Nature pushes science-inspired openness in Saudi Arabia—but gently
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8099
“When the new ‘King Abdullah University of Science and Technology’ was inaugurated in 2009,” began a recent letter from 18 Nobel laureates to that university’s president in Saudi Arabia, “it was recognised as a visionary attempt to ‘rekindle science in the Islamic world.’” The letter’s 18 signatories—including physicists Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Sheldon Glashow, and Brian Josephson—were defending openness and the freedom to dissent.
Saudia Arabia’s barbaric physical punishment of a blogging dissenter, Raif Badawi, precipitated the letter. An article at Times Higher Education says some believe it “is a warning that the university will be internationally shunned by global scholars unless it does more to further freedom of speech.”
Internationally shunned? The 5 February edition of Nature has focused on the issue in both a news article and an editorial . Nature is calling not for an all-out campaign of international pressure, but for persistent, prudently applied, and measured advocacy of openness.
On Nature reporter Declan Butler’s article, the headline and subhead summarize: “Saudi university backs slow road to modernization: Researchers at top science institute say education will have more effect than vocal opposition.” He calls KAUST “a multicultural, world-class university in what seems an unlikely setting,” with 840 students from 69 countries, including 246 from Saudi Arabia and 302 women. It was created with the understanding that “Saudi Arabia would improve freedoms beyond the campus.” The Badawi case has put its leaders under pressure to speak out. Butler notes, though, that researchers there “argue that they can have a bigger impact on Saudi society—and perhaps on the Arab and Muslim world broadly—by quietly continuing in their efforts to create a world-class centre for research and critical thinking.”
The headline and subhead on Nature’s editorial take a slightly stronger tone: “House of cards: Western institutions must speak out against human-rights abuses in their partner countries.” The editors emphasize that the Badawi case “once again highlights the responsibility of researchers and scientific institutions who collaborate with authoritarian and repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia to denounce human-rights abuses.” They examine relevant factors: Saudi Arabia’s miserable human-rights record, the country’s oil-based ties to the West, the importance of petrodollars in supporting the university and Saudi Arabia’s participation in research generally, and the need and opportunity for KAUST to dampen “the stifling influence and control of conservative clerics.”
The editors sum up:
Campaigns for persecuted individuals whose plights otherwise risk going unnoticed can also, as in Badawi’s case, send the powerful message that the world is watching. Scientists at KAUST are perhaps not best placed to speak out, being at risk of potential retribution. But Saudi Arabia benefits hugely, not least in terms of its international image, from prominent collaborations with Western research organizations and universities, which have a duty to use that leverage to speak out on abuses, and to call for greater democratic reforms—both publicly and in their private dealings with their Saudi partners.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.