At 72, when most men are enjoying their first years of
retirement, former UCLA chancellor Charles Young is heading
Education City off the west coast of Saudi Arabia.
Young, who served as UCLA chancellor for 29 years and came out
of a brief retirement for a four-year stint as president of the
University of Florida, will spend two to three years running a
consortium of educational centers in Qatar.
Young will be president of the numerous centers operating under
the Qatar Foundation’s umbrella, a non-profit organization
founded in 1995 by Sheik Hamad ibn Khalifa al Thani; the foundation
is currently led by Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned.
The centers include a day school for children ages 3 to 18, the
Qatar Diabetes Association and a center for Public Policy, which is
operated by Rand Corporation.
The Education City campus will also include a Texas A&M
engineering school, a Carnegie Mellon computer design school, an
art and design school from Virginia Commonwealth University and a
Cornell University Medical program.
Only 20 percent of the 700,000 person population of Qatar are
native Qataris. Young’s wife, Judy, said most of the students
at Education City are from the Persian Gulf region.
Young is already working full-time in Qatar and will return to
the United States in May.
He and Judy plan to spend the summer on an island in British
Columbia. Young will return to Qatar in September, and Judy will
follow soon afterward.
Qatar ““ pronounced “cutter” ““Â is a
wealthy Islamic, Arabic-speaking nation which gained independence
from Great Britain in 1971. Oil exports currently make up 90
percent of the nation’s income.
Judy, who just returned from house hunting in Qatar, said it is
“quite a dynamic, developed place” though the cities
are surrounded by deserts.
She said the Qataris are feverishly working on construction
projects in preparation for the 2006 Asian Games.
People who do not know Young might expect him to enjoy his new
boat and his new house in British Columbia instead of going to work
on the other side of the world, but his former colleagues say his
personality is not suited to a life of leisure.
“Chuck Young is a man of enormous energy and talent who
keeps looking for new challenges,” said Norman Abrams, a UCLA
law professor and interim dean of the UCLA School of Law.
“The message for all of us who reach what some think of as
retirement age is, “˜Don’t stop,'” Abrams
said.
Several of Young’s former colleagues at UCLA echoed
Abrams’ sentiments, calling him “energetic” and
“indefatigable.”
Some ““ such as Joseph Mandel, UCLA vice chancellor for
legal affairs ““ said they were surprised when they received
an e-mail on April 20 announcing Young’s decision to take the
position in Qatar, but that surprise did not last long.
“For most of us, you draw the line and you rest on your
accomplishments, but that is just not Chuck Young,” Mandel
said, calling him a “natural leader in higher
education.”
John Sandbrook, special assistant to the executive dean of the
UCLA College, agreed.
“It is just onwards and forwards for Chuck,” said
Sandbrook, who was a longtime assistant chancellor to Young.
“He has a lot of Bruin blood in him, so if they
don’t have any school colors over there yet, I suspect they
will be blue and gold pretty soon,” he added.