girls on one side...

inside the spaceship! from the courtyard of the AUH campus

Zayed University is about 15 years old. It was started as an all-women's University but maybe 5 years ago, they started a small segregated men's program and some co-ed graduate programs. It's one university on two campuses. I work mostly at the Dubai (DXB) campus but travel to the Abu Dhabi (AUH) campus once a week or more on the daily shuttle van. The drive takes about an hour and 15 minutes.

The gender segregation is an interesting complication in the libraries on both campuses. The idea is to keep marriageable boys and girls apart in a place where they're supposed to be learning, not flirting or meeting unchaperoned. I guess by graduate school, everyone is either mature enough or already married so there can be gender mixing on a limited basis. Also, once a young man or woman is employed- even if they are a recent grad- then in the course of business, they can interact with the opposite gender. I should mention that other universities in the UAE are co-ed, ZU just provides a choice for those girls (and everyone here calls them "girls", many

complicated hours- male and female days

do arrive fairly sheltered and young-seeming) or their families who are more comfortable with the segregated undergraduate experience. So the Dubai campus was built before there were programs for males. We have only one of big resources like a cafeteria, a gym, a library. We have to segregate by time. Female library hours are 7:30AM - 4:30PM, male hours are 5PM - 9PM. Yup, the men get the short end of that stick. The Abu Dhabi campus was built (to look like a giant spaceship!) after the introduction of men's and co-ed classes and so they built two of a lot of big resources, like cafeterias and gyms, however, they couldn't really, in good conscience, build and fill two complete libraries side by side- those books get crazy-expensive. Instead, in Abu Dhabi, they ran a wall down the middle of one floor of the Library so there's a men's side and a women's side each with some English language learning resources (duplicated) and a help desk and study rooms and other materials. And then, on the 2nd and 3rd floors, they employ a maze of retractable opaque walls and on certain days of the week, men move freely from the first to second or third floors and on other days of the week, women do. If it's a men's day, however, and you're a young female student, you're stuck on the 1st floor in your

from my office window in AUH, female day in the courtyard

section and if you need a book from upstairs, you request it from a staff person who will go pull it for you. Similarly, there's only one courtyard off the 2 cafeterias and so if it's a Tuesday (female day) and you're a young man, you're eating inside.

 Other than the whole gender segregation thing, much of my daily work life is not unlike my work life in the US. There are a few other reminders that are now becoming so commonplace I almost don't notice them any more. My keyboard is bi-lingual! And for any library or teacher friends who might be familiar with Ellison dies, we have Arabic alphabets and I asked the tech in our Curriculum Resource Center to cut out the letters for my name.

click on this to see it larger and to see the Arabic letters

If there had been a test on how to order and put those letter together to spell my name, I probably would have failed, or maybe squeaked by with a low C grade. I did know which letter came first, second/third combo, and fourth. And I knew to order them right to left. But I flipped 2 of them over and put the dots that go above and below to make the letters complete in absolutely the wrong places. With quite a bit of coaching, I managed to glue them down correctly!

that says Diane!