Branch campuses of American higher-education institutions, with names like Knowledge Village, are proliferating in the Persian Gulf kingdoms because, as Martha Bayles explains in the Wall Street Journal, many Arab and Asian parents who can afford to send their children to the U.S. are opting to keep them closer to home. Among other reasons parents

cite the desirability of a campus where the sexes do not live together and there is zero tolerance for binge drinking and “hooking up.” The challenge for overseas branch campuses, then, is to distinguish between two kinds of freedom: the libertinism of American undergraduate life, in which too many students major in “partying”; and the liberty of thought, inquiry and expression that makes American universities the envy of the world …if the glittering new campuses of the Gulf are to become true centers of learning, we Americans must relearn, and try to teach, the difference between license and liberty.

That these Gulf campuses could contribute to reviving this highly blurred distinction in America would be an interesting turn of events.