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Is the University Universal? Mobile (Re)Constitutions of

American Academia in the Gulf Arab States
NEHA VORA
Lafayette College

Through ethnographic examples of students’ engagement with American universities in the United
Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship
with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both
citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one that deliberately foregrounds the parochialism
of an American perspective on the future of the academy as part of a broader project of postcolonial
and transnational engagement with this new knowledge economy. [higher education,
transnationalism, globalization, Gulf Arab States, ethnography]

Introduction
Over the last ten years, several Global South countries have actively partnered with
American universities to build branch campuses, gain Western accreditation, and train
their citizens in skills they believe will aid in economic growth. Many educators, however,
have connected the spread of U.S. universities and educational partnerships abroad to
what they consider a crisis in American academia, evidenced in part by budget cuts and
increasing neoliberalization at home campuses (see Aksan 2010; Altbach 2004; Bollag 2006;
Gould 2003; Morey 2004; Poovey 2001; Shumar 1997; Smeby and Trondal 2005). Recent
accusations that instructors are unproductive, debates surrounding the continuation of
tenure systems, and moves to quantify professor effectiveness through metrics that privi-
lege financial contributions to the university are just a few examples of shifts in national
attitudes about the university structure that have been profoundly affecting the daily lives
of faculty, staff, and students at institutions of higher education in the United States. These
shifts have led educators to question the future of academic freedom, equal access to
education, and tenure systems. The increasingly transnational and corporate structure of
the university is what Bill Readings (1996) has referred to as “the university in ruins”—an
institution that has lost its raison d’être as an inculcator of national culture and public good.
Moving away from national models and toward more corporate understandings of value
and mission has heralded a new distributed knowledge economy that increasingly
includes private enterprises, crosses national borders, and shifts understandings of insti-
tutional success. Most of the scholarship on this shift in academia has until now focused
on its potential impacts on Western—particularly American—institutions, actors, and
models of education. In contrast, this article approaches the effects of these changes not on
the United States, but on the Gulf Arab States and their residents. This entry point is one
that purposefully acknowledges the parochialism of an American perspective on the
future of the academy as part of a broader project of postcolonial and transnational
engagement with this new knowledge economy. While several scholars have argued that
new transnational neoliberal educational models are extensions of previous forms of
Western and American imperialism in the Global South, these critiques too often center
American perspectives and not on-the-ground complexities of people’s engagements with
this new knowledge economy. I want to consider therefore how the university—when it
appears to be newly mobile under 21st-century forms of capitalism—raises specific ques-
tions about commodification, imperialism, and commensurability of education for differ-
ently situated people around the world while eliding others.

Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 46, Issue 1, pp. 19–36, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.
© 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI:10.1111/aeq.12085

19
20 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

The Gulf States have been very active in partnering with American universities to build
branch campuses (Krieger 2008). While branch campuses are often understood as indica-
tors of the erosion of the values of the university—particularly academic freedom, critical
thinking, pedagogy, and disinterested knowledge production—branch campuses are also
spaces that are enabling new forms of citizenship, identity, and belonging for Gulf resi-
dents, both citizen and noncitizen. In what follows, I focus on what I consider a relatively
undiscussed element of the literal and figurative extension of the American university: the
complexities of students’ engagement with these newly available educational offerings
and the constructs they bring with them (see Kane 2012; Kelly 2010; Tetrault 2010, 2011;
Vora 2013, 2014a for ethnographic explorations of Gulf branch campuses). Specifically, the
unexpected effects that these schools are having on citizen and foreign resident popula-
tions in the Gulf muddle easy dismissals or celebrations of the practice of globalizing
higher education. By shifting our focus to these campuses, we can perhaps better ascertain
how certain ideologies, techniques, and practices of the university get stabilized and trace
the means by which actors stabilize them. What does this new knowledge economy reveal
about the universals we associate with the university, and what remains obscured? My
fieldwork experiences with South Asian young people in Dubai, as well as interviews and
teaching experiences at Texas A&M’s branch campus in Doha, Qatar, provide preliminary
and contingent answers to these questions and point to the need to conduct what Lukose
(2007) and others have called “school ethnographies” in order to explore how citizenship,
politics, identity, and belonging are reconfigured within the classrooms, hallways, dormi-
tories, and social spaces of these new universities. This article, then, is concerned with the
relationship between globalized higher education and shifting definitions of national
identity, community, civil society, and public good in the Gulf. By reflecting on these shifts
in the Gulf, I also hope to provoke reflection on larger questions about the future of the
university as a central institution for producing knowledge and producing subjects.

Framing the Debate around Globalized Higher Education in the Gulf

In her Presidential Address at the 2009 Middle East Studies Association (MESA) meet-
ings in Boston, titled “How Do We Know the Middle East?,” Virginia Aksan of McMaster
University in Ontario, Canada reflected on changes she had seen in the United States and
in academia since September 11, 2001 (9/11), saying:

The production of knowledge, through scholarly research, teaching and publication, the very heart
of who we are and what we do, is undergoing a profound fragmentation, not just because of the
reassertion of a new American enemy following 2001, but also because of . . . the creeping
corporatization of the universities and colleges where most of us work . . . the very idea of the
university and its potential to contribute to the common good is threatened. [Aksan 2010:3–4]

A major way this threat is directly manifested, according to Aksan, is in the spread of
U.S. branch campuses abroad—“commodity” products that are diluting the quality of
education and the possibilities of academic freedom promised by the university as an
institution for intellectual pursuit and curiosity.1 As she told the audience of scholars,
students, and policy makers that afternoon:

Another consequence of commoditization is the export of an idealized American education, a new

form of missionary impulse supported by vast imitative campuses built by governments in the
Gulf or China (as at my own university). Qatar’s Education City boasts Carnegie Mellon, George-
town, Texas A & M, and Virginia Commonwealth. NYU is opening The World’s Honors College in
Abu Dhabi. Our Provost was informally asked what would happen if a scholar raised the human
rights question at McMaster’s university in China, and the answer was predictable. The social
sciences are not to be part of the initial phase of the project . . . Can we be silent on these questions?
[Aksan 2010: 9–10]
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 21

