University Life
I know it's been a long time since my last post on this, but the holidays and my agency move have cut into my time considerably. While going through some boxes looking for a CD mailer, I came across printouts of old emails from that era, and reading them I realized things were even worse than I remembered. So, here goes -
The UAE University (http://www.uaeu.ac.ae/) was founded in the dark ages of 1977. The country got its independence from Great Britain around 1972, so it went pretty far back in their history, although the area has been inhabited since at least 5000 BC. Al Ain is the ancestral home of His Royal Highness Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahayan, leader of Abu Dhabi and President of the UAE, so it was decided to establish it there. Since the country was swimming in oil, admission was open to all UAE citizens, and tuition was free. He also appointed his brother or cousin as university president.
Around 1990, they discovered two things:
- students coming out of UAE high schools were not prepared for university-level work, and
- faculty who got their PhD's from Arab universities didn't know very much either.
So they established the Basic University Education Center (BUEC, pronounced like "Buick"). This was essentially a 2-year remedial program to prepare the students for taking real college-level classes. They took courses in math, computers, English, Arabic, and "Islamic life" (whatever that is). They also hired Westerners for faculty. This resulted in some interesting events when about 150 Westerners arrived in Al Ain in August of 1990, just as Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait. Not a few of them took one look at a map, saw there was nothing between them and the Iraqi forces but about 1000 km of sand and the Saudi army, and hightailed it out of there, taking their $7000 furniture allowances with them. I believe some of them are still persona non grata.
After a few years, they found that the students felt stigmatized by being forced to take remedial classes when they had already graduated from high school. So the entire unit was reorganized under a new name: University General Requirements Unit, or UGRU. This was just before I arrived. I interviewed with, and was hired by, BUEC, but wound up working for UGRU. In fact, the first week or 2 I was there, we were asked for input on what it should be called. Someone suggested General University Requirements Unit or GURU (since "guru" means "teacher" in Hindi or something), but that was rejected for no particular reason.
The mission statement of the unit was revised to indicate that this was something everyone was required to complete before going on to the regular university. On the other hand, they could test out of it. So the actual curriculum didn't change a bit, and we still had the same placement tests. The only difference was that the students were allowed to save a little face.
Being a Muslim country, it was not allowed for the students to attend co-educational classes. In fact, they established two completely separate campuses, at opposite ends of town: one for the boys, and one for the girls.
As it turned out, the girl's campus had a much higher enrollment than the boy's campus since men had a lot of options after high school (including going to college overseas) while the women could either get married (if they weren't already) and start having babies, or go to UAEU. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be couldn't fathom why women would want or need an education when "their job was to raise children," so the facilities on the girl's campus tended to be rather sparse. It was also spread out a lot more than the boy's campus, which was housed all in one building. It made for some pungent moments when a student had to run all the way across campus in an angle-length dress, covered by a black abaya, in 100+ degree heat, to make it in time for her next class, and had never even seen a stick of deodorant.
The original policy was also to allow only women and married men to teach on the girl's campus, for fear that single men might be tempted to molest their precious daughters. That soon went by the wayside when they couldn't find enough teachers for them under those rules. (I think they also figured out that some single men might well be gay. In fact, I got the feeling they assumed that any man who was over 30 and not married probably *was* gay.)
The girls also had a lot of restrictions on travel that the boys didn't. The boys usually drove to class in their Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, or expensive SUV, while the girls were required to live on campus and couldn't leave unless accompanied by a male relative or a representative of the University (e.g. a bus driver taking them home for the holidays).
Probably the biggest building on the girl's campus was the "gym." This was built at a cost of many millions of dollars because the powers-that-be thought it would be a "good idea" for the students to participate in athletic activity. Great. What did they decide to build? A natatorium, with a competition swimming pool, scoreboard, bleachers, and everything. It was only *after* it was built that someone realized the implications of a swim team. That's right, the students would have to compete in swimsuits. Swimsuits (even comptetition tank suits) reveal an awful lot of the female body. Oops! That's a big No-No in a Muslim country. So, the pool was filled in, and the "gym" was never used for anything other than giving placement tests and final exams. This is a perfect example of Arab planning.
Overall, the student's attire varied greatly. Some of the girls covered themselves completely except for their eyes. Even in 120 degree heat they wore full-length dresses, black (silk or polyester, I'm not sure which) abayas, veil, head scarf, and even gloves. Others (generally the daughters of professors from the more liberal Muslim countries) wore jeans. And there was everything in between. The same held for the boys. Some wore the traditional Arab dishdash, with scarf and headband, others wore jeans, and some alternated from one day to the next.
