DOHA, Qatar -- Nearly four years ago, the School of Foreign Service’s Qatar campus opened its doors within Education City. Now the campus is preparing to moving from a shared-building owned by the Qatar Foundation into a nearly 400,000-square-foot facility of its own.

The building, scheduled to open in fall 2010, will include classrooms, offices, a library and other facilities for more than 200 undergraduate and graduate students.

"The new facility will help us do better what we have already been doing for the past four years, which is to make Georgetown a living reality 6,000 miles from the Hilltop," said School of Foreign Service-Qatar Dean James Reardon-Anderson.  "We expect the building to feel and function like Georgetown, while having a look and location a bit removed from Healy Hall."

When the Qatar campus welcomed its first students in 2005, there were 25 undergraduates. Now, SFS-Q has nearly 150 students representing 28 different countries. And this May, Georgetown will hold ceremonies for its first graduating class at the Qatar campus.

Currently housed within Education City’s Liberal Arts and Science Building, SFS-Q will remain amongst the group of American universities in Education City, but it will stand alone in its own building just as a handful of other institutions do.

The new facility, which is funded by the Qatar Foundation, was designed by architectural firm Legoretta and Legoretta. The Mexico City-based firm also designed the neighboring buildings now occupied by the Qatar campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Texas A&M Universities.

During last semester’s groundbreaking ceremony, officials highlighted the importance of worker safety in the planning and construction of the building.

“The Qatar Foundation has played a pioneering role in ensuring the safety of workers at the Georgetown University building and throughout Education City,” Reardon-Anderson said during the Oct. 30 groundbreaking. “One of the reasons that Georgetown is proud to be a partner with Qatar Foundation, and a resident of Education City, is the commitment of our hosts to the safety and welfare of the workers who are providing a place for us to live and work.”

The Georgetown building will be the first civil construction project in Education City to integrate requirements for safety into all aspects of the project. “There is no such thing as OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) in Qatar, so we had to assist the Qatar Foundation with standard practices,” said Karen Frank, vice president of university facilities and student housing on Main Campus. 

The Qatar Foundation is working with San Francisco-based URS, an engineering and technical services company that specializes in construction safety, to take steps so the project conforms to international safety standards.
The building team will include on-site health and safety administrators and an external safety review team will audit the site regularly.

Though the students at the Qatar campus will directly benefit from the new facility, the university as a whole has and will continue to reap the rewards of the research and resources at SFS-Q.

“We don’t want Education City to be just an island benefiting a few in Qatar,” said Fathy Saoud, president of the Qatar Foundation. 

The Center for International and Regional Studies, located on Georgetown’s Qatar campus, has produced a variety of publications and conferences funded by grants from sources such as the Qatar National Research Fund and the Qatar Foundation. These projects have involved close collaboration between Georgetown’s research centers in Doha and Washington.

University leaders say seeing the work being done in Qatar firsthand is a must. 

“You can read a lot about the globalization of education, but you have to come to Education City to really see the magnitude of this project,” said Scott Fleming, associate vice president of federal relations, after a recent visit to the Qatar campus with a delegation of U.S. congressional members.

-- Charles Nailen, Blue & Gray Contributing Writer

(January 26, 2009)