Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes has been named to the board of trustees of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. Set to open in September 2009 with a class of 250-350 international and Saudi students, KAUST will train a cohort of graduate students, all on full scholarships. It will be co-educational and have women on its faculty, which will be guaranteed academic freedom. Instruction will be in English.

Rhodes' involvement with KAUST began a couple of years ago when he was asked to write a charter and bylaws for the new university.

"King Abdullah -- who is financing this and whose name it bears -- wanted to build a university that would advance the interests of the people of Saudi Arabia in the era when petroleum is no longer the dominant basis of the economy," Rhodes said. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, who also serves as prime minister, has been the royal head of the kingdom since 2005.

Rhodes consulted the constitutions of many universities, including those in the United States and Britain, and over three months produced a document that introduced such new ideas into Saudi higher education as co-education and women faculty; an independent, self-electing board of trustees; strong guarantees of academic freedom; and endowment income free of the influence or control of government ministries.

"King Abdullah has a very elevated vision for a great university that could become world-class in science and engineering," Rhodes said.

Serving on the 20-member board with Rhodes are Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland; Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health; Rolf-Dieter Heuer, incoming director general of CERN; Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University; Jie Zhang, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; and Cornell trustee Lubna Suliman Olayan . "It's an impressive international spread," said Rhodes, who led Cornell from 1977 to 1995.

The king has provided the university with a $10 billion endowment -- among the largest for any university (about double Cornell's endowment) -- and separate funds for construction of a campus that will function as its own city. A team of 20,000 workers is building the campus, which is located on the Red Sea north of Jeddah in a former fishing village called Thuwal.

"They're building a new city there, and the architecture is just dazzling," said Rhodes. About 30 faculty members of a proposed 400-member faculty have been appointed so far.

Since writing the university's charter, Rhodes has served on a small international advisory board for KAUST, which has been involved in recruiting a president (Shih Choon Fong, outgoing president of the National University of Singapore) and provost (Fawwaz T. Ulaby, former vice president of research at the University of Michigan). Rhodes was "somewhat surprised" to be named to the board, whose composition, as stipulated by the charter he wrote, is half non-Saudi. "I'm too old for this sort of thing, but I'm really very honored to be part of it."

KAUST has formed research arrangements with universities and corporations around the world, including Cornell, which has a $25 million partnership. Projects under way with KAUST: General Electric working on wind and solar power; IBM building a massive supercomputer; Monsanto developing salt-resistant crops; and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution helping to preserve the coral reef offshore of the KAUST campus. Some universities are loaning faculty to KAUST during its initial period.

"Remarkably, all this has happened in the last two years," said Rhodes. "As I look back on what is happening, I catch my breath and pinch myself. In a normal university, this would take 50 years, at least. Here, it's all going to happen within three years. It's an enormous challenge to take all these moving parts and be sure you get some sort of cohesion between them. This [university] can be a transforming agent for good in this part of the world."