King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia is a long way from St. Peter, Minn., where Ray Thrower was chief of police at Gustavus Adolphus College, but there's a western feel to what will be a college campus situated between the city of Thuwal and the Red Sea.

Thrower was recruited from the U.S. to oversee a team of nearly 200 campus security personnel, emergency communications personnel, the student identification division, security and alarm monitoring, and a host of other things as deputy manager of the campus's command and control center.

Thrower is in KAUST as part of a program, instituted by the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), to provide an all-inclusive training program for communications personnel in the university's new communications center.

KAUST is being built as an international, graduate-level research university dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the kingdom that will also benefit the region and the world. Its core campus occupies more than 36 million square meters on the Red Sea and sits approximately 80 kilometers north of Saudi Arabia's second largest city, Jeddah. The university's goal is to advance its mission by providing and maintaining a safe and orderly learning environment for the KAUST community. As part of this effort, KAUST will staff a 20-person communications center and utilize all of the APCO Institute's training programs and support software.

Laws of Islam Relaxed

The campus, which spans more than 15 square miles, will be completely westernized, which means that some of the laws of Islam will be relaxed within the security walls between Thuwal, KAUST and the Red Sea. Women will be allowed to drive on campus, something that's not allowed throughout the rest of the kingdom.

The required wearing of the traditional black abayas by females is also not necessary unless so desired. All classes will be coed, and intermingling between the sexes will be as it is throughout other Western countries like the United Kingdom and United States. Though these practices seem normal to us, they are for the most part a radical change of tradition being promoted by the king.

When completed, the campus will be occupied by more than 20,000 residents -- including students, staff, faculty and their families. The construction consists of 3,500 residential dwellings, 29 academic and administrative buildings and three mosques. KAUST is its own self-contained city. Some of the academic buildings span the size of a football field and are five stories tall with waters from the Red Sea meandering through the ground level.

The emergency communications staff currently consists of eight gentlemen of Saudi Arabian decent, all of whom were hand-picked and exceeded the advertised requirements necessary with degrees in computers and information systems technologies.

"The ultimate goal is to respect the rights and protect the safety of all students, staff, residents and visitors of their campus," APCO International President Chris Fischer said. "We are happy to support this effort by ensuring KAUST communications personnel are fully trained, self-sufficient and prepared to successfully handle fire, EMS or police-related emergency calls."

The training is being conducted over a three-month period and began in April.

Lessons of the Day

Dennis Shepp, a security specialist from Canada who has tenured existence in a variety of places in the Middle East, teaches classes a multitude of lessons dealing with the basics of command and control. During one class, the lesson of the day dealt with academic building evacuations, for which he had the class work as a group to develop a PowerPoint presentation depicting how the students would envision evacuating the administrative building if a bomb threat call were received. The group presented an