America’s Higher Education Goes Global: An Inside Look at the Georgetown Branch Campus Experience in Qatar

By Christine Schiwietz

American universities are the most prestigious and sought-after bastions of higher learning in the world. Now, even students outside the United States can reap the benefits of an education from big-name universities like Georgetown University—and the global branch campus is making it possible.

In America's Higher Education Goes Global, Dr. Christine Schiwietz provides an inside look at the Georgetown University branch campus in Education City, Qatar. You'll learn about internationalization in academia, how Georgetown University started their global branch campus, advantages for international and American students, and first-hand insight on global experiential learning and the multiversity experience. With fascinating facts, student testimonials, and valuable resources, this is a unique look at the movement bringing the world together through higher education.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781544529684

Book preview

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Copyright © 2022 Christine Schiwietz

All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-5445-2968-4

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To Mary, Nino, and Annaïs

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Sowing the Seeds: Interculturalization and the New Global World

A New Beginning: Georgetown University’s Decision to Go Global

Feeding an Idea: The Global Classroom

A Season of Growth: Cultivating Tomorrow’s Leaders

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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Foreword

Dr. Christine Schiwietz’s groundbreaking book on what I believe to be the most important development in American higher education in the twenty-first century could not have come at a more opportune time. Qatar, along with six of the best American universities and their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, have embarked on an unprecedented initiative revolutionizing higher education.

This is not just idle speculation. A number of other first-class American universities have embraced—perhaps even copied—the Qatari Education City model in other countries. Essentially, Qatar persuaded U.S. universities to establish a branch campus that retains a seamless relationship with the home school. These are not American-sponsored schools but fully functional campuses issuing diplomas indistinguishable from those issued on the main campus.

Almost four decades in the United States Foreign Service convinced me that America’s universities represent our country’s most valuable asset. Our universities, in addition to teaching priceless practical skills, have done more to spread our values of democracy, equality, political dialogue, and advancement by merit than the combined efforts of our diplomats, soldiers, sailors, businessmen, or missionaries. Foreign students at American universities return to their countries not as emissaries but as remarkably well-prepared advocates for these values. They are the glue that binds people to the United States. Most find a way back to their home campus and bring their spouses, parents, and children with them on a regular basis. They attend reunions with an enthusiasm that rivals and often exceeds that of their American-born alumni sisters and brothers. Those who stay in the United States almost always enrich their schools, communities, and new country to a degree that again surpasses that of their American-born fellow graduates.

Decades ago, scholarships for American universities, including American universities and colleges located abroad, formed a large part of the American foreign aid outlays. Graduates from the American University in Beirut (AUB) were prominently progressive, even revolutionary, members of the Middle Eastern government. For reasons I have never understood, these scholarship programs atrophied in the late 1950s, replaced by more expensive and far less effective developmental projects costing billions of dollars more.

The twenty-first century has seen a counterproductive turn: America has rolled up its welcome mat. Perhaps it began with 9/11. In a mad and thoughtless rush to protect the homeland, America canceled visas for thousands of Middle Eastern students on an unprecedented scale. On a personal note, my own daughter found herself scrambling for classroom assignments at the London School of Economics that fall because of the sudden and unexpected influx of Middle Eastern students who had decided not to pursue higher education across the Atlantic.

The obtaining of American student visas is now extraordinarily difficult for foreign students. Students from the Middle East, in particular, face increasing bureaucratic obstacles. The Trump administration extended the hostility to more than just Middle Eastern countries and targeted Chinese students, as well. Unfortunately, many of these unfair restrictions continue.

Nonetheless, the example has been set and there is good reason to believe that succeeding administrations will not reopen our borders to the degree that we have enjoyed before. Indeed, there is no better time for this book than now.

Two decades before this book was written, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the wife of Qatar’s leader, Emir Sheikh Hamid bin Khalifah Al-Thani, addressed the women graduates of the 1997 class from Qatar University. She had just returned from a tour of American schools as she prepared to launch Education City, her flagship project for the modernization of her country. She informed the graduates that she found in the United States a university culture unlike any other in the world, and she intended to bring this culture and its qualities to Qatar.

Sheikha Moza, certainly the most visionary woman in the Arab Middle East, worked with her husband to bring the best universities in the world to Qatar. They believed that no matter how much oil and gas wealth may exist below the surface of their country, its true future prosperity depended on the development of its people. They witnessed the problems created when rentier polities survived by clipping coupons from international energy companies and buying the loyalty of citizens with a promise of ensuring great personal wealth.

In 2017, the neighboring countries of Qatar imposed a blockade. They issued a list of demands to lift it and among them was that Qatar shutter its two subversive schools, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (SFS) and Northwestern University’s journalism school.

This outrageous demand, alone, validates the concept. The benefits accrue not just to Qatari citizens whose natural resources guarantee a comfortable life no matter their education but to the majority of third-country students graduating from these schools. One SFS graduate, a young Sudanese woman, once told me that Georgetown had changed her life and she was returning to Khartoum to help others change their lives.

Sheikha Moza’s vision included consulting the best professionals to improve an archaic primary and secondary school system and reform Qatar’s sole tertiary-level school, Qatar University. She believed that collaborating with the best schools in the world would inspire her country’s educational institutions to rise to the same level.

An American university is a living organism—a concept the Sheikha understands. You may extend its branches, but you cannot sever them and expect the parts to perform like the entire organism. The Sheikha discerned that for-profit schools, which constitute the majority of American universities elsewhere in the Middle East, cannot possibly provide the same level of education. Today, I’m proud to say that Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar may consistently produce the valedictorian for the entire school.

This book is the blueprint for how an experiment in a small, distant country revolutionized higher education across the world.

—Ambassador Patrick N. Theros, U.S. Ambassador to Qatar, 1995-1998

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Introduction

I jump to my feet and proudly applaud the Georgetown graduates, their faces a mix of elation and anticipation as they open the door to the next chapter and take their steps forward into an exciting future. As parents and professors beam, the last students move their tassels from right to left, signifying the years of hard work and accomplishment that brought them to this moment. A chorus of laughter and cheering erupts from the mass of capped and gowned graduates as they file out of the commencement hall into the grand library atrium where friends, family, and community members anxiously await them. Above, rows of flags from all over the world hang high from the walls and ceiling, the bright sunlight from the skylight windows highlighting