Abstract
Participation in transnational-university founding, as discussed for the case of the Sultanate of Oman, is a relatively recent national policy-making strategy to encourage ‘permanent innovation’ through an institutional mechanism. In their efforts, institutional entrepreneurs benefit from the spread of global models for higher education and revised conceptions of the national innovation system. A transnational space for higher education, such as Oman’s newly built private sector of universities and colleges, allows actors from many countries to further their own respective goal of global competitiveness. Being anchored in the national innovation policy for country development, the university projects’ potential success factor is derived from a number of national, transnational, and regional conditions for emergence. This chapter argues that globalization scholars focus narrowly on the transnational phenomenon, neglecting the analysis of opportunities for national actors. The chapter analyzes the win-win strategy for the case of the German University of Technology in Oman and other sector members of the transnational field—a field in which the German-partnered university, providing a specific model for advanced technical education and research emulated under very different country conditions, must compete. It reflects on the ways the state is embedded in trans-border processes, offering ideas for more research on the worldwide circulation of institutional models and their engagement by national states and elites.
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Notes
- 1.
A new model as offshoot of the Triple Helix model has been suggested as suitable to the study of Omani socio-economic development: “The Penta Helix model has its roots in Etzkowitz and Leyesdorff’s (2000) Triple Helix, where a tri-lateral network of academe, industries, and government combine to take advantage of the innovative research projects that are cultured within educational institutions and transform these projects to viable commercial products or services. NGOs, civil society, and the social entrepreneurs were added to the Penta Helix. They have significant roles to play in supporting shared innovation goals (Rampersad et al. 2010) and they contribute to socio-economic progress of the region” (Halibas et al. 2017).
- 2.
This policy has already seen a number of often reported challenges such as ‘quality’ and ‘brands’ which are being exported from one country to another but not ‘translated’ fully under destination-country development conditions. Further problems, such as export of excellent research and scholarship while free speech and faculty rights as known in the West often stay behind, have received critical commentary (Findlow 2005; Wildavsky 2010). There often is a ‘cultural reawakening’, in the sense that universities include as Islamic civilization what the model would suggest is the humanities canon (Muborakshoeva 2013). Transnational higher-education research has yet to investigate such trends (for seminal works see for example, Knight and Observatory on Borderless Higher 2005).
- 3.
Some of the most significant transnational education projects today are in the Arab World. Still in the 1980s, “the general climate in most countries was unsympathetic or actively hostile to research and scholarship that did not have evident practical application or that questioned conventional views and official doctrines” (Muborakshoeva 2013). According to World Bank data, Middle East and Northern Africa (the so-called MENA region) contributed one percent of worldwide research in 1999, and, according to the UNDP report of 2002, the entire Arab world was cited to have written 330 books annually (Muborakshoeva 2013).
- 4.
SQU was modeled on American and English ‘templates’, with the first colleges educating students in medicine, engineering, science, Islamic studies and education, as well as in agriculture. In the 1990s, a Faculty of Commerce and Economics and a Faculty of Sharia and Law were added. In the late 1990s, government licensed several private colleges with emphasized business curricula, which are reformed teacher colleges, for which the head of state no longer saw a need.
- 5.
In 2006, the number of students in the private sector is roughly 46,000, in the state sector over 51,000, with about 12,300 students being educated at Sultan Qaboos University, and a ‘considerable number of Omani students going abroad for higher education (partly on government scholarships for the entire family) (for thorough discussion Donn and Issan 2007). For studies abroad within the Gulf region. see (Findlow and Hayes 2016).
- 6.
Such universities have been built in Jordan, Turkey, Viet Nam and other countries, including Oman. Each bilateral project contains a unique combination of actors, as university and federal-state partners differ already on the German side. This holds, of course, also for the model-importing countries and for the governance structure, as Fromm eloquently shows.
- 7.
Generally, the internationalization policy by German universities is funded long-term through the DAAD (which is an agency funded in turn by the German Bund, the federal state). In the case of the projects discussed, the major grants are the responsibility of the German state, or states involved in the projects. The DAAD position is that a sustainable engagement must be supported by its capacities, including regular deployment of German academics in the host-countries.
- 8.
During my fieldtrip to GUtech at the end of 2014, I observed the German higher-education policy on language instruction as the major mechanism for instilling the German sense of culture and preparing the mobility of the students, as academic course work includes a study term at RWTH Aachen. The demand on Arabic-speaking natives to learn German, when they are already struggling with English, was not a demand well received in Oman, as it takes away from academic instruction time. On the societal concern about English “as a language that opens doors for development, modernization, information, and even democracy” in Oman, see (Abdel-Jawad and Abu Radwan 2011).
- 9.
My research findings pertain to 2015, due to the limit of the audit and the lack of robust secondary research data. The findings are based on information given at the higher-education institutions between 2008 and 2013. A new round of audits is currently in process, and the results offer more robust research opportunities in the near future.
- 10.
On similar findings on research function development in other Gulf countries’ sectors of private higher education, see (Findlow and Hayes 2016).
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges a travel stipend issued by the University of Speyer’s DAAD-PROMOS fund and family-side financial support by Prof. Dr. Jörg Vogel (Würzburg) for life in the field. The author is thankful for insights shared by Prof. Dr. Michael Jansen (founding member of GUtech) and Prof. Dr. Michael Modigell (current Rector of GUtech), as well as several members of the Al-Salmi family, the owners and co-directors of GUtech.
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Vogel, A. (2020). Transnational Institutions of Higher Education and Their Contribution to the National Innovation System: The Case of the German University of Technology in Oman. In: Nickl, B., Popenici, S., Blackler, D. (eds) Transnational German Education and Comparative Education Systems. Global Germany in Transnational Dialogues. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36252-2_9
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