This thesis examines the transfer of an American pedagogical model to the Arabian
Gulf against the wider context of the globalisation of higher education. Weill Cornell
Medical College in Qatar is used as a case study to examine how American medical
knowledge and professional practice are transmitted to and assimilated by an Arabic
social setting. It considers the workings of what is presumed to be a universal
pedagogical model by examining how the degree is culturally translated and
localised in Qatar. It addresses the question of whether or not the Cornell degree of
“Doctor of Medicine” is simply an American product transplanted to the Middle
East, or rather a malleable artefact: sought out, manipulated and shaped by the
Qataris for their own ends.
Medical education necessitates a highly challenging process of acculturation that is
amplified for Arabic-educated students who enter the American medical curriculum
without many of the values derived from a Western educational system. In addition
to language, students from Arabic-medium schools cite dress, familial, cultural and
ethical dissonance as issues that had to be negotiated while undertaking the degree.
Students enrolled at the American-style medical college currently divide their clinical
training between the Gulf and America. The structure of the imported curriculum
and biomedical practices generated in the metropole demand that students become
bilingually competent in both Arab and American health care systems. The
“American way” of doing things, however, does not always translate or conform to
cultural mores and standard practice within the Gulf setting. This thesis follows
Arab students as they move between the coeducational American academic setting
and local health care facilities, examining the ways that the physicians-in-training
contextualise, appropriate and reconstruct the medical degree according to their own
cultural referential framework.
The thesis introduces the language of “transplantation” as a heuristic tool through
which the globalisation of higher education might be explored conceptually. It is an
ethnography of an emergent educational transplant propagated in a globalised era,
which explores novel modes of knowledge transfer, institutional and social
arrangements across local and transnational boundaries, changing subjectivities and
the generation of new life forms. In a setting in the Islamic world, Weill Cornell
Medical College in Qatar provides a strategic site for observing the dynamics of a
nation and its people grappling with modernity. Through its production of Americanstyle
doctors in a non-American setting, Cornell’s transnational medical school
serves as a niche through which to explore the tensions that arise in global models of
tertiary education
