By: Waleed Al-Shobakky
Published in The New Atlantis, Fall 2008
Oil executives are rarely assigned to establish universities. But when the unlikely call arrives, some hardly pause to ponder the unconventionality of the assignment. So, only five minutes into the meeting that brought him together with leading individuals from Carnegie Mellon University, Nadhmi Al-Nasr, vice president of Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Aramco, did not mince his words: “It is perhaps unusual that an oil executive is starting a university. But given your experience in Qatar, would your university be willing to help us build a new research university in Saudi Arabia?”
It was over dinner in Pittsburgh on a spring day in 2007, joined by a host of high-ranking officials from Aramco, that Al-Nasr—then the interim president of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology—posed the question to his host, Carnegie Mellon president Jared Cohon. “It is anyway easier than a university president starting an oil company,” quipped Cohon.
