Arabian rights

Applications are now open for a new program offered by the Fuqua School of Business in the United Arab Emirates. This two-year Master of Management Studies in Finance degree program is slated to begin classes Spring 2012. However, less than a year from the purported start date, there are still troubling questions left unanswered.

First, the administration has not yet addressed the human rights situation in the UAE, which has no democratically elected officials. The situation is worsening, according to a January 2012 Human Rights Watch report. Last Spring, the state charged five activists for publishing public “insults” of government officials and skirted these activists’ rights to a fair trial. Even more foreboding for Fuqua’s educational mission is the decision of UAE officials to disband the board of directors for the country’s Teachers’ Association, which co-signed a public appeal in April advocating for greater democracy. The government replaced these boards with state-appointed officials.

In light of this crackdown on freedom of speech, it is unclear how Duke will keep its teaching, research and curriculum planning safe from government interference. If Fuqua administrators have given substantial thought to the issue, they certainly have not shared those thoughts with the broader Duke community. Duke should follow in the footsteps of New York University—which has hired a British firm to oversee labor conditions at NYU in Abu Dhabi—and keep close watch on the many stages involved with starting a program in the Middle East.

This attitude of caution should also extend to financial dealings with Fuqua’s Middle Eastern partners. The MMS-Finance program will be largely funded by the Securities and Commodities Authority of the UAE. Fuqua should be wary of close ties with ESCA, which seems to have taken more than a financial interest in the program: ESCA plans on paying for its employees to attend the program. Receiving funding from ESCA may put Duke in a vulnerable position, should its financial or educational goals clash with those of the UAE government.

These risks are real. The director of the London School of Economics resigned last year amid a controversy regarding donations from a foundation run by the son of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Georgetown University and Cambridge University experienced similar scandals after accepting millions of dollars from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia and the suspect Chong Hua Foundation in China, respectively.

Preserving human rights and institutional integrity in the UAE presents a delicate and complex problem. But Fuqua pushed the program’s approval through and does not seem to have thought these issues through. The Academic Council passed the proposal “without many questions” and allowed an inchoate idea to pass for a well vetted plan. Likewise, the proposal did not get approved by the full Board of Trustees.

If Duke is going to stake its reputation in the Middle East on a thrown together program, it should be able to provide the Duke community with some guarantees—that it can maintain academic freedom, that it can withdraw from the UAE if its academic or moral commitments are compromised and that it can maintain the quality of instruction that Duke wants to be known for.

Right now, it does not seem like Fuqua can guarantee any of this. We should not go forward with the UAE until it can.