What Would You Like to do With $11.9 Billion?     Endow a New University Perhaps? (June 8, 2007)

    Apparently the answer is "yes" if you're the ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz.

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), scheduled to open in the fall of 2009, will have an endowment of US$10 billion which places it sixth in the world's endowment stakes.

2005 listing of university endowments

The journal Science reports: "Although the university won't open for more than 2 years, officials said this week that they will prime the pump by awarding some 500 undergraduate scholarships this year and next to students around the world, with the understanding that the recipients will form KAUST's inaugural classes. They are also launching a $100-million-a-year global research partnership program to fund work by scientists who agree to become affiliated with the new university."

The campus will be sited 80 kilometres north of Jiddah with a total area of 36 million square meters on the Red Sea and the Saudi government has stated that once completed, the university will be financially and administratively independent of the Saudi government.

The Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, KAUST's interim president, says "KAUST will have its own governing board of trustees as well as its own endowment," and explains that government officials have decided to place it outside the purview of the ministry of higher education. "The kingdom is in the midst of reassessing its entire system of higher education," Al-Nasr explains. "So it would not make sense to try to build KAUST within the existing bureaucracy."

Science's Jeffrey Mervis goes on to say, "The university will be organized around multidisciplinary research institutes. The initial ones will encompass energy and the environment, biosciences and engineering, materials science and engineering, and applied mathematics and computational science. Accordingly, the first round of global partnerships will lure faculty members by tackling challenges such as desalination, carbon capture and hydrogen-rich fuels, and computational linguistics."

The goal is to have a capacity for 2000 graduate students and 600 faculty members and researchers, and Al-Nasr hopes as many as one-fifth of the students will be Saudis.

By comparison, the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) has a faculty of 278, teaching 896 undergraduates, and mentoring 1,275 graduate students and has an endowment of  US$1,520,478,000.

Frank Rhodes, president emeritus of Cornell University and an adviser to the university told Science: "I think it's a potential game changer for the region," while Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial College London and another adviser introduced a note of caution: "I don't think that it'll be too difficult to get good people to come for a short time. The issue will be, 'Can you sustain the quality over time?' "

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology hopes to have its founding president installed by the beginning of next year.