A new university at the heart of Saudi Arabia’s planned megacity on the banks of the Red Sea could soon emerge as the country’s premier scientific institution with the backing of its powerful crown prince.

Billed as the sustainable city of the future and covering an area the size of Belgium, the $500 billion (Rs.39 lakh crore) Neom project is set to boast improbable wonders such as ‘The Line’, a 177 km-long linear city housing 1 million people without conventional cars, and ‘Oxagon’, an eight-sided floating industrial city — as well as a flagship university, dubbed Neom U.

The institution, which last month (June) appointed a founding president, Andreas Cangellaris, currently provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, intends to become a ‘pre-eminent knowledge institution’, attracting students from across Saudi Arabia and overseas, and offering on-site and online learning. It will initially focus on computer science, engineering and design, media, art and entertainment, and business studies.

Christopher Davidson, an expert in Middle Eastern politics and fellow at the European Centre for International Affairs, says the new university will benefit from the patron age of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — known as MBS. “Given Neom’s close association with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman… it is likely to emerge as Saudi Arabia’s premier and best-resourced research institution,” says Davidson, adding that, as a key component of the Vision 2030 strategy to reduce the country’s reliance on fossil fuel extraction and diversify its economy, the university is likely to “be well-funded, and heavily promoted, both domestically and internationally”.

Significantly, beyond Prof. Cangellaris, many of the key players in the Neom U project are veterans who nurtured the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), until now the beacon of transformation of Saudi Arabia’s research sector, boasting a massive $10 billion endowment, a mostly international student cohort, and the country’s first mixed-gender campus.

Nadhmi Al-Nasr, chief executive of the Neom project, was KAUST’s interim president at its foundation and later served as executive vice-president for administration and finance. Neom’s international steering council for education and research is chaired by Jean-Lou Chameau, former president of the top-ranked California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech) who led KAUST between 2013-2017.

Although KAUST is involved in the development of Neom, Dr. Davidson predicts that “though there will likely be cooperation and collaboration with…KAUST, the latter may eventually fall by the wayside”. “After all, KAUST was a King Abdullah-era project — with his name still buried in the acronym — and MBS is known to have harboured a strong dislike and distrust of King Abdullah’s sons and senior associates, with the most influential having been targeted by MBS’ anti-corruption campaign.”

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at Oxford University agrees that Neom U has the potential to join the top tier of global research institutions. “As KAUST shows, if we judge ‘world-class’ in universities by the quality of the infrastructure, and by quality and quantity of leading faculty and researchers hired, which is the most important single element in the world-class university model, the Saudi formula for building world-class universities can work,” says Marginson.

But he notes that, alongside concerns over freedom of expression and gender equality in Saudi Arabia, “questions remain” over other metrics for success. “How embedded are the high-investment Saudi world-class universities in the Saudi economy and culture? Isolating institutions from society is not a viable strategy in the long term,” says Marginson, adding that universities cut off from their surroundings “create less social and economic value” and are less likely to be sustainable.