What do North Carolina and the small Middle Eastern nation of Qatar have in common?
Administrators and faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are asking the same question, as the university is vying--along with the University of Texas at Austin and perhaps others--to initiate a satellite undergraduate business school in Qatar.
In fall 2001, the Faculty Council at UNC-CH approved the proposal 44-25, with nine additional undecided votes, and in late December, the school proposed a $28 million budget for the satellite campus, despite recent reports that the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development--a private, non-profit organization founded in 1995 by Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani--has discussed the proposal with other schools.
"We're still exchanging information with them on budgets and curriculum," said Chapel Hill provost Robert Shelton. "Initially, what they want to do is enroll as many as 25 students per year, all from the Middle East."
However, not all faculty members are confident the partnership will be productive. Dennis Rondinelli, a Glaxo Distinguished International Professor of management at Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flager Business School, cited a number of reasons for caution--including royal corruption and human rights abuses. He also questioned what the school would gain academically from the partnership.
"I can't find a compelling academic reason for doing this," Rondinelli said. "We have no real expertise in the Middle East. There's very little that's going to benefit UNC from this."
Rondinelli suggested that money was the primary motivation for UNC-CH, noting that Cornell University received a donation of an undisclosed amount from the Qatar Foundation after agreeing to establish a satellite medical school last April.
Shelton, however, envisioned a number of potential research interests in Qatar such as methane chemistry, geology and Islam.
Robert Adler, professor of management at Chapel Hill, went on a trip to Qatar last fall with a contingent of faculty members and said that he returned confident the partnership would be successful.
"It seems to me this is a critical region of the world," he said. "This is a way to expand our connection to the Middle East that is incredibly productive for both sides."
Given the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and subsequent U.S. military action in Afghanistan, safety concerns have been a prime consideration.
"I think there are going to be continuing security problems in that part of the world," Rondinelli said. "It's rather risky to place a clearly American campus in the midst of a very volatile area."
Adler, however, disagreed.
"Qatar, to my knowledge, has had zero incidents of terrorism. It's a benign, friendly little country," Adler said. "My take on that is, I would rather have been in Qatar on Sept. 11 than sitting in a nice, safe office in New York City."
Many American universities have looked to forming partnerships with foreign universities in recent years to bolster their international reputation. Duke's Fuqua School of Business, a flagship for building international relationships, initiated a satellite campus two years ago in Frankfurt, Germany, to complement its Executive MBA program and begin a new Cross-Continent MBA program as well.
Shelton said the internationalization of American higher education is a growing enterprise.
"You can see it at the undergraduate level and the tremendous push for international experiences, internships abroad and that's nothing new," he said. "It's only natural with the global economy."
Qatar is a Middle Eastern, Muslim nation of 770,000 people located on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. A traditional monarchy, Qatar has a per-capita income similar to most Western European nations because of its oil production, which accounts for 30 percent of its gross domestic product.
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