An artist's impression of the sprawling Princess Nora Bint Abdur Rahman University in Riyadh. – Archives RIYADH – Saudi Arabia's largest university for women is, for the moment, a universe of men. Laborers from Pakistan, India, and Syria crawl over the near-finished classrooms and lecture halls, polishing marble and fine tuning light fixtures. In the state-of-the-art library, technicians from Lebanon are putting final touches on a vast robotic book delivery system that can direct any one of five million books in the stacks to dedicated portals. Out front, Sri Lankan laborers lay tiles around a massive fountain and reflecting pool. But in two months, when Princess Nora Bint Abdul Rahman University opens its doors to a new class of some 30,000 students, every single one of those men will disappear behind a wall, cordoned off, by university law, from this all female enclave, DP.news.com said Tuesday. King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, opened the first exclusive university campus for women on May 15 this year. In one of the Kingdom's most ambitious projects to date, the 2,000-acre campus, complete with dorms to house 12,000 students, 14 colleges, a teaching hospital, Olympic-caliber athletic stadium and a mosque big enough for 5,000 worshippers, was built in less than two years, at a cost of SR22 billion. The project, says lead contractor Hussain Al-Harrieh, was akin to building Disney World in two years, “But maybe not as much fun.” Like Disneyland, anything that disrupts the fantasy of an all-women world will be carefully hidden: under the campus runs a 4-km long network of tunnels that allows maintenance workers to access pipes, communications cables and electrical mains in each of the buildings, without actually setting foot on university grounds. omen will staff cleaning crews, as well as the army of gardeners needed to tend the spacious lawns and floral borders. Female attendants will manage the automated and integrated monorail system. But the university is also setting Saudi society up for more difficult questions to come: where will those women work when they graduate? Ahmed Al-Hakami, Deputy Minister of Economics and Planning, holds that many Princess Nora graduates will find jobs at the university itself, but that is hardly a sustainable solution. A government order Monday has opened some retail opportunities to women, namely in lingerie shops, but that's hardly an attractive job for someone with a degree in philosophy. In fact, says Al- Hakami, one of the biggest problems with employing women is the fact that they have historically opted for the softer sciences, like arts and literature, over finance and technology. “We need to convince female students to switch to the sciences, so that they are better suited for today's labor market.” One student described the university as “a turning point in the education process”. “The university is an example of one of the finest universities in the world, and will give us the opportunity for an education in conditions conducive to study and learning,” she said.
