The flava:
The Middle East campuses of American universities are expecting — or perhaps just hoping — to be open for classes as usual for the coming semester, even as the United States’ conflict with Iran poses new risks in the region.
Some American schools have long run programs in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The war, however, meant that students spent much of the spring semester enduring shutdowns, evacuations, online courses and other emergency measures. But the unraveling of the cease-fire between Washington and Tehran is not yet curbing universities’ ambitions to teach as they ordinarily would in the Middle East.
The University of New Haven is still planning to inaugurate its new campus in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, though probably without some faculty members it intended to send from the United States.
“The word in Saudi is that students are going to school and it’s business as usual,” Jens Frederiksen, New Haven’s president, said in an interview. “We’re proceeding with the launch.”
For American universities, campuses in wealthy Persian Gulf states can offer new revenue and welcome clout. Those perks, though, come with sporadic political headaches at home, reputational perils and regional safety concerns. After a strike on a physics building at a university in Tehran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps warned in March that “American universities in the West Asia region are legitimate targets for us.”
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