In her speech, Aksan explicitly connects American empire with the corporate neoliberal
aspects of globalized higher education, and she points to how these questions are particu-
larly salient for scholars of the Middle East given we are in an era of a war on terror. This
speech was published in a recent issue of the Review of Middle Eastern Studies alongside a
rebuttal by Mehran Kamrava from Georgetown’s branch campus in Doha (see Kamrava
2010). Dr. Kamrava’s response to Dr. Aksan highlighted how the six universities in Qatar’s
Education City were committed to the highest international standards of teaching and
research, were free from censorship, and were invigorating multicultural spaces of aca-
demic curiosity.2 To make his point, Kamrava provided examples such as the regular Doha
Debates, which occur in Education City and discuss controversial topics from a range of
perspectives, and the Problem of God course offered at Doha’s Georgetown campus,
which is required for all students. While Aksan’s speech highlighted concerns about
importing a particular kind of American imperialism into a region that has already been
“colonized” in many ways, both by prior knowledge production about it and by
missionary-style educational projects,3 Kamrava’s response questions whether Aksan
herself was irresponsible in her dismissal of places like Education City, having never been
there, seen the universities, nor spoken with the students herself.
This debate between Kamrava and Aksan represents the divergent views upon which
other debates surrounding branch campuses of American universities, particularly those
in nonliberal contexts like the Gulf Arab States, have largely been framed in recent years.
On the one hand, proponents point out that people outside of the Global North deserve
access to quality education, that English and other skills are required both to be globally
competitive and to produce citizens who will aid in national development, and that
international partnerships have value to U.S. universities that go beyond monetary profit,
such as increased brand recognition and more cosmopolitan educational experiences for
their students. Detractors, on the other hand, are concerned with the impacts of moving
established institutions into unfamiliar places in terms of brand dilution due to the
inability to police whether education is truly commensurable and due to concerns over
human rights for students and employees in states that openly suppress freedom of
speech, women’s equality, labor organization, and/or gay and lesbian rights. In addi-
tion, critics of globalized higher education express concerns about globalization as a
potential flattening force that, emerging from prior unequal geopolitical relationships,
could be yet another threat to local forms of knowledge production and autonomy. The
issues highlighted in pro and con views of American university expansion abroad seem
in many ways to be magnified in the case of the Gulf States. I have explored elsewhere,
for example, how the supposed exceptionality of these spaces makes for discussions
about them that are often evacuated of the complexities of lived experience for their
diverse residents (Vora 2013). In fact, many representations of the Gulf ironically rely
upon facile and Orientalist understandings of Gulf governments, people, and politics in
order to argue against American neocolonialism in the region. These same criticisms
also venture dangerously close to moral judgments and civilizational discourse about
which places in the world are ready for democratic government, Western education,
or civil society and which places are “not yet” on a yardstick of development to deserve
such institutions (Chakrabarty 2000). The forms of governance, economic development,
and social hierarchies that have come to define the contemporary Gulf States do seem
to directly challenge, at first glance, the values associated with Western academia. In
addition, the legal, economic, and political aspects of the Gulf States are in many
ways different from those of Western democracies and require some explanation
in order to address how these differences get mobilized within debates on globalized
higher education and in the intricate processes of building American branch
campuses.
22 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

The Gulf Arab States, known collectively as the GCC (Gulf Cooperative Council),
include the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. Most
were under exclusive treaty agreements with the British Empire into the mid-20th century
and are relatively new nations (see Kubursi 1984; Onley 2007; Zahlan 1998). Qatar and the
UAE, for example—the two countries that I focus on in this article—gained independence
in 1971. As oil-rich countries, the GCC states are often referred to as “petro” or “rentier”
states in the political-economic writing on the region (Beblawi 1990). They are hereditary
monarchies with limited parliamentary government (or none in some cases), and citizen-
ship rights are based not in liberal democratic participation but rather in generous social
welfare benefits, such as free education (including higher education), free housing or
housing subsidies, guaranteed employment, and universal access to healthcare, among
others. Additionally, these countries are marked by a large demographic “imbalance” in
the work force and often in the general population as well; rapid development following
the discovery of oil and, more recently, economic diversification projects have fueled high
levels of migration to the region from around the world, ranging from semiskilled con-
struction and service industry workers from Asia and Africa to managerial and entrepre-
neurial classes from North America and Europe, for example.4 This demographic
imbalance between citizen and noncitizen is the most exaggerated in Qatar and the UAE:
it is estimated that less than 15 percent of residents in these countries are citizens (Sater
2013). Foreign residents, the majority of whom are from South Asia, have almost no access
to citizenship and are in the country either on work visas or as dependents to other foreign
residents (Kapiszewski 2001). Furthermore, Gulf States are extremely interested in polic-
ing the boundaries of citizenship to protect what they consider threatened native popu-
lations (Dresch 2005). Gulf States do, however, provide opportunities for economic
belonging to their more wealthy foreign residents, and one way this is manifested is in
middle-class and elite migrants’ ability to raise families in the Gulf and, more recently, to
have their children attend private institutions of higher education, as I explore below.
Globalized higher education in the Gulf is part of state incentives to diversify away from
finite oil wealth into knowledge-based economies, and it is attractive to ruling families as
a way to train citizens to be locally and globally more competitive in order to reduce the
current reliance on foreign labor, even though bringing in foreign universities often
requires paying hefty set-up costs and consultation fees, and the importation of even more
non-native expert labor (Vora 2014b). The UAE has greatly expanded its private higher
education options in the last decade with the American University of Sharjah (AUS), the
American University of Dubai (AUD), the University of Wollongong, and more recently
the opening of the Harvard-affiliated Dubai School of Government and NYU Abu Dhabi.
In Qatar there is a similar trend, focused primarily on the universities within Education
City but more recently expanding to other areas of Doha with the introduction of the
College of the Atlantic, the University of Houston (which provides a community college
option for Qataris), and non-US Western institutions as well. As I explore below through
the cases of South Asian youth in Dubai and both Qatari and foreign resident students in
Doha’s Education City, the multiple valences that stratify Gulf residents impact their
educational experiences and, by extension, their forms of subjectification and citizenship,
whether legal or substantive.5
I am, however, deliberately not taking sides here in the particular debate about whether
branch campuses are indicative of moves towards increasing international prominence
and global excellence, on the one hand, or of either an erosion of the core values of the
Western university or a form of new imperialism on the other. Instead, I am interested in
looking more closely at how this debate itself, as well as the language through which
branch campuses are understood as infrastructural extensions of home universities, both
traffic in similar assumptions. Both sides of the debate rely upon a shared discourse that
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 23

