Houston CC: Qatar Unable to Credit Coursework?
TThe western universities in Qatar have fought long and hard to have accountability and enforced standards . . . and there are always challenges. Here is a hilarious article about one such newer university facing significant challenges (thanks, John! )
Faulty planning may be to blame for HCC Qatar campus’s problems
By Jeannie Kever, Houston Chronicle
Updated 09:01 p.m., Saturday, February 4, 2012
As top officials at Houston Community College were collecting awards and publishing papers about their international ventures last year, their effort in Qatar was struggling with disagreements over accreditation, high faculty turnover and growing worries that the dean hired by the Qataris to lead the effort was working against them.
The problems, detailed in emails and internal documents obtained through a public records request, raise questions about whether HCC was prepared for the ambitious foreign undertaking.
The dean chosen by the Qatari government was replaced in November by a veteran HCC employee, Butch Herrod, as part of an administrative overhaul. Enrollment has reached 750 students, less than two years after HCC signed an agreement with the Qatari government to create that nation’s first community college.
But students have not received HCC credits for their classes there – a cornerstone of the promises made when the partnership was announced – and for now it appears unlikely their coursework will transfer to the six U.S. universities with operations in Qatar. After months of student protests, a deal signed last month will allow graduates of the new community college to enroll in Qatar University.
Things were so bad last spring an HCC administrator in Qatar wrote HCC Chancellor Mary Spangler that Community College of Qatar, or CCQ, had become known as “the Crazy College of Qatar.”
From the beginning, Spangler said the Qatar contract was a way to earn money as state funding dropped and property tax revenues remained flat. HCC records indicate the college has collected $640,034 from the deal; it projects a profit of $4.6 million by 2015, slightly more than expected.
Deputy Chancellor Art Tyler said in a recent interview that things now are running smoothly, and that misunderstandings are unavoidable in any international operation.
“The world is not exactly flat,” he said. “It may have gotten smaller over the years, thanks to technology, but when you’re dealing with people, with communities, you can’t know everything.”
Women taught separately
Among the things HCC didn’t know until just before classes began in September 2010: The Qatari government decided male and female students would be educated separately, contrary to the five-year, $45 million contract, which called for coeducational classes.
Former employees say that was just one of the surprises when they arrived in Qatar, ranging from delays in getting textbooks to worries over their exit visas.
“Things did not go smoothly at all,” said Randi Perlman, hired to teach English to Arabic-speaking students. “There were a lot of issues that came up … that I think didn’t need to happen.”
Overseas campuses
With more than 70,000 students, HCC is one of the nation’s largest community college systems, offering lower division academic classes and workforce training.
Over the past decade, it has become increasingly involved in international ventures, as well, with projects in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Qatar.
Tyler said Qatar, located on the Persian Gulf, is a natural match for a Houston institution: energy industry ties, Qatar Airlines’ nonstop flights and the presence of the Qatar Consulate here. Six U.S. universities have campuses there, including Texas A&M.
The Methodist Hospital System has an office in the United Arab Emirates and is helping to build an ambulatory care center in the capital city of Doha.
Visa requirement
The first wave of HCC faculty and staff discovered after being hired – in some cases, after arriving in Doha – that their visas required them to get permission before leaving the country.
“That seemed to me to be a human-rights violation,” said Jan McNeil, a veteran English teacher who had previously worked in Singapore.
HCC offered interviews with three employees who worked in Qatar last year, all of whom said the visas posed no problem.
David Ross, chairman of the English as a second language and English departments in Qatar, said the system worked but acknowledged the six-day window to use the visas made timing tricky and the lack of multiple exit visas – standard for U.S. employees of American universities and companies there – provoked anxiety.
Internal emails also detail delays in preparing apartments for the expatriate employees, paying tuition at schools for their children and complaints about spotty Internet service.
“That whole piece of helping faculty and staff feel at home … was a challenge,” Tyler said.
‘A matter of learning’
Perlman, who now teaches at Texas A&M in College Station, attributed many of the challenges to poor planning, including hiring administrators – many of whom transferred from Houston – without experience working in a foreign country.
“You need people on the ground there, to help you get things done,” said Perlman. “They didn’t have that.”
Mark Weichold, dean and CEO of Texas A&M’s Qatar campus and a member of an interim board appointed last fall to govern CCQ, said missteps are to be expected.
