In May 2011, Mr UD went to Jeddah, to review an academic program at King Abdulaziz University. I remember thinking, listening to him talk about the school and Saudi Arabia, that this is arguably the weirdest country in the world. It has money, and seems to want various forms of international legitimacy (for its educational establishment, for instance). Saudi Arabia must look at rapidly progressing China and India and think I’ll have a slice of that…

Yet its deeply, absurdly, repressive culture (Mr UD described the way, as the plane touched down, every woman passenger assumed a funeral pall) makes any form of cultural progress almost impossible.

Saudi Arabia does have one university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (its only mixed-gender university) that’s getting somewhere.

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Most countries do indeed look first at their universities as they seek a voice in the modern intellectual and scientific world; but because Saudi Arabia by definition (it not only lacks a scientific ethos; it is foundationally opposed to a scientific ethos) cannot attract or cultivate world-class intellectuals, it has tried to use its vast wealth to as it were attach academic respectability to itself.

Case in point: The same university Mr UD visited has been throwing tens of thousands of dollars a year at highly cited researchers in the US and elsewhere in order to get them to list an affiliation with King Abdulaziz University. They don’t have to go there or anything; in exchange for the money, they call themselves adjunct professors. They make contact with one or two professors on the campus; they may talk vaguely about scholarly cooperation. But really it’s about cash for flash: You give us your name, we give you $70,000 a year.

It’s also about gaming the international university ranking system:

Citations are an indicator of academic clout, but they are also a crucial metric used in compiling several university rankings. There may be many reasons for hiring highly cited researchers, but rankings are one clear result of KAU’s investment. The worry, some researchers have said, is that citations and, ultimately, rankings may be KAU’s primary aim.

Indeed a Berkeley mathematician describes his shock on seeing that “a little-known university in Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in mathematics [in the US News and World Report rankings] — despite the fact that it didn’t have a doctorate program in math until two years ago.”

The adjunct ploy has spawned some busybusybusybusyBUSY professors:

[There’s] Jun Wang, director of the Beijing Genome Institute, whose affiliations are BGI (60%), University of Copenhagen (15%), King Abdulaziz University (15%), The University of Hong Kong (5%), Macau University of Science and Technology (5%). Should he also acknowledge the airlines he flies on? Should there not be some limit on the number of affiliations of an individual?

Take that, Morris Zapp!!

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You have to give KAU this: They understand numbers. And they understand human psychology. (As one scientist who went for the deal explained to the Berkeley guy, “It’s just capitalism.” A professor who turned down an invitation from KAU writes, in a comment on the Berkeley guy’s blog, “I got one of these invitations from King Abdulaziz University too and I said ‘No’ to it… But believe me, the offer of $72K ‘easy money’ even made me think for a minute or two before saying ‘No.’ It was tempting! Some people have children to send to school, and their salaries are not enough.”) Maybe for this alone they deserve their ranking.