Are money and faith enough to build a world-class research institute?

My title comes from the first line of a story that my colleague Toni Feder wrote two years ago about the opening of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

Saudi Arabia can’t at present fill all KAUST’s faculty slots with homegrown professors. But even if it could, the university is determined to be international in its outlook, faculty, and student body. Thanks to ample funding, KAUST boasts Asia’s fastest supercomputer and modern, well-equipped labs.

And if the facilities aren’t sufficiently enticing to foreign professors, KAUST also offers palatial houses, free health insurance, tax-free salaries, and free travel to two conferences or other professional meetings a year. Gasoline in the oil-rich country is $0.40 a gallon.

News of those inducements reached me last Friday in the form of a forwarded e-mail from a physicist who had recently visited KAUST. Days later, I read of a demonstration outside Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Two hundred Saudis had gathered to protest against the continued detention without trial of their fellow citizens. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia sent soldiers to Bahrain to prop up that country’s unpopular monarchy.

I’ve lived and worked in two countries—Japan and the US—outside my native Britain. During my two years in Japan and my first nine years in the US, I couldn’t vote in either country, yet I never felt my freedom and my pursuit of happiness were threatened or curtailed.

I haven’t visited KAUST or Saudi Arabia, but I doubt I’d be happy there. I enjoy drinking wine too much to give it up. Even though I’m not a woman, the restrictions on what women in Saudia Arabia can wear and the ban on their driving cars would gnaw at my conscience constantly.

But several non-Saudi researchers evidently don’t share my qualms and have joined KAUST’s faculty. I wish them well. I’m skeptical, though, that KAUST will, in the words of King Abdullah himself, “become a house of wisdom to all its peers around the world, a beacon of tolerance.”

Whereas science flourished in the Soviet Union and is flourishing in China, neither country restricted the rights of its female population to the extent that Saudi Arabia does. In fact, according a 2010 United Nations report on gender gaps , Saudi Arabia’s women have the world’s lowest level of political empowerment.

KAUST is a technical university. Its success should perhaps be measured in its scientific output. So far, its researchers have written or cowritten eight papers in Applied Physics Letters and three papers in Physical Review Letters. A creditable score, but as far as I could tell, none of the KAUST authors is a woman.