privileges certain tracers to make some spaces central and others peripheral, some global
and others local, some universal and others derivative. Additionally, this debate obscures
the production of abstract ideas such as academic freedom, scientific observation, and
humanism from within Western universities in order to recuperate them as fact. The
universals of the university are thus presumed to precede it instead of to come about
through specific associations of university actors, locations, and historical contexts. These
assumptions take away from more nuanced questions about how a contemporary U.S.
university is made into a modular and transportable commodity—literally and metaphori-
cally how the networks and branches get laid to build a globalized university. Following
from postcolonial studies about the entanglements between Western educational models
and colonial contexts, I am interested in how hegemonic ideas are negotiated on the
ground, have unintended consequences, and allow us to see tracers that reveal the paro-
chial nature of supposedly universal values (for an exploration of the complexities of
education under colonialism see Bertelsen 2012; Chatterjee and Maira 2014; Seth 2007;
Summers 2002; and Viswanathan 1989). However, while literature on colonial education
provides a rich analytical framework, I do not want to imply that the contemporary Gulf
context is an extension of Western imperialism—Gulf wealth and power also flows to the
West, and there are many geopolitical entanglements, cosmopolitanisms, and cultural
forms that resist easy categorizations of Gulf States as colonized by Western governments
or ideas.

Case 1: South Asian Second-Generation Youth, Politicization, and

New Subjectivities
The United Arab Emirates’ close to three million South Asians, who constitute the
majority of the population, have until recently been quite absent from the literature on
South Asian diasporas.6 This might be because the system of migration sponsorship in the
Gulf Arab States, called kafala—through which individual citizens sponsor migrants on
temporary, renewable work contracts—makes any real community formation and sense of
attachment to the UAE seem impossible. While the state does provide unofficial forms of
belonging for some of its foreign residents, particularly middle and upper classes, its kafala
migration sponsorship system and its official policies produce the idea that migrants are
temporary necessary evils of development, and they discourage (or even forbid) inter-
marriage, cultural assimilation, naturalization, or other processes that would make foreign
residents more permanent. The state’s desire to prevent migrant integration is directly
reflected in its educational systems, which greatly impacted the experiences of middle-
class South Asian young people raised in Dubai among whom I conducted ethnographic
research in 2006 (see Vora 2013). However, as I argue in my previous work, the state
deploys multiple forms of governance to regulate its citizenry and therefore proliferates
several types of citizenship as well. This includes ideas about national and racial purity,
liberal contract-style relationships, and neoliberal and consumer citizenship models.
These are not only forms of governance and subjectification that apply to citizens but
also—and more importantly—to the majority noncitizen population of the country. Non-
citizen narratives can therefore tell us quite a bit not only about mechanisms of exclusion
in the Gulf but also about what belonging and citizenship looks like on the ground (see
Ahmad 2011; Gardner 2010; Leonard 2002; Longva 1997; Nagy 2008; Okruhlik 2010); in
particular, as key sites for citizenship training, educational institutions can be rich spaces
for ethnographic research into citizenship and belonging among citizens as well as
noncitizens.
As a component of the welfare benefits provided by the oil-rich Gulf States, citizens in
the UAE are provided free public education in Arabic (and more recently in English). In
24 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

contrast, noncitizens attend private schools that are most often nationality based. Private
education at the primary and secondary level is integral to the production of the citizen/
noncitizen divide in the UAE and other Gulf States. Students in private schools are not
taught in Arabic (except for a small required amount of training that all my interlocutors
had since forgotten), have little sustained interaction with Emiratis, and learn Emirati
culture and history only as outsiders to that culture and history (Al-Khaldi 2007). Private
education also produces distinct national identities among foreign residents. By dividing
most children into national groups and teaching national languages and histories, students
develop an identity that is primarily based upon their parents’ country of origin. In
addition, they are most often prepared for higher education outside of the UAE and
therefore expect their tenure in the UAE to have an end date. The recent influx of American
branch campuses and Western-style higher education into the Gulf has extended this end
date for younger members of diasporic communities. This is key to the way that American
branch campuses have multiple and contradictory effects—while they are meant primarily
to hail the citizenry as clients within this knowledge economy, they are also spaces that are
reconfiguring notions of citizenship and belonging among their noncitizen consumers,
particularly South Asians, who make up a large proportion of the enrollment at these
universities.
In the UAE and in other Gulf States, the ability to migrate with family members is based
on minimum monthly salary requirements for the male head of household (at the time of
my research this was 4,500 dirhams, or a little over 1,200 dollars). Therefore, the young
people that I am speaking about here were able to grow up in the UAE because their
parents had achieved some form of middle-class status. Foreign children are sponsored by
their fathers, and their ability to reside in the UAE is reliant upon this sponsorship. They
are ineligible for naturalization in the Gulf and hold the nationality of their fathers regard-
less of where they were born. Boys can only be sponsored on their fathers’ visas until they
turn 18 or until they graduate from university; girls, on the other hand, are considered
dependent through the time of marriage or until they find employment that provides them
with their own visa sponsorship. This makes second-generation futures in the UAE very
uncertain, and gendered as well. This uncertainty, combined with the ubiquity of South
Asian peoples, products, and services in the downtown neighborhoods of Dubai where
the majority of the South Asian diaspora lives, led to understandings of identity among
South Asian youth that were both oriented toward South Asia but also firmly rooted in
Dubai.
Ashish, an interlocutor who came to become one of my good friends during and after
fieldwork, is a second-generation South Asian resident of Dubai whose university expe-
riences impacted his sense of identity and produced what I believe are important changes
in the way he and his peers think about their social positions in comparison to older
generations of Dubai South Asians (see Vora 2013, chapter 5). Born and raised in Dubai,
Ashish attended the American University of Sharjah, which is affiliated with American
University in Washington, DC. After graduation he entered a prestigious master’s
program in the United States. When I met him before his trip to the United States for
graduate school, his aspirations for the future were to work for the UN or at a policy-
oriented think tank that focused on the Middle East. However, Ashish’s aspirations con-
sistently brushed up against forms of immobility and the parochial identifications through
which he was interpellated, both in the UAE and in the United States. One such time was
a few days before Christmas in 2007, when I was living in California. I received an
unexpected phone call from Ashish, who was in the midst of his master’s program in
Washington, DC. He wanted to know if it was too late to take me up on an offer I had
extended to come and visit during his winter break. “But I thought you were going back
home to Dubai,” I said. “I was,” he responded, “but I have been to the airport twice so far
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 25

