The Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies hosted a lecture by Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at Qatar University, Esraa Al-Muftah. The event, part of the Unit’s monthly lecture series, was introduced by Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and Unit Researcher, Abdulrahman Alebrahim. Held on Tuesday, 12 November 2024, the lecture was titled “The Internationalization of Higher Education: The Case of Academic Mobility and Knowledge Production at Qatar University”.

Al-Muftah began by explaining that her choice of academic mobility and internationalization as a research topic stemmed from a personal experience, as her life has revolved around moving between academic institutions in Qatar, New York, and Vancouver, Canada. Additionally, she was motivated by the lack of literature on mobility and higher education. She also pointed out that Qatar University represented a unique model and an intriguing case, as it helps understand how Qataris experience academic mobility, with a potential to contribute to the field of critical internationalization studies by redefining the concept.

In this context, one indicator of internationalization is the number of local academics compared to international faculty members at an institution, the number of international students, and knowledge production in collaboration with academics from international institutions. Al-Muftah adopted Marianne Larsen’s definition of internationalization: the expansion of the university’s scope beyond borders through student mobility, knowledge production, and other related activities. The research questions the speaker addressed were: How does the pattern of internationalization at Qatar University affect academic mobility within the institution? And how does the mobility of faculty members influence the internationalization of knowledge both at its founding and in the present day?

To answer these questions, Al-Muftah drew on feminist approaches in transnational studies of globalization, which, in her view, help to understand a seemingly global phenomenon, reveal how it is connected to a particular social construct, and deconstruct the binary oppositions between the national and global and local and international. She emphasized that academics are not merely recipients of knowledge, but can also build upon it. The speaker conducted a case study at Qatar University, employing ethnographic methods through interactive observation, archival research, and interviews. The findings showed that since its founding in 1973, as a result of cooperation between Qatar and UNESCO, Qatar University has always been an international project, with varying perspectives between the founding phase and the present.

According to Al-Muftah, during the period from the university’s founding until 1986, the inclination toward internationalization was evident. Mohammed Ibrahim Kazem (1928-1992), an Egyptian academic and the founder of Qatar University who served as its first president from 1977 to 1986, envisioned the university as an international institution, even though it was fundamentally a national university. As such, the university was open to external influences. This international character was reflected in the countries from which the academic staff originated, particularly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, and Sudan, with further extension to the United States and Japan. During this phase, internationalization was particularly evident in the mobility of academics within the Global South, particularly the Arab countries.

In 2005, a phase of reform began at Qatar University, overseen by the Rand Corporation, which introduced new concepts of social hierarchies that some academics welcomed, while others felt alienated. Among the major changes was the shift in the language of instruction from Arabic to English, while adopting US accreditation and ranking standards. In 2012, after the university returned to teaching in Arabic, some academics found themselves “displaced” by the change, even describing it as a “deadly reform”. Despite the return to Arabic, the standards and rankings continued to rely on Western institutions. Al-Muftah concluded that the patterns of internationalization in place influence both academic mobility and knowledge production at institutions. This process creates a knowledge hierarchy and results in a practical and institutional void that undermines the production of knowledge and stifles research centers from emerging.