The American University of Bahrain has appointed Dr Wafa Almansoori as president, confirming in the role the engineer and higher education administrator who had been leading the institution as interim president and provost.
The appointment was made by the university's board of trustees and announced by the institution, with board chairman Hisham Al-Saie welcoming it. Almansoori had held the interim presidency together with the provost's office since the middle of last year, and has been part of the university's senior leadership since its early years.
An engineer who helped build Bahrain's quality regime
Almansoori is an electrical engineer by training. She took her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Bahrain, a master's in microelectronic systems and communications at the University of Liverpool, and a doctorate in electrical engineering at Tufts University in the United States. She then taught in the electrical and electronics engineering department at the University of Bahrain.
The part of her record that matters most for a university presidency is not the teaching but the regulation. From the middle of the last decade's reform programme she worked on the initiative to establish Bahrain's Quality Assurance Authority, now the Education and Training Quality Authority, under the Education Reform Project led by the Bahrain Economic Development Board. She helped develop the Higher Education Review System and ran its pilots.
That is an unusual background for a president and a useful one. The person who helped design the national framework against which Bahraini universities are reviewed now runs an institution subject to it. In a small higher education market where accreditation outcomes determine student recruitment and government recognition, that is a material advantage.
Earlier this year she was honoured among fifteen Gulf figures recognised as pioneers of Gulf engineering at a ceremony held alongside the Gulf Engineering Forum in Kuwait, presented by Kuwait's minister of state for municipal affairs.
The institution and its position
The American University of Bahrain is a private university at Riffa offering American style undergraduate programmes, and it is one of several private institutions that have opened in the Gulf over the past fifteen years to serve students who would otherwise study abroad. The commercial logic of that model has tightened. Competition from private universities in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates has grown, the cost of delivering American style provision has risen, and the Bahraini market is small enough that enrolment numbers move sharply on reputation.
Confirming an interim leader rather than recruiting externally suggests the board wants continuity through that. It also removes the uncertainty that an extended interim arrangement creates with faculty recruitment and with accreditation bodies, both of which look unfavourably on institutions whose leadership is unsettled.
The open question is growth. A private university of this size has to either expand its programme portfolio, which is capital intensive and slow to accredit, or raise its yield from a fixed catchment. Which of those the new president pursues will say more about the institution's next five years than the appointment itself does.
About the American University of Bahrain
The American University of Bahrain is a private university in the Kingdom of Bahrain, offering American curriculum undergraduate degrees across business, engineering, computing, design and the arts and sciences.