and they won’t let me get on the plane.” It turns out that Ashish, who holds an Indian
passport because he is unable to naturalize in the UAE and is no longer considered a
dependent of his father, not only needed a visa to return home, but the American-based
airline he was flying also wanted to see the actual paper visa—the faxed copy from Dubai
that he had was not sufficient for the airline staff because people of certain nationalities
were not allowed to board a flight to the UAE without a visa. Despite having lived his
entire life in Dubai, and processes being in place in the UAE for people in his position to
have family apply on their behalf from the UAE, Ashish found himself for the first time in
his life unable to return to the only place he had ever called home. Given that it was the
weekend and right before Christmas, it was impossible to reach the Emirati embassy in the
United States to clear up the matter. As I listened to Ashish express his anger and
frustration over this incident, I thought back to several conversations we had had in Dubai
about his identity as a foreign resident of the emirate: in our first interview, I asked him to
describe his identity and he referred to himself as “Indian by default.” When I asked him
to explain, he said, “I basically feel that as an Indian I would never be a full equal over here.
I am discriminated against. I wouldn’t be able to get equal pay for equal work. I am always
going to be second class even if I were to get citizenship somehow. I would never be
accepted as one of them.”
Ashish’s sense of second-class identity was a politicization that grew out of his inability
to transcend a parochialized Indian existence in the UAE and elsewhere, and it was also a
diasporic claim to citizenship and racial justice in Dubai, the only home that he had ever
known. Ashish and the other young people I interviewed understood and expressed their
identities, belongings, and futures differently from their parents and even from South
Asians raised in the Gulf a few years before them. This politicization came about not
through a lifetime of discriminatory experiences but rather through their experiences as
college students at the American University of Sharjah and other universities in the UAE.
Like many of my other interlocutors, young people raised in Dubai felt that it was most of
all a South Asian—and especially an Indian—social and cultural space. This is because
they lived their lives in communities and neighborhoods that were mostly segregated
from citizens and non-South Asian migrants. Most importantly, however, their experience
of Dubai as an Indian/South Asian space was due to the fact they were taught Indian or
Pakistani citizenship through a privatized education system that produced foreign resi-
dents’ future orientation toward a return to South Asia or migration out of the UAE.
Ashish’s comment that he is “Indian by default” was indicative of the ways in which
Emirati forms of governmentality operated in the production of South Asian youth as
outsiders to Emirati national identity.
Public colleges and universities only allow citizens to matriculate, which means that
until the introduction of privatized higher education about a decade ago—primarily
through branch campuses and for-profit institutions—noncitizen youth had no local
options for tertiary schooling. The transitions from secondary schools to American-style
universities were moments of rupture for my interlocutors, for their Indian forms of
learned citizenship and identity came into contact with the supposedly global and uni-
versal forms of liberal education that branch campuses were integrating into the existing
social fabric of Gulf countries. I argue that the reconceptualization of South Asian
diasporic identities in Dubai, like we can see in Ashish’s narrative, can be traced in part to
this dramatic influx of American and Western-style universities into the Gulf Arab States.
However, as I explore below, the seemingly universal ideas of American education were
reassembled in Gulf spaces in ways that diverged from their original forms and became
quite local in their iterations and engagements with differently situated actors.
Though intended to globalize Emirati citizens and allow them to replace foreign
workers, private universities in the UAE are attended more often by middle- and
26 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

upper-class foreign residents, who often already have the English-language training these
schools require and whose sheer numbers in the Gulf make them the largest pool of
potential consumers for these new educational offerings. Western universities provide an
opportunity for Gulf expatriate students to stay close to home while also teaching them
skills they (and their parents) imagine will make them more globally marketable. These
universities also extend the length of time noncitizen children can stay in Gulf countries,
and they often provided the first opportunity that my South Asian student interlocutors,
despite having grown up in an international “global city” like Dubai, experienced any
sustained contact with Emirati citizens and other foreign nationals. Because these options
are so new for foreigners in the Gulf, Indians raised in Dubai who are 30 and above went
abroad for higher education, usually to India, and in some cases to Europe or North
America. The youth whom I interviewed had very different experiences than those just a
few years older, for they were able to stay in the Gulf through the entire course of their
schooling. The movement from K-12 education to college marked a dissonance in the
experiences of noncitizen students and a historical turning point in the trajectories of
second-generation life in the UAE. Only now, in their twenties, were these young people
facing the possibility of living abroad.
This new knowledge economy, while producing transnational and neoliberal subjects,
also brought a form of localized politicization for South Asian youth that they did not have
prior to entering the university system. By entering a university space that is modeled, in
most cases, on American academic institutions, these young people are theoretically equal
to their peers, regardless of citizenship or nationality. However, they recounted many
incidents that made the transition into this type of egalitarian space very complicated and
highlighted the ways in which equality, as an idea associated with the American univer-
sity, is experienced and negotiated differently in specific academic spaces. When they
began to interact with Emiratis and other expatriates at branch campuses like AUS, my
interlocutors developed a more concrete sense of the citizen/noncitizen hierarchy and the
fact that they were actually foreigners in the place they considered home. The university
was a space in which all students were technically equal. However, it was the academy that
highlighted for South Asian youth their difference from other groups, for it was in this
space that they experienced direct racism and practices of self-entitlement from their
peers, often for the first time. My interlocutors told me that what they found most difficult
was the behavior of Emirati and other Gulf Arab nationals. In our conversations, they
spoke of incidents in which locals (the common term for Gulf citizens) would cut in front
of them in the cafeteria line, would expect them to share their notes and even their
homework, and would speak in Arabic during mixed Arab/non-Arab social gatherings in
ways that made them feel excluded. Ironically, then, it was the supposedly egalitarian
platform of the university, and not the segregated environment of their childhoods, that
showed South Asian youth the realities of social hierarchies in the UAE. While their
parents were very adamant about not wanting to give up their Indian or Pakistani pass-
ports and narrated their migration as primarily an economic choice (Vora 2013), the
university students and graduates I spoke with felt that their lack of belonging in Dubai
was involuntary and deprived them of political and civil rights. Their strong ties to Dubai
as home made it difficult to accept the feelings of insecurity and temporariness that came
with holding foreign passports and being tied to their parents’ visas. For these young
people, then, the terms home, identity, and future were political, for they brought up issues
surrounding the tenuousness of their lives in Dubai and the inequalities embedded in
their social and legal positions.
Unlike people raised or schooled in South Asia, with whom I had to broach the topic of
citizenship, Dubai-raised young people wanted to talk about citizenship, or the lack
thereof, more than anything else. In fact, my asking if citizenship made a difference
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 27

seemed to them a ridiculous question. Of course it made a difference! Not being a citizen
determined the entire course of their lives. Amina, for example, who had managed to
procure a job as a receptionist after graduating from AUS, stressed:

