Nahal Toosi
For more than two decades, Texas A&M University has had a campus here. The facade of its main building carries hints of Aggie maroon and its students say “howdy” per college tradition. But soon, the university will bid farewell to Doha, a break-up apparently caused by the strange politics that mark the U.S.-Qatar relationship.
A&M’s Board of Regents voted in February to phase out the Doha campus. The decision stunned its hundreds of students, along with faculty and others in Doha, who say it came with no real warning or consultation. A&M’s top brass said they were leaving Qatar because the university needed to focus its resources closer to home and because of instability in the Middle East.
I’m skeptical of those reasons. The ultra-wealthy Qatar Foundation — a state-supported non-profit — covers A&M’s operational costs and those of other U.S. campuses in a state-of-the-art neighborhood known as Education City. And the Middle East isn’t exactly a stranger to instability; the A&M campus, which is focused on engineering, launched in 2003, the year the U.S. invaded Iraq. Qatar itself is a safe zone in a restive region.
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