The brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, received its founding endowment of $10 billion from the King himself. That makes it among the wealthiest handful of universities on the globe, in the company of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton.

As Stanford is to Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia hopes KAUST will spur a new Arabian “knowledge economy.” It’s a controlled experiment that they hope will mean a major shift in the world’s academic gravitational field:

In the realm of higher education, the institutional structure of Kaust is similarly otherworldly. For starters, the all-science university has done away with two of academia’s sacred touchstones: traditional academic departments, and tenure. Rather than departments, Kaust is organised around problems – specifically, Saudi Arabia’s problems. Hence, rather than a physics and a chemistry department, Kaust has a Solar and Alternative Energy Science and Engineering research centre and a Water Desalination and Reuse research centre. Several of the university’s nine research centres are explicitly organised around developing sustainable technologies of the sort that might be particularly handy once the petrochemical economy has gone the way of the typewriter. And while some of Kaust’s projects – like its Red Sea research centre – are slightly more geared towards pure science, most of Kaust’s research centres were very much designed with industrial applications in mind. “They’re already aligned with the needs of the industry,” says Ahmad O al Khowaiter, the university’s interim vice president for economic development. Unlike at a traditional university where professors operate out of standardised academic departments, at Kaust, al Khowaiter says, “companies don’t have the challenge of trying to find who’s interested in their problems”.

Each professor, meanwhile, is hired on a renewable, rolling five-year contract, and is automatically granted an annual research budget that ranges from $400,000 to $800,000, to use at his or her discretion. So far, the faculty seem to regard this as a favourable trade-off between tenure and the kind of research independence that comes with steady money. … When it comes to students, the university enrols no undergraduates – all of Kaust’s students are pursuing either a masters or a PhD, and are primed for the laboratory. (This is a rare, if not unheard of, set-up in higher education; Rockefeller University, a highly-regarded science institution in New York, does the same.) The university’s student-recruitment strategy provides another picture of its largesse: To entice the inaugural class of 374 students to an institution that was still, at the time, a concept without a campus, Kaust’s recruiters offered to pay for them to complete their undergraduate degrees, with a living stipend thrown in on top.

Via Linda Stone.