UCL’s planned Dubai outpost sparks free speech concerns

A leading UK university is hoping to restart its transnational education activities by establishing a healthcare training centre in Dubai, just six years after closing its last remaining international campus.

Under plans recently approved by its governing council, UCL will establish an education centre in Dubai to train healthcare managers and leaders. However, scholars on the university’s academic board have already raised concerns about how academics’ human rights will be protected in a state with strict blasphemy laws.

Led by the UCL Global Business School of Health, the proposed postgraduate education centre has been described as a “small, specialist training and education hub...focused on healthcare leadership and management for working health professionals”.

“This is not a full university expansion; it is a limited, tightly defined postgraduate and executive education offer delivered by the school and fully governed, quality‑assured and awarded from London,” Nora Colton, the school’s founding director, told Times Higher Education.

“This initiative builds on the school’s existing international activity and supports its commitment to improving health outcomes globally,” continued Colton, professor of leadership and management for healthcare, who added that “staff already work internationally through research, teaching, conferences and partnerships, and the hub follows the same careful, measured approach to collaboration and risk management”.

Although UCL has emphasised the limited scale of the Middle Eastern outpost, its move into teaching overseas marks a shift in its international engagement, having ditched its branch campus model in 2015 after its global engagement strategy confirmed it would focus on educating students in London.

Having adopted the tagline “London’s Global University” in the early 2000s, UCL set up campuses in Australia and Qatar but its Adelaide base closed in 2017 because of low enrolments and its Doha centre shut in 2020. It also wound down a foundation year programme taught in Kazakhstan back in 2015.

UCL’s return to teaching internationally has raised concerns among staff about how the Bloomsbury-based institution will protect the academic freedom of scholars working in Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates, where Islam is the official state religion.

“UCL has long prided itself on being Britain’s ‘godless college’ so setting up once again in a country with strict blasphemy laws has not gone down well with everyone,” one UCL professor told Times Higher Education, speaking anonymously.

Another UCL professor told THE that staff had concerns about how academics hired locally would be protected in free speech matters. “Most of the hires would be Qatari and we couldn’t protect them to the same standard as flying faculty,” they explained, adding that similar concerns had been raised by UCL’s academic board earlier this month.

Addressing the issue of teaching, UCL’s Colton said: “Academic freedom, equality, and staff and student welfare are built into the model through clear UCL governance, risk monitoring and values‑based exit provisions. This ensures the initiative – aligned with UCL’s mission to improve global health through education – has full institutional oversight.

“Academic staff will remain London‑based, with teaching delivered in short blocks or online on an opt‑in basis. Any locally recruited roles will be employed on terms aligned with UCL standards and policies,” she said, adding that the project would now “move to the next stage of regulatory consideration with Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com