“Watching HCC help get the community college established, some of the bumps are similar to what I’ve seen the other branch campuses (in Qatar) experience,” he said. “It’s a matter of learning how to do things in a different part of the world.”
Little control at top
But former employees and internal documents suggest HCC’s biggest problem came from a contract that authorized the Qatari government to hire the school’s chief academic official, giving HCC little control over decisions at the top.
Judith Hansen was hired by Qatar’s Supreme Education Council and served as dean until late last year.
Tyler declined to discuss the circumstances that led to Hansen’s departure in November.
Hansen, who had been forced out of the president’s job at Southwestern Oregon Community College in 2008 following three no-confidence votes by faculty and staff groups, did not respond to requests for comment.
But she was at the center of disputes over accreditation and whether CCQ could change HCC’s curriculum or claim it as its own.
She insisted on independence in an email to Tyler last winter: “The request for no assistance with (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) accreditation means there is no need for HCC to be concerned about CCQ organizational chart,” she wrote.
‘Crazy College of Qatar’
Not so fast, Spangler said after Tyler passed on the message.
“We will not accept this response,” the HCC chancellor wrote to Tyler. “She is not calling the shots.”
Cheryl Sterling, an HCC administrator now in Qatar, wrote Tyler and Spangler last spring after Tyler acknowledged no HCC credit would be awarded for the spring 2011 semester.
“If students do not receive HCC credits this Spring, we will have a major crisis (all out war),” she wrote. “The Dean has held several forums assuring them of credits. … we are known as CCQ, the Crazy College of Qatar.”
At about the same time, faculty members issued a “no confidence” vote against Hansen.
John Moretta, a faculty member now in Qatar, was in contact with Spangler before the vote.
“She avoids me because she knows … that I know what she is doing is in direct contravention of so many HCC policies,” he wrote of Hansen. “Should we proceed with the faculty-senate vote of no confidence? … Please advise.”
Spangler replied the same day.
“The short answer is yes, and we didn’t have this conversation,” she told him.
Canadian Family Found Guilt of Honor Killing
From today’s AOL / Huffington Post: World:
KINGSTON, Ontario — A jury on Sunday found an Afghan father, his wife and their son guilty of killing three teenage sisters and a co-wife in what the judge described as “cold-blooded, shameful murders” resulting from a “twisted concept of honor.”
The jury took 15 hours to find Mohammad Shafia, 58; his wife Tooba Yahya, 42; and their son Hamed, 21, each guilty of four counts of first-degree murder in a case that shocked and riveted Canadians from coast to coast. First-degree murder carries an automatic life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years.
After the verdict was read, the three defendants again declared their innocence in the killings of sisters Zainab, 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti, 13, as well as Rona Amir Mohammad, 52, Shafia’s childless first wife in a polygamous marriage.
Their bodies were found June 30, 2009, in a car submerged in a canal in Kingston, Ontario, where the family had stopped for the night on their way home to Montreal from Niagara Falls, Ontario.
Prosecutors said the defendants allegedly killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying its disciplinarian rules on dress, dating, socializing and going online. Shafia’s first wife was living with him and his second wife. The polygamous relationship, if revealed, could have resulted in their deportation.
The prosecution alleged it was a case of premeditated murder, staged to look like an accident after it was carried out. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims elsewhere on the site, placed their bodies in the car and pushed it into the canal.
Defense lawyers said the deaths were accidental. They said the Nissan car accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and her father’s first wife. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn’t call police from the scene.
After the jury returned the verdicts, Mohammad Shafia, speaking through a translator, said, “We are not criminal, we are not murderer, we didn’t commit the murder and this is unjust.”
His weeping wife, Tooba, also declared the verdict unjust, saying, “I am not a murderer, and I am a mother, a mother.”
Their son, Hamed, speaking in English said, “I did not drown my sisters anywhere.”
But Judge Robert Maranger was unmoved, saying the evidence clearly supported their conviction for “the planned and deliberate murder of four members of your family.”
“It is difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime … the apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor … that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”
Hamed’s lawyer, Patrick McCann, said he was disappointed with the verdict, but said his client will appeal and he believes the other two defendants will as well.
But prosecutor Gerard Laarhuis welcomed the verdict.
