Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Prep School Days, Sans Foliage

Jordan's King Abdullah is a graduate of Deerfield Academy, the Massachusetts boarding school. He considers it such an important part of his life that he's building King's Academy in Jordan, a (yes) co-ed boarding school for which Deerfield serves as the model. It will open this coming fall. Take a look at the website here.

The headmaster is Eric Widmer, who served as Deerfield's headmaster for over a decade. Safwan Masri, an extremely popular professor at Columbia Business School for many years, is Chairman of the Board of Trustees and also a visiting faculty member. I'm familiar with both Widmer and Masri, and I can't think of two people better suited to start an important school from scratch.

The results should be interesting to watch.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Is this going to be a madrasa-type school?

I had a high school friend who went to Deerfield. Always considered them the best of the brightest...and the most drunken mischievous fools on the planet. I had to stop visiting because I couldn't keep up with them.

5/01/2007 7:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Madrasa just means school in arabic. It is going to be co-ed, so how could it possibly be an extremist Islamic school?

5/01/2007 11:36 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was tongue-in-cheeking it. Co-ed sounds pretty extreme to me...

5/01/2007 3:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Sorry, can't be too sure these days

5/01/2007 9:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

We should really pick names. People are going to think it's the same person talking to itself.

5/02/2007 6:24 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good bloody lord.

There are plenty of coed public schools in Jordan and have been since independence. Establishing another elite school for the Jordanian elite (for which there are already several) is not news.

The bizarre semi-traditional schools of Pakistan ARE NOT GENERAL in the Arab world, for bloody fuck's sake.

5/06/2007 7:44 AM  

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