GUST

I visited the Gulf University of Science and Technology (GUST) here in Kuwait City today. During a presentation I gave last fall in Fez, Morocco I met Ray Weisenborn, the dean of Arts & Sciences at GUST, and he discussed extending the GM network to Kuwait - this is pretty typical, which is why I give so many papers at conferences overseas (including four on this long trip). Anyway, we ended up running a GM with Mark Olson from GUST this semester on divorce in Kuwait and the US. The university is interesting in that all the classes are segregated by gender (a recent phenomenon caused by the election of more Islamist members to parliament) and we actually divided up a couple Champlain classes by gender to match up with the GUST courses, which was a real teachable moment for our Vermont students. The men and women even, technically, have separate wings and even floors of the library. I say technically because they mix fairly freely in the central area and the eating areas. At the same time the women dress in a more "western" fashion than any Arabic school I've ever visited. At a place like Zayed University in the UAE all the girls where the traditional black abaya and hihab - same with Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman. At a school like the University of Jordan you have a rough division into thirds - completely traditional, completely western, and somewhere in between (western wear and the hijab) - but even here the western wear would always be jeans. Here, on the other hand, you'd have a similar division into thirds, but the western students were actually wearing dresses or skirts and showing a fair amount of skin (as with Jordan, there has been a steady growth in the number of students wearing thw traditional wear in the last few years, although it's hard to say whether that is because of a growth in faith or as a result in a changing sense of fashion).. It's a strange mix because it's also a country which is pretty conservative in other ways - including a complete ban on all alcohol - causing many ex-pats to brew their own on the sly. I'll try and post some pictures later.