The Amman adventure begins...

It’s like a James Bond film really: indoor palm trees, high ceilings, limestone walls, sheiks in long white robes helping themselves to a luxurious breakfast buffet at the Le Royal hotel; the chatty cab driver who tells me that he has friends everywhere and a Maltese girlfriend waiting for him at home. Military men with guns (well, not flowers obviously), guarding precious property…hang on, the property is the American University! Nothing invites students so enticingly as the nozzle of the gun. The only deviation from this sexy storyline is that we are here for a higher education reform conference. From exciting thriller to drama (or documentary perhaps), the term “education” has a way of sobering this momentum. This is a collaboration between Columbia Middle East Research Center and the Jordanian government. Columbia University, much like several universities in the US, is eager to gain an academic foothold in the Middle East and capture a new consumer base of young doe-eyed students while the Jordanian government, as part of its extended semi-love affair with the US, strives for strategic affiliations. I am here as part of the Columbia team to help in creating a policy document for higher education reform with an emphasis on new media, internationalism and the knowledge economy. An adventure awaits, as I wonder how the Jordanians will receive a professor from the Netherlands with a British accent (or so I’ve been told) yet sounding rather American, and wearing an Indian tunic!