Money can’t buy change

Around the world, there are countries striving to become world powers. Yet how many world powers do we know that have strict limitations on the fundamental ability of someone to go to college? Not many. Currently, Saudi Arabia is among those few countries.

Despite their obvious setbacks, Saudi Arabia is planning on opening the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which will be home to one of the world’s largest supercomputers.

Saudi Arabia believes that by having this ability, they will move forward in sciences both along the Red Sea and in the world, ignoring the fact that limiting half their population will never help them move forward.

In Saudi Arabia, women can only go to college with the permission of their father or husband, and even then, they are limited in the subjects that they are allowed to study. This is also the only country in the world where women cannot legally drive or ride a bicycle, and where women can only testify in court if no men were present as witnesses, since women are said to be too emotional to be rational.

I fully believe we should respect different cultures, but this isn’t a matter of respect. This is a matter of lack of respect for the country’s own citizens.

The truth of the matter is that Saudi Arabia may believe that by acquiring a supercomputer and opening a technical school they might draw in scientists and researchers from other countries to help advance their own sciences, but they are leaving out a very important detail.

The countries that have these experts are going to be Westernized countries which do not have the extremely sexist policies that have left Saudi Arabia in the dark ages for so long. If Saudi Arabia truly hopes to move forward and become more successful in the world they are going to have to reevaluate their own belief system.

KAUST will be working in partnership with Cornell University, the University of Oxford, Stanford University, and Texas A&M University in an effort to make this new technology available to researchers around the world. But is Saudi Arabia forgetting that the rest of the world has allowed women the freedom to choose what they study and they may not attract important researchers because they are what they consider to be the weaker sex?

Although the women who work at these partner universities will be able to work with the research gained from the supercomputer, those women will not be able to work with the supercomputer itself.

Most women who actually make it to college in Saudi Arabia are limited to studying literature and education.

Can you imagine having macaroni and cheese and leaving out the cheese? It’s still edible, but isn’t nearly as good. Likewise, you can have the cheese without the macaroni, but it works better together.

Having both men and women studying in college is just like that. Sure, the country might have some break-through in technology with only the men working with it. But doesn’t the overall quality as well as the possibility of success increase if they actually made these studies available to everyone?

King Abdullah donated $10 billion to this university, but he still won’t change the law to make the money worthwhile.

What about westernized men who will choose not to assimilate into such a rigid culture? Even though KAUST has already begun to recruit researchers from elsewhere in the world who are very excited about this technology, they may still lose out overall.

Saudi Arabia doesn’t understand that purchasing something amazing will not bring the success they desire. The country will only be able to be truly successful by opening its minds to understand that there are no differences between the mental capacity of men and women.

The laws are being blatantly ignorant, not even remotely realizing that by limiting half of their population, they may be losing ideas that could have helped. If women choose to be mothers and homemakers, that is their decision.

To not allow them the flexibility to be something else is ludicrous. Saudi Arabia is still trying to live in the dark ages while the world continues through the 21st century.