The Academic Workplace in Public Arab Gulf Universities

Abstract

This chapter examines the professoriate and the organization of the academic workplace in public universities currently operating in the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The academic workplace and the university professor, as they are known in the West, represent recent phenomena in Arab societies, particularly in the Gulf states. The emergence of the contemporary Arab university (jami’a)—as well as the notion of the Islamic university (Al-Assad, 1996, pp. 26–30)—and of the role of the university professor (ustaz) represent cultural products associated with the Western colonial encounter with Arab societies and the expansion of Western higher education systems (Rida, 1998, pp. 119–120). In this sense, the contemporary Arab academic workplace differs from earlier institutional models of knowledge formulation and transmission as they were historically and socially experienced in Arab and Muslim societies (Makdisi, 1981; Berkey, 1992; see particularly the critique of Al-Assad, 1996).