RIYADH: A Saudi foundation plans to launch next year a private university it hopes will help reform the strict kingdom’s much-criticised education system.
“The whole reason for Al Faisal university is ... to cause a change in Saudi Arabia, you can only do it with education, “ said Prince Bandar bin Saud bin Khalid al-Saud, deputy managing director of the King Faisal Foundation. “We look at education as an agent of change in Saudi Arabia.”
The reform of education in the kingdom, which follows an austere version of Islam, has been under debate since the September 11 attacks on US cities, carried out mainly by Saudis.
Local and Western critics say the education system fosters the radical Islam espoused by militants.
They say schools and universities also do not arm young Saudis with the right skills to get a job in a country with a rapidly growing native population.
Prince Bandar said the university enjoyed the support of authorities “to become the benchmark for other universities in Saudi Arabia”. Costing hundreds of millions of dollars, it will focus on sciences and will not offer courses in Islamic or social studies.
“We will teach engineering, medicine, science and business technology... Al Faisal should be like the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or the Cambridge of the Middle East,” he told Reuters in an interview.
“We aim to encourage other universities to do much better, because students will have another choice... (we aim) to give them the knowledge, open up their horizons, let them see things in a broader and global sort of way.”
Many Saudi students, hoping for a job in the public sector, snub science studies, a pattern that has been criticised by the World Bank as a major obstacle to government efforts to create jobs. The world’s biggest oil exporter depends on some 6 million foreign workers.
The sprawling campus will have two-storey classrooms, which will ensure that students attend a lecture without breaking Islamic rules that ban unrelated men and women from mixing together. Medical students, however, will get the unprecedented chance to study together.
The university expects up to 4,000 undergraduates in its first year. The King Faisal Foundation was set up in 1976 by the late King Faisal’s sons to help promote education development in Muslim countries.—Reuters