After the gym fiasco, someone else got on the athletics bandwagon. He felt it was necessary for everyone to get some physical exercise. He learned the lesson of the swim team though. "It just wouldn't do to have our daughters exposing their skin to strangers. Hmm. What kind of sports team could we have, without requiring them to undress? I know! We'll have a chess team!" Yep. That was it. That's how the girls at the UAEU got their exercise - playing chess.
The curriculum was fairly basic. I was in the math and computer "department" where we basically had 2 tracks - arts and science. This was later amended to include business and agriculture, but they took a mixture of arts and science classes. Both tracks took the students through a very basic grounding in the kind of stuff they might encounter in a typical Western university. I won't bore you with the details. They probably wouldn't mean much unless you've taught remedial level university math classes.
The grading was different though. It was decided that grades would be based entirely on a midterm and a final, except attendance would be taken and the student would automatically fail if he/she missed more than a certain (very generous) number of classes. The mid-term was to count 40% and the final 60%. (I think they later allowed about 10% for "teacher input" but I'm not sure where it was taken from). Now I'm a mathematician. I think I know how to weight a set of tests to count 40-60, and come up with a numerical grade between 0 and 100. In fact, I think everyone in the department was able to do so. That didn't matter. The mid-term was to count 40%, so it *had* to be a 40 point test, and the final *had* to be a 60 point test. But wait! That's not all. We also were instructed not to give any final grades between 55 and 60, because the registrar's office automatically rounded them up to 60 and passed the student. Since the mid-term was long over, it couldn't possibly be regraded, and trying to regrade a 60 point final so as not to fall in that range was damn near impossible.
On top of that, we weren't trusted to see the exams beforehand. Sure we had a syllabus, but the exams didn't always follow it exactly, and we sometimes also had to cut some topics short due to time constraints.
Cheating was also rampant. The students didn't regard it as "academic dishonesty" but as "helping my friend". To control it somewhat, we gave 2 exams, with essentially identical questions, only the numbers were changed (as well as the multiple choice answers).
I had one particularly flagrant case of cheating on a computer algebra exam. We used a computer algebra program called Derive. The students were expected to be proficient at it. To insure that, we gave them tests. The typical classroom layout had 2 students to a long table with 2 computer monitors. To try to control cheating, we gave each of the pair a different test. This was easy to do, since they just had to punch in numbers and the computer did all the actual calculations.
One student went through the test, and would have done so-so, but then he went back and crossed out all his answers and replaced them with those from the other test. He had obviously copied from the student next to him. When I presented this evidence to my boss, he told me it wasn't worth bothering with, since he would fail anyway, given the answers he put down.
Now I quote from the email I mentioned at the beginning of this post. It was written on August 30, at the beginning of my second year:
"At the faculty meeting we discovered that:
- We will now have to pay for our own utilities. They're giving us Dh 300 extra a month for it, but if the estimates we've done for the last few days hold up, the cost is going to be more like Dh 700-900, at least in the summer.
- The new dorms aren't finished yet so there won't be any new students for at least the first week. The returning students know the first week doesn't count in attendence (but this year it will, or so they tell us) so they won't show up either.
- The textbooks for the course I'll be teaching weren't sent until July 15th, and to save money they went by ship. They're supposed to arrive by Sept. 1. Hah!
- We all have to get new parking stickers for our cars. Every day we get a new application, with a note saying yesterday's wasn't right. Today they told us it had to be filled out in Arabic!
- George [my boss] is resigning effective in January, so all top management (and their secretaries) will be new.
- The answer sheets they sent us for the placement tests were completely different than the ones we told the students how to use in orientation."
I think the utilities worked out to actually be in our favor, but we had to go down to the electric company in person to pay them every month since they didn't really have a mail system there. Also, the reason they were turned over to us in the first place is because the university never paid its bills and the electric company was getting pissed (even though both were government agencies).
George stuck around for at least another year after I left, so that one never actually came to pass. However, he did go on recruiting trip in January, leaving the asst chairman in charge, who told me "it would look better for you if you decided to leave before the renewal letters come out." I later learned that George went to bat for everyone who wasn't renewed, and got the decisions all reversed.
I had a situation later where my students went over George's head to the dean (an Egyptian) to complain about me. It seems I actually expected them to do some work, and they didn't think that was fair. The dean, who was scared to death of pissing off some sheik's son and getting shipped back to Egypt, sided with them, and ordered George to take me out of the classroom. I spent the rest of the semester writing placement tests for the next year and supervising the student tutors.
I also heard through the grapevine that our office building burned down at the beginning of the semester, taking all the placement tests with it. Half had just been given, but not graded, and the rest were going to be given the next day. I never learned how they dealt with it, but everyone had to work from a desk in the multipurpose room until they built a new office building.