Saudi looks to the future, opens coed university

Academic focus is solar energy, desalination
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RIYADH/DUBAI: Saudi Arabia’s new $10 billion, state-of-the-art science and technology university welcomes the country’s first coed student body Wednesday in one of the king’s keystone attempts to power his country into the 21st century with renewable energy and social reform.
The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology on the Red Sea coast boasts one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, state-of-the-art “green” technologies and a team of top scientists timed its launch for Saudi Arabia's National Day.
“This international research university is a contribution from Saudi Arabia to promote knowledge,” King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud told a meeting of the Council of Ministers at al-Safa Palace last week.
The energy-efficient university, equipped with the latest technology and some of the world's top scientists, is set to break both scientific as well as social barriers. And with one of the world’s largest educational endowments it hopes to attract students and faculty from around the world with funding for 2,000 graduate students.
The 20,000 faculty, staff, students and their families are expected to live on campus, the first where men and women can mingle freely.
The university accepted 817 students from 61 countries from more than 7,000 applications, and about 15 percent of the incoming student body is women.
“The idea behind this university, if it succeeds, is to be very pioneering because the Saudi society by nature is a closed one, and if we look at universities in other countries like the United States we find them to be diverse and international,” Abdulrahman al-Rabesh, a consultant and engineer with the company, told Al Arabiya.
“I believe in mixed-gender education because it puts women on equal footing with men,” he said, adding that the idea of mixed-gender education is not completely new to Saudi universities since some medical schools offer coed classes.