Posted on 07/15/2008 3:37:11 PM PDT by forkinsocket
THUWAL, SAUDI ARABIA -- Up the corniche, along a coast where boats carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca sailed for centuries, a thicket of cranes rises over whitewashed mosques along the Red Sea.
Steel flashes and blowtorches glow as 20,000 workers build a $10-billion university ordered up by a king who hopes Western ingenuity will revive the economy of this ultraconservative Muslim nation. When finished next year, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology will offer coed classes, Western professors, a curriculum in English and other touches loathed as dangerous liberalism by Islamic fundamentalists.
The West may be dependent on Saudi crude, now as high as $145 a barrel, but this campus outside an ancient fishing village is recognition that the country that is home to Islam's holiest shrines needs the likes of USC, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to survive globalization.
An architect's rendering shows a campus of canals and reflecting pools running along sleek silver and glass libraries and laboratories. A marina with slips for 140 boats stands in a cove lighted by a tapered beacon. Students and professors will live in villas and apartments looking out on date palms and furnished with eggshell and white Swedish-style sofas and chairs.
Saudis have studied in the U.S. and Europe for decades, bringing back expertise without directly exposing the kingdom to Western classrooms and professors. But the new university is inviting the secular West a step closer in another ideological battle between Saudi reformers led by King Abdullah and the Wahhabi sect of puritanical Islam that has resisted outside influences since the days of desert caravans.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Sounds like a big fat target to me. I hope they pay the Western professors well and issue them bulletproof vests and bomb proof homes.
...... blowtorches glow ......
ignorant journalist flag. The man is grossly ignorant and should not be allowet to wield a pen.
Fortunately, he soon will be jobless
An educated people are a people who are hard to control. Of course, that would not at all bode well for the Wahhabis. This looks like an interesting experiment in education, and I can only wish the Saudis well in this endeavor.
You mean largely staffed by leftists and boasting co-ed dorm rooms?
what about cheerleaders?
And what about keggers?
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