> The Board of Regents decided to reassess the university’s physical presence in Qatar in fall 2023 due to the heightened instability in the Middle East.
Is this a coded reference to the Israel-Hamas war? Why would that involve Qatar, which is thousands of miles away?
I think you posted the wrong link? This doesn't say Israel paid Hamas, it says Qatar (in the course of funding basic infrastructure like electricity in Gaza) did. Israel simply didn't stop them from doing it. If Israel had, people would be accusing them of killing Gazan civilians because Gaza wouldn't have electricity, and thus no functioning hospitals. Kind of a lose-lose for them.
I can see why Texas A&M would want to exit a country that's currently sheltering Hamas leadership, however. Kind of a bad look.
That’s understating it a bit: Israel encouraged and blessed the payments, specifically seeing it as beneficial to strengthen the Hamas this way, and Mossad officials escorted the monthly cash transports.
Without extra context, I fail to understand why this is relevant. With the information provided in this link I can easily just swap "Texas University" for Greggs or McDonalds and still get the same output. Can someone provide a bit more content?
There must be at least an inkling of a premonition that being located in a petrostate is not really necessary for the future. Although punching holes in the ground is a durable skill, petroleum engineering as a widespread industry will be on the ropes as this century proceeds.
I attended Texas A&M for undergrad about a decade ago and did a "leadership exchange" program with the Qatar branch campus, so it surprised me to see this on the HN front page. I'm at an airport waiting on a flight with a few hours to kill, so I thought I would share some thoughts and memories of the experience.
I am not keyed into Texas A&M politics so I couldn't say why this is happening now, though the increasing instability of the Middle East region is as likely reason as any. Texas A&M is one of the most overtly conservative public schools in the country, with the physics building named after the guy who invented fracking and the school is the home to the George H.W. Bush Presidential library. My thinking is that the increasing association of Qatar and Al Jazeera with the left generally probably upset the very vocal alumni networks over the last few years, especially lately. Take a look at TexAgs for a sense of how Qatar is viewed within the Aggie community https://texags.com/search?q=qatar.
The leadership exchange program was that a dozen or so students from the Qatar branch campus flew to the main College Station campus for a week and then we all flew over to Qatar and they showed us around the Qatar branch campus for a week. I want to say it happened over spring break and it was all expenses paid by the schools, very much in the spirit of building a bridge between the very distant campuses.
The first week, we happily showed the Qatar branch students around and had fun showing them the campus and America for the first time. We answered a lot of questions about America and it honestly wasn't so memorable to me. I can't say I took it that seriously, for me it was just another whatever week on campus with some extracurricular activities with new people.
When we flew over there though, we all lost our shit immediately though. We had never in our lives seen as much concentrated wealth as any of us did in that one week period. For example, the colors of Texas A&M are maroon and white, and they love those colors, everything is maroon and white on campus, it's a huge deal there and they take pride in it. Anyway, the Qatar branch campus imported tons and tons of pink marble to be used in a bunch of buildings, because that shade of pink marble was the closest to maroon that they could find. The bathrooms were full of pink marble. It's hard to convey the scale of it and I wish I had taken more pictures but the marble alone blew us away.
The joke among the American students quickly became how poor we were and how poorly we had treated the visiting Qatari students. We were put into the Sharq hotel, a five star hotel in Doha. I think the school had put the Qatari students in like Holiday Inn or something, it just didn't compare. At breakfast at the Sharq in the mornings, there was often an African man in full military fatigues that made him like a general, reading the newspaper, surrounded by a retinue of beautiful women, also dressed in full military fatigues.
That week was my first time experiencing real serious jet lag and it surely contributed to the total surreal experience of the whole thing. One morning they announced that they were taking us to the Pearl, the man made islands they were constructing and showed it all off to us. We walked around and saw all the advertisements for luxury brands everywhere. Again, hard to convey how surreal it was walking around a giant luxury paradise, when we were giving the Qatari students tours of the dining halls a week prior.
Simply put, Qatar had and has too much oil money. This was in 2011 or so I think and the Shah had somewhat recently put out Vision 2025, the royal family's plan to transition the economy away from oil extraction and processing and into literally anything else. They were all very aware that the oil could well run out one day and to maintain the absurdly high standard of living for Qatari cit...
Pretty much the Saudi sphere of influence in a nutshell.
Parts of the maintained colonial vestiges within proper China are also equally absurd in splendor: marble from floor-to-ceiling, chandeliers as large as medium-sized aircraft, hedge mazes, indoor and outdoor sport shooting, and individual bungalows in the back by the lake filled with swans... and even the "cheap" rooms came with barber service and a "masseuse".
