Dubai's Zayed branch to admit males

DUBAI // Male students will start attending the Dubai branch of Zayed University for the first time this autumn, but plans for their own campus have still not been finalised. About 200 men will take classes in the afternoon after the female students go home. A campus for male students opened in Abu Dhabi two years ago, and the university announced last spring that it would build a men's campus in Dubai that was scheduled to open in September.

That timetable has been radically revised, but Dr Daniel Johnson, the provost at ZU, said educating men has been the university's plan since its founding in 1998. Dr Johnson said the decision to admit men at this point was taken in part to combat an imbalance between men and women in federal universities. However, this was not the sole reason for the expansion. "Having men and women together at the same university provides an educational environment that is going to be more approximate to the real world," he said.

Dr Johnson said plans for a full-scale men's campus are still in the works. [e-mail]