Innovation's Dramatic Death Scene

How do we quantify development and intellectual progress? Count up the number of PhDs held by citizens? No. According to an environmental expert I recently interviewed, the real question is: What do we produce? What ideas do we have and what do we do with them? (Am I starting to sound like Thomas Friedman yet?).

Example: Omanis developed an innovative technology to filter petrochemical wastewater using plants resistant to contaminants. Israel contacts Oman to profit from this solution. Oman ends up giving away technologies such as these to larger, international companies. This would be acceptable, if there were partnerships between Omanis and the international corporations so that both sides would benefit. Alas, there are few of these mutually beneficial relationships.

Of course, innovation is based on education. And quality education is sorely lacking in the Sultanate. My interviewee criticizes many aspects of the university system that he was a part of for 20 years. He asserts that people here have not changed their way of thinking. Professors are not concerned with actually fixing problems and helping the poor. What are they concerned about? He has created three labels for scientists/professors. 1) Those that aim to please the public. They don’t publish anything that would upset them. 2) Those that aim to please the government. They just want to keep working with ministries on consultancies. 3) The opposition; the minority.

In the US, a department that is hiring will strive to bring in the best possible addition to its faculty to aid in future collaborations. Here, it’s a story of employing who you know, or who will make you look better comparatively, or who is cheaper for HR. With low quality professors who care more about keeping their jobs than anything else, what can you expect from students?

An Omani friend of mine was a public high school English teacher for one year. He hated his job. Every day he would enter class, and motivate his students in Barka by telling them how important English was to their future. But these were 12th graders who had been passed in English class since grade school, and now were preparing to graduate without knowing how to hold a conversation in that language.

At SQU, the highest level university in Oman, students are equally unmotivated and under prepared. My interviewee said that his daughter, a middle school student at a private school in Muscat, could write a more cogent essay that an SQU attendee. One SQU professor I recently spoke with said that it takes an average of 6 years for students to complete their degree. Though they are only allowed to be on academic probation (below a 2.0 average) three times, many petition high level university officials, and tally nine probations without being expelled.

Students are given free tuition at SQU, free housing, free meals, a monthly stipend. These are supposed to be the best of the best, and they are treated as such. This is just one more reason not to care as much about school. You are not wasting anything by spending more time at university; whereas in the US, two extra years at a university would cost you at least $60,000. Heck, if I was able to stay in college two years longer, for free, as opposed to having to find a real job or get locked into a marriage here, why not prolong my stay at SQU?

In class, students demand things from professors. In a science course, students revolted against a professor who used questions for his exam that did not exactly mimic the examples he gave in class. You are getting the picture. Students are not pushed to perform. They are not asked to think creatively. There is no accountability. Teachers do not set good examples. Everyone gets passed in the end.

If the education system refuses to water the seeds of innovation, bureaucracy is a rabbit that goes around gnawing at any little sprout. My new environmentally minded friend spent four months in communication with a ministry because they did not like the name of the center he was trying to establish. How many people would wait that out? How many people could afford to keep paying the rent on the building that they had chosen for their new “small/medium enterprise” to wait on a ministry to approve their name? And that is just step one. As he explained, Oman is influenced by the Egyptian administration style, and this is cancerous. It is a paper bureaucracy where many, many copies are made of any approval. People value the “proof” that paper provides and do not trust electronic systems. Long strings of procedures perpetuate the bureaucratic inertia.

Innovation. Discussion. Debate. These can all be seen as destabilizing forces because they require change. But Oman is learning that economic progress will stall without such creativity.