“This jury found that four strong, vivacious and freedom-loving women were murdered by their own family in the most troubling of circumstances,” Laarhuis said outside court.
“This verdict sends a very clear message about our Canadian values and the core principles in a free and democratic society that all Canadians enjoy and even visitors to Canada enjoy,” he said to cheers of approval from onlookers.
The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a wealthy businessman, married Yahya because his first wife could not have children.
The prosecution painted a picture of a household controlled by a domineering Shafia, with Hamed keeping his sisters in line and doling out discipline when his father was away on frequent business trips to Dubai.
The months leading up to the deaths were not happy ones in the Shafia household, according to evidence presented at trial. Zainab, the oldest daughter, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend, and she fled to a shelter, terrified of her father, the court was told.
The prosecution said her parents found condoms in Sahar’s room as well as photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control: skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while declaring to authority figures that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.
Shafia’s first wife wrote in a diary that her husband beat her and “made life a torture,” while his second wife called her a servant.
The prosecution presented wire taps and cell phone records from the Shafia family in court to support their honor killing theory. The wiretaps, which capture Shafia spewing vitriol about his dead daughters, calling them treacherous and whores and invoking the devil to defecate on their graves, were a focal point of the trial.
“There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this,” Shafia said on one recording. “Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows … nothing is more dear to me than my honor.”
Defense lawyers argued that at no point in the intercepts do the accused say they drowned the victims.
Shafia’s lawyer, Peter Kemp, said after the verdicts that he believes the comments his client made on the wiretaps may have weighed more heavily on the jury’s minds than the physical evidence in the case.
“He wasn’t convicted for what he did,” Kemp said. “He was convicted for what he said.”
Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word
Come back when you have some time – you’ll need about twenty minutes to watch this TED video about communication. I love this – but then you know I am a word nerd, and I love the way concepts are born and grow.
Computers have aided language analysis and taken it to lengths that were previously inconceivable. First, Deb Roy shows – with videos, graphs and cloud analysis – how his son learned to speak his first word.
He goes from there to what I would call “buzz analysis”, taking program content from cable television and correlating it to comments on public media – blogs, FaceBook, all kinds of public forums. The results are astonishing, and a great tool to understand the national psyche and how we think and process. This is amazing stuff.
Saudi Arabia: Women Driving Will Have Sex, Report Says
I am sorry, but if this were a joke, it would be hilarious. It IS hilarious, or it would be, if it didn’t impact so darkly on the lives of so many women.
So my friends in Saudi Arabia, here is the solution. Let the women drive. Tell the men not to have sex with these driving women, not until they are married. Tell the men that no matter how much the women beg, to keep themselves pure, and not to let these women tempt them away from their purity. Teach the men that it is a CHOICE, and that they can behave themselves honorably, and withhold themselves from these driving women who want to have sex with them.
That’ll teach those women 🙂
From the Huffington Post
Saudi Arabia: Women Driving Will Have Sex, Report Says
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A report given to a high-level advisory group in Saudi Arabia claims that allowing women in the kingdom to drive could encourage premarital sex, a rights activist said Saturday.
The ultraconservative stance suggests increasing pressure on King Abdullah to retain the kingdom’s male-only driving rules despite international criticism.
Rights activist Waleed Abu Alkhair said the document by a well-known academic was sent to the all-male Shura Council, which advises the monarchy. The report by Kamal Subhi claims that allowing women to drive will threaten the country’s traditions of virgin brides, he said. The suggestion is that driving will allow greater mixing of genders and could promote sex.
Saudi women have staged several protests defying the driving ban. The king has already promised some reforms, including allowing women to vote in municipal elections in 2015.
There was no official criticism or commentary on the scholar’s views, and it was unclear whether they were solicited by the Shura Council or submitted independently. But social media sites were flooded with speculation that Saudi’s traditional-minded clerics and others will fight hard against social changes suggested by the 87-year-old Abdullah.
Saudi’s ruling family, which oversees Islam’s holiest sites, draws its legitimacy from the backing of the kingdom’s religious establishment, which follows a strict brand of Islam known as Wahhabism. While Abdullah has pushed for some changes on women’s rights, he is cautious not to push too hard against the clerics.
In October, Saudi Arabia named a new heir to the throne, Prince Nayef, who is a former interior minister and considered to hold traditionalist views, although he had led crackdowns against suspected Islamic extremists. His selection appeared to embolden the ultraconservative clerics to challenge any sweeping social reforms.
