You will find short stories on this site. Most are autobiographical. Some are fiction.

THE RECTOR’S PLAN
Introduction:

In an autocratic country, the government controls the news. There are no investigative reporters that can follow and report on governmental activities. The public understanding of their government is based on hearsay. This was the situation in Saudi Arabia when I was there in the 1980s. This story is not based on gossip but rather it is pieced together from bits of information I heard over the six years that I taught at King Faisal University. I heard these things from various sources and corroborated them with my personal experience of living with the consequences of these events.

The Story:

A friend told me that a friend of his stopped in Tokyo on his way back to his job in Saudi Arabia. He was talking to a stranger in a bar who told him, upon learning that he worked in the Eastern Province, “ I have heard about a university there, I think it’s King Faisal University, which is known to be totally corrupt.“ When I heard this I thought it must be some other institution and dismissed it as a fictitious rumor.

Month after month the dusty Mercedes-Benz trucks could be seen turning off the coast highway and out onto a spit of land projecting into the Arabian [Persian] Gulf. The trucks could be seen from the King Faisal University (KFU) campus where I taught architecture. I asked my colleagues if any knew what was happening out on the spit. The answer was that the rector was filling the shallow waters to create land upon which to build a new campus for the future expansion of KFU. Drawings of the proposed mid-rise buildings in a well-landscaped campus could be seen as architectural renderings proudly displayed in the administration building which was one of five humble wood frame buildings that made up the existing KFU campus. There were other architect’s renderings in the Admin building. These drawings depicted two new multi-story buildings that were being built on the KFU campus located 80 miles south of the main campus, in the oasis town of Hoffuf. One of these was nearing completion, the other was framed but a year away from completion. All of this expansion was a testimony to the vision and creative efforts of The University’s rector, (University President), Mohamad Bint Fatima. (a pseudonym)

I first learned about these expansion plans in the college cafeteria where the architectural faculty gathered for lunch. Occasionally a small group of Brits and Frenchmen would eat there too. These were the project managers for the expansion projects. Being architects, We would seek to talk with the project managers in conversation about their projects, they would only say which project they were working on and give no details. It seemed strange to me that they would be secretive about such worthy projects.

One thing I learned at lunch was that the many Mercedes trucks had been given, by the king, to Bedouins who had previously been engaged in camel caravans. They were given in an effort to modernize the Saudi transportation system. Each Bedouin who received a truck had to agree to use it in commerce for at least seven years, after which he would own it.

I didn’t notice when it was that we no longer saw the “Project Managers” at lunch. At some point, I heard that they had all been sent “out of Kingdom.” It was not long after that when we heard that our forward-thinking rector was in trouble. Then the story came to the lunch room about a Bedouin truck driver who complained to the rector because he and other truck drivers were being paid only a small portion of what was owed them for hauling fill. The story was that the Bedouin had told the rector “If you don’t pay the drivers, I will go to the king’s modulese and give him a petition requesting that he intervene.” The rector’s response was “Go ahead. It will do you no good. The king’s favorite wife is my daughter.” Undeterred, the Bedouin traveled to Riyad and presented the king with a petition for back pay for himself and the other drivers. Time passed. Sadly, it seemed that the Bedouin’s efforts had to come to nothing. Then, months later, we learned that the rector was placed under house arrest. The King had investigated the driver’s complaint and found that the drivers were due their pay for transporting mountains of sand from the desert to the gulf. Unlike an engineered fill of very large rock which would have stayed in place. The sand was being washed away by the combined currents of Iraq’s Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

I learned from an acquaintance, who was a manager with Ballast-Nedam the Dutch international construction and development company, that he had been interrogated by the King’s auditors. He told me that the investigation involved a bid for the campus expansion project which was purported to have been submitted by his company. However, it was made without his company’s knowledge. At that time of the interrogation, he was shown the bid. He recognized that it was a crudely altered Ballast-Nedam memo. He described it, saying “The form could be seen to have large sections erased using typist’s white correction fluid.” He also told me that the company that won the bid was a Saudi company owned by the rector’s aging mother. Furthermore, the investigation documented that the Kingdom had paid the rector’s development account untold millions of dollars for the two buildings in Hoffuf which, according to progress payments, were nearing completion. When the auditors visited the sites of these two buildings, they found them to be plots of empty land.

The Rector was the instigator of these three scams. His punishment was house arrest, in his comfortable villa, for two years. Arabian code for dealing with such business-related crimes is astounding. It takes the position that if one is clever enough to embezzle funds then he deserves to keep what he stole. He wasn’t forced to return the millions of dollars that he stole.

This way of dealing with embezzlement seems wildly inappropriate to the Western way of thinking. In an attempt to understand this, I came to understand that the Saudi mores are formed from its history as a merchant culture. One man selling a carpet to another initially asks for 400 Rials. The buyer counters with an offer of much less, say 150 Rials. They then go through a long process of haggling. The intrinsic value of the carpet, if there is one, does not enter into the transaction. If the merchant is clever enough to get more than the carpet is worth, he keeps it. So it is with embezzled funds. The Saudi culture is not far from that of nomadic Bedouins. As a teacher of Saudi youth, I found that “truth” is negotiable. An excuse, proffered by a student for an absence or failure to submit work, was seen as a kind of proposal that the professor could accept or reject. If accepted the excuse was considered to be the truth. If rejected, with good cause, the student would be shamed for lying.

After two years comfortably spent at his home, the rector was reinstated into his job as head of KFU but with a 20% cut in operating budget. I imagine that he had the option of using the millions he stole, to maintain his university at full budget or he could make cuts to every employee and every program. He chose to keep the money and make the cuts. These cuts were taken from faculty and staff by abrogating contractual agreements such as providing school bus service for the children of faculty, and airfare for Christmas visits of children attending high school out of the country.*

Feeling the bite of these cuts, I joined a group of architectural faculty to visit the rector and request that he honor the terms of our contracts. Rather than inviting us into his office for tea, as is the Saudi custom, he left us standing by the door while we delivered our request. His response was to say “Is that all? You may leave now.” I went, from this meeting, directly to the office of the Dean of our college. I told him what had happened when we spoke to the rector. I also told him that I would not be returning to teach the following year. While I was there, the dean received a phone call. The conversation was in Arabic so I could not understand what was being said, but I did recognize that it was stressful and important. I excused myself. I later learned that the call was from the rector who was demanding that our dean fire all of the men in the group who had been in the rector’s office on that day. The dean was arguing that “If I do that, I will lose my best faculty. I will no longer have a viable architectural program.” The rector eventually relented.

As a result of his crimes and the resulting budget cuts, the once highly regarded, visionary rector, was faced with a campus of contemptuous and angry employees. His shame extended across the kingdom.

* Footnote: The Kingdom did not permit children, of high school age to live in The Kingdom. This policy was intended to prevent ex-patriot youth and Saudi youth from falling in love and thus diminishing the racial and cultural purity of the kingdom.