All the perfumes of Arabia?

With a year still to go before their new institution opens its doors for business, education planners in Saudi Arabia already have reason to offer a non-alcoholic toast to their success in laying the foundations for what is destined to be among the world's richest universities.

A number of groundbreaking agreements with world-class universities has seen what is to be called the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or Kaust, make an impressive start in matching its bedazzling economic bounty with the intellectual wealth its supporters hope will eventually propel the new institution into the ranks of the great.

Kaust, a graduate-level research university named after the political ruler who has underwritten its costs and endowment, is intended to be a showcase for modernisation in the heart of one of Saudi Arabia's most conservative regions, according to its advance publicity.

The new institution is the centrepiece of a raft of higher education reforms that have also seen the desert kingdom upgrading many of its degree-granting institutions over the past couple of years, while also planning to establish at least 10 other new universities by 2010.

"This has all been a big surprise," says Philip Altbach, director of the Boston College Centre for International Higher Education and a former consultant to the Saudi government. Had he been asked even a decade ago whether Saudi Arabia would have made such a significant investment in higher education as part of its way of making its mark on the world, Altbach says: "I certainly wouldn't have thought it possible."

Unresolved questions

Kaust is set to be the world's sixth wealthiest university - or, if its endowment is measured on a per-student basis, the world's second wealthiest. As things stand, it's the wealthiest institution of higher learning anywhere outside the US: it will open with an endowment of more than $10bn.

But the cultural setting of the media-shy new university still poses unresolved questions. Saudi Arabia remains one of the world's most rigid societies, a status reflected by the strict interpretation of Islam under which its 28 million inhabitants must live and learn.

While nominally the first co-educational institution in Saudi history, the new university will not permit any intermingling of the sexes within or outside the lecture halls, nor will it tolerate any classroom discussion of "western" subjects such as popular music, psychology, classical philosophy or - especially relevant to any research-led institution - evolutionary science.

Nor could any female academics expect to be permitted to drive a car, or indeed ride in a car driven by a man who is not a relation or spouse.

The New York Times recently reported on a carefully staged, groundbreaking ceremony held for the new university at which the organisers distributed an issue of the Economist magazine, with a special advertisement for the institution wrapped around the cover. Physically torn from each copy, however, had been an article about Saudi legal reform titled "Law of God Versus Law of Man".

Nevertheless, says Altbach, the kingdom is confident it can attract western academics by offering them the kinds of laboratory facilities and grants they cannot find at home. "They think a combination of those things will lure a certain number of research-productive western faculty," he says, "but I have my doubts."

Fewer doubts probably exist among the kingdom's young people, excluded as most have been until now from higher education. More than half of Saudi Arabia's native-born population of 22 million is under 25, but scarcely 100,000 attended a local university last year, leaving many more to travel abroad to study - often arriving to mixed cultural receptions.

Difficulties in securing visas to attend British and American institutions, combined with more aggressive recruiting by higher education institutions in New Zealand and Australia, have led to surging numbers of Middle Eastern students going there to study in recent years. At the turn of the century, New Zealand's eight universities enrolled fewer than 50 Middle Eastern students; that number has since grown to more than 2,000, with nearly 8,000 at other universities in nearby Australia.

But the increase in Saudi students in the region has raised alarm, as it has in the past in Britain and the US. Last year, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an influential government-financed body, scolded the country's universities for failing to work more closely with the government's counterterrorism efforts, warning of potential terrorist mayhem in the making at one or other of Australia's 40 institutions of higher learning.

"My sense is that the understanding here of what these students are all about continues to be pretty limited," admits Samina Yasmeen, director of the University of Western Australia's Centre for Muslim States and Societies.

Yasmeen believes that the new moves afoot in Saudi Arabian higher education could yet nudge some of these intending fee-paying international students back in a homeward direction.

Boosting scientific researchStill, those moves are as much about countering a historical lack of general scientific research in the kingdom - where architecture and medicine have traditionally been considered the only rites of passage for the educated elite - as they are about simply providing more classrooms or keeping promising students at home.

With this in mind, and an eye on international recruitment, Kaust has already finalised a number of $20m agreements, including one signed in March with Imperial College, London, along with the universities of California at Berkeley and of Texas at Austin, and - especially notable because of its existing international standing as a leading research institution - Stanford University.

Like the others, Stanford will have a role in faculty selection and curriculum development, with the Californian university hosting a number of Kaust scholars as visiting fellows. Under the agreement, up to a dozen Stanford educators will also be available to teach short courses and hold seminars in Saudi Arabia, helping as they would to academically audit Kaust's applied mathematics and computational science programmes.

According to Peter Glynn, director of Stanford's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, such agreements have enjoyed broad academic support. "The thing that really resonated with people here was that this could have a really positive impact on Saudi society over the years and decade to come," says Glynn.

But should the much-vaunted King Abdullah University of Science and Technology not fulfil the liberal hopes of its western well-wishers, he warns "then certainly you'll see individual faculty making decisions about that matter with their feet. At an official level, too, I think you'd see the university pulling the plug."