If we had citizenship we would have access to national schools, which speak Arabic. If we had
citizenship we would be speaking Arabic right now. We would be ingrained into the culture, we
would be attending the same schools as locals, we would be locals. We would have that heritage.
It would change your outlook altogether. [interview with author, 2006]

These young people had a dual sense of identity, then; they articulated that they were
Indian or Pakistani in Dubai but that they were not Indian or Pakistani in the way people
who lived in those countries were or even in the way that their parents or older siblings
were. The feelings of cultural duality expressed by South Asian youth in Dubai mirror what
scholars have found among second-generation diaspora populations in Western countries,
where people do have some access to permanent residency or citizenship. The globalized
American university, lamented by some scholars as a commodification and erosion of the
liberal ideals of the university, is providing space and opportunities for unexpected liberal
politicizations and calls for rights by South Asian young people in Dubai. Their university
experiences reinforced a sense of exclusion from Dubai and the UAE but also created an
active politicization that they shared with me in their conversations.
These sentiments resonate with my more recent research among Indian as well as
Qatari students in Doha’s Education City: in interviews, while Indian students sometimes
felt that Qataris treated them like servants, many Qataris acknowledged this stereotype but
felt that entering a multicultural learning environment challenged their assumptions
about various expatriate nationalities. Instead of thinking of experiences of racism and
marginalization as failures of the branch campus, then, it is important to acknowledge that
university spaces everywhere are productive of new forms of citizenship, identity, politics,
and belonging, precisely through the contradictory and multiplicitous ways in which ideas
like equality and freedom are disassembled and reassembled.

Case 2: Pedagogy and School Spirit at a Texas University in Qatar

The example of South Asian students in Dubai provides new ways of thinking about the
re-assemblages of identity, knowledge, politics, and equality that occur at branch cam-
puses, ones that are not visible within the current top-down debate about the value of
these institutions to the American academy. The harsh criticism levied of late on U.S.
branch campuses and the rhetoric found in the justifications used to promote and market
these universities abroad actually share at their core certain assumptions that lead to the
determination that these endeavors are either successes of globalized education on the one
hand or failures of university ideals on the other—that is, they both assume not only that
the university is an abstraction that is capable of existing in its ideal form but also that this
ideal can be modeled into derivatives to be applied successfully, with the right tweaking,
to various localized contexts. Much of what happens inside these spaces reveals,
however—through interactions and misunderstandings between various actors—the
localized (and uneven) roots of pedagogy, academic freedom, and equality that are chan-
neled through the American university. How the university is envisioned as an institution
with universal ideals that can literally branch out to other places does not always mean the
effects are predictable. My experiences teaching at Texas A&M University Qatar (TAMUQ)
during the summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012, and the interviews and participant observa-
tion I conducted with students and administrators at TAMUQ and other Education City
branch campuses in Doha during that time, indicate a need to examine more closely how
value, mission, and school spirit are disassembled and reassembled within these schools
28 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

and how the mobile (re)constitution of the American university is productive of new
forms of identity and citizenship among student populations.
The six American universities of Education City, Qatar, are housed in individual build-
ings and offer specialized degrees. They symbolize an immense investment by the Qatari
government in knowledge economy, infrastructural development, and economic diversi-
fication. The Qatar Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the Qatari government, supposedly
chose the multiversity format to bring in those universities that were best known in the
United States for particular programs (such as Weill Cornell for its medical school and
Northwestern for journalism). The Qatar Foundation not only pays set-up and operating
costs for all of Education City’s branch campuses (including providing scholarships and
financial aid for many of their students), but it also offers the universities themselves large
management fees (into the tens of millions of dollars a year) to operate in the country. These
monies are channeled directly back to home campuses in the United States; thus, the
monetary rewards are great for opening a branch campus in Doha. American universities in
Doha are interested in promoting and preserving their brand integrity, which means they
have mechanisms in place to promote school spirit; they replicate some of the educational
and noneducational offerings of their home institutions; and they negotiate with Qatar
Foundation to decide on budget, hiring of quality faculty, and other aspects of running their
campuses. In addition, they have Education City wide standards that, despite the unique
curricula of each branch campus, produce an ethos that is both self-named as “American”
and recognized as such (whether positively or negatively) by the residents of Qatar, both
citizen and foreign resident.7 “Americanness” in this case means many things that are coded
as universal values of academia, including English-only education, gender-integrated
classrooms, secularism, freedom of expression, the promotion of critical thinking, and a
system of grading and testing that comes out of American K-12 education. Students have to
take the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and TOEFL (Test of English as Foreign Language) to
apply, for example, and their grading is both A through F and on a four-point average
system. In addition, there are required courses at all universities that encourage a liberal-
arts style of well-rounded education, even in the more science-heavy schools like TAMUQ.
Taken together then, Education City is a somewhat unified distinct cultural space but with
individual universities that produce their own forms of academic identity and norms as
well. These forms, both at the individual college and Education City levels, produce
unexpected local manifestations of American academia and its values when they come into
contact with and are engaged by students, administrators, and faculty.
Anyone with experience at any university in the United States knows how
individualistic—and thus not universal or abstract—the culture, history, pedagogical
offerings, and sense of belonging and citizenship cultivated on these campuses are. Texas
A&M, while intriguing, is in no way an exceptional case. In fact, it is just one example
among many of how American universities are extremely localized in their cultural
development and modes of student citizenship. College Station, Texas, or “Aggieland” as
the locals refer to it, is home to Texas A&M University, one of the largest public univer-
sities in the United States. The school’s history as an all-male military and agricultural
academy is quite visible today in a number of expressions of school spirit, as well as in the
makeup of the student body, which is predominantly white, Christian, and conservative.
In addition, Texas A&M is designated as a “Senior Military College” by the U.S. military
and is one of only three nonmilitary campuses in America with a full-time active Corps of
Cadets. Students who come to Texas A&M are inculcated into a form of citizenship and
imagined community that stretches back to the founding of the school, and forward well
beyond their college years. Initiation ceremonies, for example, include “fish camp,” where
incoming freshmen learn about “Aggie Spirit” and develop their own particular chant for
their graduating class, and “Elephant Walk,” where graduating seniors symbolically hand
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 29

