NU plans to open j-school in Qatar (update 2)
Medill will be offering some courses at the school, the Tribune says today:
Lured by money and the opportunity to expand its international presence, Northwestern University is nearing a deal to open journalism and communication schools in Qatar, headquarters of Al Jazeera, the largest Arabic-language TV network, university officials said.
The Medill School of Journalism and School of Communication programs would offer foreign students — who can meet Northwestern’s admissions requirements and afford its pricey tuition — an undergraduate curriculum similar to the one at the Evanston campus.
Tuition would cost the same as here. Besides the money, Qatar is appealing because there are several other American universities there already.
A deal is pretty close: “Bienen said Northwestern probably is within weeks of signing an agreement. Classes could begin as early as September, he said.”
Update: Who’s paying the faculty? AP says Northwestern will, while the Tribune says Qatar pays for everything. Both say there will be 50 to 60 faculty, with some rotating between Evanston and Qatar.
Update 2: Will it be real journalism. Medill Media Watch writes about something I’ve been thinking about: How free is journalism going to be in Qatar, which has no free press?
More to come…
Thanks to Hillary Proctor for the heads-up!
So that’s what Medill’s been doing all this time when administrators said the reports on next year’s curriculum was delayed. It sure feels great telling my parents how much they have to pay for this…
Nomaan
April 6, 2007 at 11:44 am
I definitely had the same thought.
Tom Giratikanon
April 6, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Qatar better be paying NU a lot — more than the cost to build the new school, so that students at the Evanston campus see some benefit from this. It’d be cool if Al Jazeera and other outlets in the region became TM sites, but it’s not going to be cool if they to fly some of Medill’s best professors to teach there. I agree with Nomaan that this is an inappropriate time for NU to be doing this: Medill’s curriculum at the moment isn’t worthy of being exported anywhere.
Spencer Kornhaber
April 6, 2007 at 12:04 pm
I think it’s a spectacular idea. Medill is so outdated and backwards in many respects, focused way too much on the old school print apparatus. It’s very common for american universities to have small satellite schools in foreign countries — these programs can offer great study abroad opportunities without having to deal with credit transfers. Also, the arab television media market is actually GROWING, Al-Jazeera just launched an all-english network and hired a bunch of cream-of-the-crop western journalists.
Christian
April 6, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Interesting move, Medill. I tend to agree with Spencer on this: Maybe the curriculum should actually be in good shape before they teach it to students in Qatar. Also interesting that they’re not planning to do IMC stuff there initially; maybe the money we get from this means the school won’t have to pull this “OMG! IMC!” business on us for financial reasons as a recent Daily guest column claimed Medill does.
Dagny Salas
April 6, 2007 at 3:06 pm