Prince Nayef was picked following the death of Crown Prince Sultan.
Eating after 8 PM? Higher BMI
I found this today on AOL Healthy Living; bad news for my friends in the Middle East who rise late, dine late and sleep late. You can read the entire article for yourself by clicking on the blue type above.
It seems to me that there needs to be more testing; the group studied was very small.
Sleeping Late, Eating Late Leads to Gaining Weight
A message to night owls: There’s news that your bedtime — and those late-night snacks — may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds. A recent study took on an important, and under-examined, aspect of the sleep-weight loss connection: how the timing of sleeping — and of eating — can affect weight. Researchers at Northwestern University examined the effects of sleep timing on diet and body-mass index (BMI), and found that late bedtimes and late mealtimes can lead to less healthful diets and to weight gain.
A group of 52 adults — 25 women and 27 men — spent seven days keeping food logs and having their sleep and waking activity measured by a wrist sensor. The researchers divided participants into two categories of sleepers:
“Normal sleepers” reached the midpoint of their night’s sleep before 5:30 a.m. These sleepers were asleep by shortly after midnight, and woke around 8 a.m. Among the study group, 56 percent were normal sleepers.
“Late sleepers” reached the midpoint of their nightly sleep after 5:30 a.m. They went to sleep in the middle of the night, well after midnight, and woke in the mid-to-late morning. Among the study group, 44 percent were late sleepers.
Researchers tracked the eating habits of these two types of sleepers through the information provided to them from the participants’ food logs. Not surprisingly, “normal sleepers” and “late sleepers” were on very different schedules, in terms of when they ate throughout the day:
Normal sleepers ate breakfast by 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m., on average. These sleepers reported being finished with eating for the day by 8:30 p.m.
Late sleepers reported eating their first meal of the day at about noon. They ate again in the middle of the afternoon, and did not eat dinner until after 8 p.m. Late sleepers did not finish their eating for the day until 10 p.m., on average.
What were the consequences for sleeping later and eating later? Researchers found that late sleepers suffered across the board, in terms of the quality and quantity of both their daily sleep and eating:
Late sleepers slept less overall than normal sleepers — an average of more than an hour less per night.
Late sleepers consumed more calories at dinnertime than normal sleepers. They also consumed significantly more calories after 8 p.m.
Late sleepers had poorer quality diets than normal sleepers — they ate more fast food, drank more sugar-laden soda, and ate fewer vegetables.
These habits of late sleepers — sleeping less, going to sleep later in the night, and eating more after 8 p.m. — were all found to be associated with a higher body mass index. Among these habits, eating after 8 p.m. was the strongest predictor of a higher BMI. What does this mean? It’s not just what you eat, but when you eat, that can affect your ability to lose weight. And your sleep habits can have a significant influence on the timing of your eating, as well as on how much you eat.
Qatar: The Richest Fattest Nation on Earth
Thank you, reader John, for passing along this fascinating article from The Atlantic:
Qatar is a tiny country with a big problem.
This Connecticut-sized nation, sticking out like a loose tooth in the Persian Gulf, is one of the most obese nations in the world, with residents fatter, on average, than even those of the United States, which often takes the cake in such competitions.
According to recent studies, roughly half of adults and a third of children in Qatar are obese, and almost 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. By comparison, about a third of Americans are obese, and eight percent are diabetic. Qatar also has very high rates of birth defects and genetic disorders — problems that, along with the prevalence of obesity (PDF) and diabetes, have worsened in recent decades, according to local and international health experts.
So what’s going wrong in little Qatar?
Qatar also has very high rates of birth defects and genetic disorders — problems that have worsened in recent decades.
To misappropriate a well-worn phrase: It’s the economy, stupid. In September, Qatar officially became the richest nation in the world, as measured by per capita gross domestic product. It also recently became the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas, and earned the title of fastest growing economy in the world. By international development standards, all this growth has happened virtually overnight, making Qataris’ lifestyles much more unhealthy, and at the same time leading many to hang on resolutely to what’s left of their fleeting tribal traditions — practices that include inter-marriage between close family members and cousins.