off the reigns of leadership at the school to the class below them. Graduating seniors also
receive school rings in official ceremonies that mark them as Aggies for life. Activities that
promote a sense of school spirit on campus and also among alumni internationally include
monthly “Silver Taps” and “Muster,” which are gatherings to honor fallen Aggies, and
“Maroon Out,” days when A&M fans, students, and alumni are supposed to wear the
school’s maroon and white colors to support sports teams. Because of this strong sense of
school spirit, Texas A&M students are often second-, third-, and even fourth-generation
Aggies, and the alumni fund of the university is one of the largest in the United States. It
is said that an Aggie will always recognize another Aggie anywhere in the world based on
the school ring and will always help out an Aggie in need.
The translation of Texas A&M to Doha, Qatar has included from its inception in 2003 a
sense of reproducing this spirit and brand, which is done in several ways. As you approach
the A&M building, designed to mimic an Aztec pyramid, signs herald “welcome to
Aggieland Qatar,” and when you walk into the front entrance, there is usually a Qatari
student worker behind the front desk to greet you with the traditional Texan “howdy.”
Because Texas A&M is a state university, the Doha branch also follows Texas law: classes
are cancelled on July 4 to mark American Independence Day, and all students have to take
a Texas history course in order to graduate. The university supplies all student books and
Aggie gear, paid for out of the budget provided by the Qatar Foundation. It also gives out
school rings to graduating seniors, as on the main campus. Student Affairs at the Doha
campus promotes the same six core values of the main campus and puts out calendars to
celebrate all of the Aggieland Qatar events, including the “Muster” ceremony that honors,
among others, Aggies fallen in service to the United States.8 The military aspects of the
university therefore extend to the Qatar campus—new students attending orientation in
August 2011 were greeted with a large sign that proclaimed, “Welcome Fighting Texas
Aggies Class of 2015!”9
The production of Doha Aggies, however, is not simply a “transplant” of College
Station (nor Texan nor American) culture and values, and has included negotiations and
challenges specific to Qatar and its demographics.10 Ring day in Texas, for example,
involves dunking one’s ring in a pitcher of beer and chugging it. This does not transplant
to a majority-Muslim campus and students either abandon this ritual or replace beer with
juice. In addition, because students and the Student Affairs office both felt that “Maroon
Out” was not local enough to engage students in campus life, they have adopted their own
phrase for school spirit, “Yallah Aggies, Yallah Maroon” (Let’s go Aggies, Let’s go
Maroon). Orientation includes acquainting students not only with Texas A&M’s general
history but with the specific culture of TAMUQ, and student clubs and activities reflect
local holidays and the ethnic and national communities that make up the student body. In
my interviews with students at TAMUQ, they stated both a sense of strong identification
with being “Aggie” but also qualified that identification by telling me that they did not feel
as Aggie as the students that attended the home campus. Students were aware, in large
part, of a disparity between how they are treated when they travel to a large public
university campus like A&M’s in College Station and how College Station students,
administrators, and faculty are treated at a small campus with many resources like
TAMUQ. Students also pushed back against the centering of U.S. experiences in the
creation of Aggie identity and traditions. Amna, a Qatari woman who had just graduated
from TAMUQ, for example, said of Muster, the ceremony to honor fallen Aggies, “Why
should we care? Would they care in America if someone died over here? Why should we
care? Aggie Muster is not relevant. They wouldn’t do the same for us.”
The fractured nature of university transplant and the reassemblages it provokes are also
evident in the classrooms of TAMUQ and other Education City branch campuses. The
marketing of Education City schools by the Qatar Foundation as well as by the individual
30 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

campuses, which have to compete with each other, Qatar University, and campuses abroad
for student enrollment, relies upon mutually understood and negotiated terms of global or
international educational standards, as I mentioned above. But many of the manifestations
of these standards challenge their utility and universal applicability. First of all, while the
American university stresses egalitarianism and meritocracy, students have different
opportunities for advancement and success based on national origin. Citizens are able to
procure generous sponsorship packages from Qatari companies, which pay tuition costs,
provide summer internships, and guarantee employment after graduation; foreign resi-
dents, on the other hand, have to either pay out of pocket or take out loans from Qatar
Foundation, and they face uncertainty in the local job market upon graduation, meaning
that they are unsure whether they will be able to stay in Qatar at all (Vora 2014a). While this
may seem to go against the egalitarian ideology of the American university, most foreign
resident students didn’t see it that way, telling me that they would have an even harder
time procuring work visas and employment in the United States, and that in the United
States international students had to pay even more than they do in Qatar, and without the
option for interest-free loans that the Qatar Foundation offers.
Second, Education City universities have gender-integrated classrooms, which have
changed the landscape of Qatari higher education, particularly in light of state incentives
to diversify away from foreign job reliance and Qatarize the economy—educating women
and inserting them into the work force is one way to increase the citizen ratio in the public
and private sectors. Qatari women indeed felt that attending university in Education City
provided them with opportunities and outlooks that they would not otherwise have. Sara,
a Qatari woman who was entering her senior year at TAMUQ, told me that what she liked
best about the American university platform was that it centered on “structure, profes-
sionalism, and objectivity.” She felt she now not only had the skills but also the confidence
to work alongside her male compatriots. In addition, she felt her role in her marriage and
family would change from this experience, saying:

It gives you the confidence and the ability to say that well, [men] want things, I want things too. It’s
not just like only them that have to be superior, whatever. It’s also us. If you are aware of that and
you tell your parents that then you will be the person who is leading the [marriage] process,
instead of being just the one who is doing things for others. [interview with author, 2011]