In many things, Americans don't realize how substandard or how (sometimes similarly) unequal their standard of living is relative to the rest of the world. I don't think most Americans have an accurate perspective because 2/3 don't even have a passport, and probably 70% of the only 1/3 who have one just have it to go to tourist traps like Tulum or Tahiti, or to be assholes in another country during Spring Break more-or-less the same as Miami Beach domestically who got tired of it.
If you want to see the world, get a backpack and ride trains across Europe, Asia, Russia, Africa, and all of the Americas too. Maybe join an international humanitarian NGO. Some people join the military, but that's a bad idea as per Smedley Butler.
12 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 42.4 ms ] threadIs this a coded reference to the Israel-Hamas war? Why would that involve Qatar, which is thousands of miles away?
I can see why Texas A&M would want to exit a country that's currently sheltering Hamas leadership, however. Kind of a bad look.
That’s understating it a bit: Israel encouraged and blessed the payments, specifically seeing it as beneficial to strengthen the Hamas this way, and Mossad officials escorted the monthly cash transports.
I am not keyed into Texas A&M politics so I couldn't say why this is happening now, though the increasing instability of the Middle East region is as likely reason as any. Texas A&M is one of the most overtly conservative public schools in the country, with the physics building named after the guy who invented fracking and the school is the home to the George H.W. Bush Presidential library. My thinking is that the increasing association of Qatar and Al Jazeera with the left generally probably upset the very vocal alumni networks over the last few years, especially lately. Take a look at TexAgs for a sense of how Qatar is viewed within the Aggie community https://texags.com/search?q=qatar.
The leadership exchange program was that a dozen or so students from the Qatar branch campus flew to the main College Station campus for a week and then we all flew over to Qatar and they showed us around the Qatar branch campus for a week. I want to say it happened over spring break and it was all expenses paid by the schools, very much in the spirit of building a bridge between the very distant campuses.
The first week, we happily showed the Qatar branch students around and had fun showing them the campus and America for the first time. We answered a lot of questions about America and it honestly wasn't so memorable to me. I can't say I took it that seriously, for me it was just another whatever week on campus with some extracurricular activities with new people.
When we flew over there though, we all lost our shit immediately though. We had never in our lives seen as much concentrated wealth as any of us did in that one week period. For example, the colors of Texas A&M are maroon and white, and they love those colors, everything is maroon and white on campus, it's a huge deal there and they take pride in it. Anyway, the Qatar branch campus imported tons and tons of pink marble to be used in a bunch of buildings, because that shade of pink marble was the closest to maroon that they could find. The bathrooms were full of pink marble. It's hard to convey the scale of it and I wish I had taken more pictures but the marble alone blew us away.
The joke among the American students quickly became how poor we were and how poorly we had treated the visiting Qatari students. We were put into the Sharq hotel, a five star hotel in Doha. I think the school had put the Qatari students in like Holiday Inn or something, it just didn't compare. At breakfast at the Sharq in the mornings, there was often an African man in full military fatigues that made him like a general, reading the newspaper, surrounded by a retinue of beautiful women, also dressed in full military fatigues.
That week was my first time experiencing real serious jet lag and it surely contributed to the total surreal experience of the whole thing. One morning they announced that they were taking us to the Pearl, the man made islands they were constructing and showed it all off to us. We walked around and saw all the advertisements for luxury brands everywhere. Again, hard to convey how surreal it was walking around a giant luxury paradise, when we were giving the Qatari students tours of the dining halls a week prior.
Simply put, Qatar had and has too much oil money. This was in 2011 or so I think and the Shah had somewhat recently put out Vision 2025, the royal family's plan to transition the economy away from oil extraction and processing and into literally anything else. They were all very aware that the oil could well run out one day and to maintain the absurdly high standard of living for Qatari cit...
Parts of the maintained colonial vestiges within proper China are also equally absurd in splendor: marble from floor-to-ceiling, chandeliers as large as medium-sized aircraft, hedge mazes, indoor and outdoor sport shooting, and individual bungalows in the back by the lake filled with swans... and even the "cheap" rooms came with barber service and a "masseuse".
In many things, Americans don't realize how substandard or how (sometimes similarly) unequal their standard of living is relative to the rest of the world. I don't think most Americans have an accurate perspective because 2/3 don't even have a passport, and probably 70% of the only 1/3 who have one just have it to go to tourist traps like Tulum or Tahiti, or to be assholes in another country during Spring Break more-or-less the same as Miami Beach domestically who got tired of it.
If you want to see the world, get a backpack and ride trains across Europe, Asia, Russia, Africa, and all of the Americas too. Maybe join an international humanitarian NGO. Some people join the military, but that's a bad idea as per Smedley Butler.
Why would they want laxer standards that could only impair their reputation?
If anything they have strong incentives to enforce a higher standard to show the world their eminence and so on.