scientists, it wants to produce engineers and scientists who produce knowledge for consumption elsewhere selling knowledge instead of hydrocarbons, if you like. Everette Dennis at NU-Q explains that their priority is to make sure their graduates have a competent liberal arts education and a capacity to know and understand the field they are going into. A school like this is initially preparing people for entry level. If theyre going to be competent at this level, youd like them to be prepared to move into a managerial or a leadership role. We provide this we want our students to have a certain level of expertise, but also understand how they can use this to grow further. We do this in a number of ways. We had a job fair recently where 20-25 local firms were interacting with our students. They go on internships to different media organisations around the city or businesses that need communication skills. We sent students on special summer courses or courses during their breaks where they might cover a story at a refugee camp in Jordan, or an international event in Geneva. About 39% of our total admis-

sions are Qatari students this obviously fluctuates year-on-year. Monroe at Carnegie Mellon says his university is founded on the firm belief that through the encouragement of scientific inquiry and the promotion of practical preparedness, they can provide a generation of thinkers, business leaders, researchers and scientists. Core values of innovation, creativity, collaboration and problem-solving provide the foundation for everything we do, he says. Through our Office of Professional Development, the university connects students with valuable internship and career opportunities. More than 80% of Carnegie Mellon graduates complete at least one internship programme, and some students take on multiple internships before graduation. Our corporate partners span a wide range of industries in Qatar. We have also seen an increase in international internships, with students gaining experience with finan-

we keep talking about knowledge transfer and technology transfer, but we should be focusing on talent transfer. Technology is safe as it can be bought, knowledge is accessible on these devices, but developing talent will be the key to the knowledge-based economy. abdullah zaid al-Talib

chairman of Qatar university wireless innovations center (Quwic)

cial firms on Wall Street, consulting companies in Singapore and Dubai, and research organisations in India, Tanzania and Bangladesh.

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