In the classroom, faculty that had been at TAMUQ for several years noticed a profound
change between men’s and women’s interactions both inside and outside of the class-
room. While in the first years of university, men and women would self-segregate, and
conservative Qatari parents still chose to send their children (especially their daughters) to
the segregated public Qatar University, classrooms at TAMUQ now have more men and
women sitting and interacting together than ever, and outreach efforts have brought in
students from more conservative families. Cross-gender socialization and teamwork have
also become more comfortable and commonplace in the hallways and are encouraged by
Student Affairs and by individual staff and faculty.
In my summer 2011 Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology class at TAMUQ, on a day
when we were discussing gender roles, the young Qatari women in my class were
extremely vocal about their opinions regarding gender inequality in Qatar, directly criti-
cizing what they felt were sexist claims made by some of the men in the class. When I
recounted the incident later, several of my colleagues were pleasantly surprised and told
me they would not have expected such an interaction even two years prior at the school,
nor in 2011. My class that day could be regarded as a success when seen from the
perspective of American ideas of gender equality within the classroom. However, these
events cannot easily be co-opted into the language of mainstream U.S. feminism, for my
Qatari female students’ definitions of gender equality were framed less in terms of liberal
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 31

democratic access to rights and civil society but more as calls for extending the responsi-
bilities of the patrimonial nonliberal welfare state to include women more expansively, an
extension that relied directly upon excluding the large noncitizen majority to support the
benefits provided to the citizen minority. For example, many of the Qatari women felt it
was unfair that male expatriates were given job preference over them;11 they expressed
unease about moving around in spaces that were occupied by low-wage foreign resident
men; and they were angry about having to leave their children with foreign “housemaids”
because husbands did not do an equal share of domestic work. Thus, the concepts of
equality, democracy, and freedom, when applied from a Western academic perspective,
fail to account for the particularities through which Qatari women were deploying these
terms. In fact, celebrating their grievances against the state and their male compatriots as
moments of feminist liberation makes us complicit in the alienation of noncitizen groups
and in the power and labor hierarchies within which they live their daily lives. In addition,
given Qatar’s semisegregated public gender norms and the sense of frustration among
Qatari men that jobs are scarce, it will be interesting to see how larger influxes of women
into the workplace affect Qatari daily life in the future.
Other supposed universals applied at TAMUQ include English language education as a
global platform, something we can see sweeping across the Gulf; a focus on vocational
training, such as engineering, which is considered to be translatable across a range of
contexts; and the idea that education is a secular pursuit. Unlike their local counterparts, for
example, many American universities in the Gulf do not broadcast the call to prayer, and
they, at least on paper, are quite clear about upholding principles of academic freedom and
democracy, which includes treating religion as a topic of study instead of a constitutive
aspect of the university.12 Thus, when some Muslim students were upset about George-
town’s required Problem of God course, administrators told them that the course would
continue but that discussion about its existence would constitute part of a dialogue about
civil discourse on the campus. The Georgetown example is particularly relevant, precisely
because it raises questions about the localized root of academic democracy, not as an
abstract form but as one that has already been assigned its privileged tracers. Georgetown’s
required course is one that emerges not from an Enlightenment-style abstracted individual
pursuit of intellectualism but is rather part of a history of Jesuit knowledge production and
pedagogy. It is only in the context of Doha, where there is a misrecognition by Muslim
students of a class that appears to them as anti-religion, that Georgetown leverages the
supposedly global language of secular academic freedom and commensurability of educa-
tion, and not the parochial religious roots of the institution and its history.
The language of the global or universal also relies upon particular local forms of
citizenship training for students and thus is not truly universal at all. This becomes quite
apparent in pedagogical moments at branch campuses. To give an example: the introduc-
tory anthropology textbook I used at TAMUQ—one that I have successfully taught from at
universities within the United States—adopted, like many anthropology textbooks, the
poststructuralist turn in the discipline to consider how representation and power are
intertwined, how anthropology was and is part of colonial and imperial regimes, and how
early anthropology was complicit with scientific racism and other now debunked forms of
proving hierarchical difference between race, gender, class, and sexuality. In order to
achieve its aims, however, the textbook required an American reader familiar with Ameri-
can racial categories, American gender norms, American expansionism, and American
kinship in order to denaturalize American assumptions about these categories through
cross-cultural examples—try telling a classroom full of Gulf Arab students, for example,
that they have to abandon their preconceived notions that cousin marriage is incest when
in fact this is a common, and even desirable, custom among Gulf national families! Thus,
teaching anthropology as an abstract, supposedly portable discipline requires assuming
32 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

American or at least Western citizenship training among our students. The very reflexive
moments of our disciplines, therefore, reproduce their exclusivity even as they question it.
From the point of view of the debate with which I started this paper, many of the
examples I provided above might seem in line with Aksan’s assertion of American impe-
rialism perpetuated through the platform of the globalizing university. However, this is
only true if we see the United States as the site of the universal and the abstract and the
Gulf as the site of the parochial and the local, or, in a similar vein, if we see the infrastruc-
ture of the university as emanating from one place, with one directionality “branching”
out to a predetermined telos—without conflicts, misunderstandings, or negotiations.
What we see in branch campuses instead is that the university is more of a network, a
complex apparatus whose channels carry more than the putatively universal values we
associate with it. Instead, as the university gets connected to other infrastructures and
routed through citizenship configurations not anticipated at its founding, new
reassemblages of knowledge, pedagogy, and core values are possible and the localized
(and uneven) roots of universality revealed.