“They’re concentrating the gene pool, and at the same time, they’re facing rapid affluence,” said Sharoud Al-Jundi Matthis, the program manager at the Qatar Diabetes Association, a government funded health center in Doha, the capital. As a result of these factors, Qataris are becoming obese, passing on genetic disorders at an alarming rate, and getting diabetes much more often than others around the world. They’re also getting diabetes a decade younger than the average age of onset, which is pushing up rates of related illnesses and complications, like hypertension, blindness, partial paralysis, heart disease, and loss of productivity. “It’s a very, very serious problem facing the future of Qatar,” Matthis said.
It’s a fascinating read, not too long, little more than double what you have already read. You can read the entire article by clicking HERE: The Atlantic
Thank you, John, for the recomendation.
Veteran’s Day: Honor Your Veterans
We will be paying for these last two wars for a long time. Veterans of these wars, many seriously, but not fatally injured by IED’s, traumatized by the activities of war are walking among us. Many of our newest vets have been in the war zones more than once.
AdventureMan is a war vet. Strong and courageous as he is, there are still times he will tear up at some of the things he witnessed in Vietnam. War is an event which resounds throughout the rest of your life.
One of the things we love about living here in Pensacola is that there are a lot of vets here, and there is a culture which honors the Veteran’s sacrifices. When we show our military ID cards in Lowe’s or Home Depot, people say “thank you for your service.” The first time it happened to me, I was caught so by surprise that my eyes leaked tears. Several restaurants are offering active duty and veterans free meals today, reduced prices, and there are many ceremonies honoring Veterans.
The military culture doesn’t like to admit that the warrior life can cause severe problems, mentally, emotionally, with the family, finding a purpose in life after military service, finding relevance in a peaceful society – our men and women come home having seen and experienced sheer horror, and find themselves alien in their own culture. Recovery can be a long, slow process. More of our severely injured vets have survived, but live with brain injuries, lost limbs, and mental wounds.
Welcome them back. Bind their wounds, be patient with their sufferings. War veterans have a high rate of suicide, often related to inability to find a job, so if you are in such a position – hire a veteran. Honor their service, shake their hand, and value their sacrifice.
Law and Order SVU: How Did They Know and When Did They Know It?
What a tragedy. Joe Paterno, fired in disgrace. Joe Paterno, the much admired, the Penn State football coach who embodied integrity, fired, disgraced. “What did he know and when did he know it?” people ask.
What astonishes me is that the situation almost exactly parallels a recent episode of Law and Order SVU about which I recently blogged, in September.
In that episode, a much-admired football coach is reported to be preying on young men in his foundation, young men for whom he gave an opportunity to ‘be someone;’ he trained them, gave them motivation and the possibility of a lot of money, fame and good things for their very poor families. His victims were burdened by a debt of gratitude, combined with the shame of male-on-male sex, which they did not want to become public knowledge. The combination of gratitude and shame kept them silent, until one spoke out. It took a lot of courage, but finally, a big star who had come through this depraved coach’s program went public, appeared before the grand jury, and set the example.
The similarities are eerie. In Law and Order, however, the coach who had preyed on young players in the showers and locker rooms did not bring down a highly regarded top-ranking program director, and a university president.
Joe, we are so sorry this has happened to you, and we hope that posterity will recognize that one poor decision is counter-balanced by a lifetime of integrity. We pray that young men victimized by Defensive Coach Jerry Sandusky will come forward, have their voices heard, and be able to move on with their lives, knowing that Sandusky will be punished. We pray for their families, who had no idea what was happening in their sons’ lives. It’s a sad time all the way around.
And thanks be to God, we live in a society where the trustees made the right decision, they fired the men who looked the other way as Sandusky victimized his young men. Thank God, this dirty laundry was not buried away to be forgotten, but brought forward, the perpetrator arrested and shamed publicly. There are times, in this world, when in the interest of the God of football, or the respect of position, when a scandal victimizing the poor and voiceless is shoved under the table, ignored, the victims sent the message that they don’t matter. As bitter as this pill is, I thank God for it, and for the increasing transparency in our society which begins to equalize justice for rich and poor.
Jungle Bell Rock in Kuwait :-)
If you remember, the Qatari Cat is a former street cat, a rescue cat. I wish I could be there to support this wonderful event and the good work that K’s Path in Kuwait is doing. They have some illustrious sponsors, and a host of great volunteers supporting their efforts.
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