Resilience and Recalibration: How Ajman University is adapting through regional uncertainty
19 June 2026
Victoria Winter, Director of International Academic Affairs, Ajman University considers how despite recent events in the Gulf, the University is adapting and moving forward.
When colleagues abroad email to ask how we are holding up, I can hear the worry behind the question. The honest answer tends to surprise them: we are doing well. The past few months have been the hardest test the Gulf’s universities have faced in a generation, and yet the story I keep finding myself telling is not one of crisis. It is one of adaptation.
Why our students stayed
I expected to lose people. When the region tipped into open conflict, I braced for a wave of withdrawals among our international degree students. It never came. A handful left, as you would expect, but the overwhelming majority simply stayed put — in their classes, in their residences, getting on with their degrees.
When I ask them why, the answer is almost always the same: they feel safe here. The UAE’s air defences have been extraordinary, intercepting more than 90% of the drones and missiles aimed at the country and keeping ordinary life largely intact. For a student from elsewhere in the Middle East, weighing up where to be during an unstable stretch, Ajman has felt like the steady choice. That is not something a brochure can manufacture. It is earned, and families notice.
The one thing that did dip
The exception has been our short-term inbound programmes — the visiting cohorts, winter schools (you would melt in the UAE in the summer) and study tours that hinge on someone booking a flight into uncertainty. Those numbers softened, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I am not losing sleep over them. This is the kind of demand that evaporates with the first alarming headline and returns just as quickly once the news calms down. With a regional agreement now close, I expect these programmes to bounce back fast, and we are getting everything in place so we can move the moment they do.
A problem worth solving
Here is where it gets interesting. For years we have had a lopsided relationship with our partners abroad: they send us far more students and faculty than we send them. It is flattering — it tells you people want to come to Ajman — but it is not really a partnership if the traffic only ever runs one way.
This quieter spell has handed us the room to fix exactly that. Instead of chasing inbound numbers we cannot influence right now, we are pouring our energy into getting more AU students and academics out into the world and onto our partners’ campuses. It is better for our students, it is fairer to our partners, and it slowly evens up an imbalance we have been meaning to tackle for a long time. A difficult period, oddly enough, is doing us a favour.
Life, more or less as usual
None of this is to wave away what people here have lived through. Tourism took a genuine hit, and I think often about the families whose livelihoods ride on visitors arriving. But for most of us, ordinary life has carried on — the school run, the lectures, the weekend plans. If anything, the roads have been clearer. The single upside of fewer tourists is that the traffic every busy city loves to complain about has eased right off.
What I tell people now
We come out of this with our community intact, our enrolment steady, and a sharper sense of what to do next. The universities that come through hard times best are rarely the ones that merely survive them. They are the ones that put them to use. For us, that means guarding what we have built, growing something more genuinely reciprocal with our partners, and being ready to throw the doors open again the moment the region turns the corner.