Conclusion
Based on this preliminary seed research in Qatar and the UAE, and on closely following
the existing scholarly discourse about branch campuses in the Gulf that has emerged over
the last few years, I argue that we should be concerned that the markers of universal and
derivative, global and local, success and failure have already been assigned and used to
debate the positives and negatives of globalized higher education. In particular, the
arguments against globalizing the American academy, which represent the more vocal
views of faculty in particular, tend to reproduce ideas about either a uniform American
imperialism perpetuated through these endeavors or ideas about the repression that
moving the university into nonliberal spaces will bring. These arguments against the
university’s globalizing mission rely all too often upon assumptions that home university
spaces are somehow free from inequality, injustice, colonial forms of power, or profit
motivation. In both the pro and con arguments I presented at the beginning of this essay,
the university remains something that still may well be realized as an idealized space of
learning and thinking, if only we could either a) protect it from the corrupt forces of
capitalism and/or imperialism or b) let it achieve its global destiny. As scholars, we should
be more concerned with the fact that these viewpoints are currently our only available
options in the debate about globalized higher education before we decide which side of
the debate to take (or whether to participate at all). This is where I think ethnographic
scholarship can contribute to the conversation, even as we question, through our peda-
gogical and research experiences in branch campuses, how we propagate particular ways
of seeing and knowing the Middle East. This includes developing an approach to the Gulf
and its knowledge economies that acknowledges how multiple, shifting, and contested
cosmopolitanisms in the region have been obscured through the disciplinary formations
that the Western university system has stabilized.
The forms of citizenship, school spirit, belonging, and exclusion taking place at univer-
sities in Qatar and the UAE are diverse and vary between students, between classrooms,
and between universities. It is impossible to paint them with one stroke just as it is
impossible to paint our own home institutions this way or to make the mistake of thinking
that somewhere out there an idealized university form both exists and is potentially
mobile. For the upwardly mobile South Asian young people I met in Dubai, for example,
university experiences were not simply about neoliberal consumption of educational
services; rather, they increasingly included emerging liberal claims to civil rights and
diasporic citizenship. For the young Qatari women in my Texas A&M classroom, mod-
Vora American Academia in the Gulf Arab States 33

ernization brought new opportunities as well as reassertions of parochial understandings

of who can claim rights to the country and its future. The emerging identifications and
interactions enabled by the American university may be changing the face of belonging in
places like Dubai and Doha while producing scholars who can engage the very debates
within which they are imbricated. Like postcolonial academics who were also products of
Western educational systems and significantly changed the landscape of the American
academy in the 1980s, these students have the potential to produce new approaches to
questions of knowledge production, history, racialization, and power. The enormous
activism we have seen across the Arab world over the last few years, from Egypt to
Bahrain, represents young people in these countries questioning and redefining state
responsibility, freedom, and citizenship. The conversations many of us have about the state
of higher education are, like this surge of civic participation, rooted in questions about
which practices, infrastructures, and institutions constitute public good. It might be
important for us to remember in our current discussions of a university in crisis that the
language of crisis was also used when women wanted to enter the Western academy and
when programs like Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies fought (and continue to fight) for
legitimization (see also Chatterjee and Maira 2014). What exactly are we losing through
internationalization of our universities, and which actors are centered and which margin-
alized in the language of loss and gain?
Conversations about the future of higher education and the potential negative impacts
of U.S. universities on Gulf societies are also rife in the classrooms, hallways, and social
spaces of higher education within the Gulf Arab States themselves, but from a perspective
where the American university signifies a different type of crisis, a different loss—one that
destabilizes autochthonous understandings of Arabian Gulf history, language, and iden-
tity. The interactions between these opposing frameworks of eroding cultural values are
creating new and interesting re-assemblages, as I have argued in this article. What
happens when these emerging scholars and activists write back to the American academy
may be exactly what many of our disciplines need in order to move to a new level of
critical knowledge production.

Neha Vora is assistant professor of Anthropology at Lafayette College (voran@lafayette

.edu).

Notes
Acknowledgments. I would like to thank Edmond Cho, Inderpal Grewal, Bill Maurer, and Caroline
Melly for comments on this article. The piece also benefited greatly from audience comments at
Wesleyan University in March 2012.
1. Aksan teaches at a Canadian university but is focused specifically on US academia in her
speech. This itself is an interesting aspect of her comments, for it both highlights the hegemony of
American educational systems in discussions about the future of the university and complicates the
idea that educational forms are being exported and called American when in fact they might not be
(like the case of McMaster in China).
2. Doha’s Education City (which has recently been renamed as Hamid bin Khalifa University)
houses branch campuses of Weill Cornell Medical School, Texas A&M University, Georgetown
School of Foreign Service, Northwestern, Carnegie Mellon, and Virginia Commonwealth. There are
also other educational ventures in the expanding “city,” including an Islamic Studies graduate school.
For more on Education City see Asquith 2006; Eastwood 2007; Handley 2007; Krieger 2007.
3. Here I reference the arguments of Edward Said in Orientalism (1979), as well as older attempts
to establish American universities in the Middle East, such as American University of Beirut (AUB)
and American University in Cairo (AUC), which were both founded by Christian missionaries. For
more on AUB and AUC, see Bertelsen 2012.
34 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 46, 2015

4. However, migration to the Gulf region can be traced back to pre-oil Indian Ocean trade
networks as well, and some foreign residents are into their second, third, or even fourth generation
(Onley 2007; Vora 2011, 2013).
5. Anthropologists and other scholars have examined citizenship in multiple forms and scales that
move beyond the formal legal categories conferred by states. See, for example, Castles and Davidson
2000; Cho 2007; Hindess 2005; Holston and Appadurai 1996; Hutchings and Dannreuther 1999;
Rosaldo 1999; Secor 2004; Siu 2005; and Soysal 1994.
6. These data are extrapolated from 2013 census information that is used by the CIA and other
global organizations. It has greatly reduced a previous population estimate from 2005 that was said
to have overestimated migration to the country. The numbers of South Asians and other migrant
groups in the Gulf is difficult to verify given that most of the avaliable demographic data on the Gulf
states is sparse and often flawed. However, numbers from individual country embassies would
suggest that South Asians comprise well over 50 percent of the population of the country and that
three million is a conservative estimate of the group’s size.
7. Since Education City has begun reformatting as Hamid bin Khalifa University, newer non-
Western forms of education are being incorporated into the overall project.
8. See http://www.qatar.tamu.edu/aggie-life/aggie-core-values-and-traditions/
9. This militarism is particularly interesting in the Gulf context because of the foreign policy
alliances between the United States and Qatar—Qatar’s large U.S. military base is the headquarters
for overseas army and air force operations.
10. Here I push against the terminology transplant university, as it is used by Tetrault (2011) and
others. Kane (2012) uses the term transplant university in an entirely different way, making a similar
argument as I am here, that transplant is not a simple reproduction of one model in a new place but
rather transformative of both home and host.
11. This perception does not seem to be supported by the sponsorship system, which gives
employment preference to all Qataris; however, further research is needed to ascertain whether some
companies do hire male foreign residents before Qatari women.
12. This is attached to the idea that universities, as cultivators of the self, should only focus on certain
features of a student’s identity and others, like religion, belong in the sphere of the private, or domestic.

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