Holden Thorp, one of the professors leading the seminar, began the class by handing out three local newspaper editorials about Qatar, including one he had written himself.
"I see a great opportunity in Qatar for us because this is a country that has shown an understanding of higher education in the sense that we understand it here at Chapel Hill," Thorp said.
The seminar opened with a presentation by Jim Peacock, a representative from the University Center for International Studies, about ways to internationalize UNC-Chapel Hill.
Peacock offered nine ways to globalize the University and goals such as defining UNC-CH as an international university and building an international presence. "Carolina doesn't have (an international presence) on the whole," Peacock said. "People recognize the name Harvard but not UNC-Chapel Hill."
After Peacock spoke, three representatives from the business school presented a basic history of the Qatar proposal and some details on the program. The representatives, Dean Robert Sullivan; Julie Collins, senior associate dean of the business school; and Jeff Cannon, the director of the bachelor of science in business administration program, also answered students' questions.
After the professors' presentations, students in the seminar asked questions about safety in Qatar, UNC-CH's financial gain, freedom of speech regarding religion, losing UNC-CH professors to the Qatar campus, Doha's strength as a center of business, and admissions policies.
In response to the question about free speech, Collins said several religious studies professors went to Qatar and asked about the problem of blasphemy when students express freedom of speech. "You can have analytical debate or discussion about any religion in class," Collins said. "But if we wanted to convert people from one religion to another that would be crossing the line."
The students raised another issue of contention about the makeup of the class admitted. In the proposed plan, 70 percent of the school's students would be from Qatar's native upper class, which makes up 25 percent of the population.
But the representatives said UNC-CH admissions officers are used to dealing with what they call ratios and what some of the seminar students called quotas.
