This week, two administrators from the University of Central Asia, Dean of Faculty Mark O’Brien, and Director of Research Nasreen Dhanani, visited Swarthmore to gain insight on the workings of liberal arts colleges. The visit was part of their effort to create a university with multiple campuses in central Asia based on the liberal arts education system.
UCA was founded in 2000 through a treaty involving Aga Khan and the governments of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikstan. In addition to liberal arts colleges, UCA plans on establishing a graduate school and a school for professional training and vocational degrees. UCA will have these campuses in three different countries: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan.
UCA was created as part of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), a group of agencies involved in the various development projects ranging from microfinance to rural development, which has now taken upon itself to create the world’s first internationally chartered institution of higher education. The previous president of Swarthmore College, David Fraser, worked as a consultant for the forum of higher education in the AKDN, which is how the group’s visit to Swarthmore initially came about.
Before coming to Swarthmore, O’Brien and Dhanani visited the Haverford College campus as well.
“The essence of the situation is, we’re trying to build liberal arts colleges, and while we’re at Swarthmore and Haverford, we’re looking at how things are run from the president to the provost to the students, everything from governance [and] financial arrangements to how classes are run and what the facilities are like,” O’Brien said. “Most importantly, we are here to pick up and learn from the culture and ethos at these sources of colleges and figure out to what degree we can replicate it in central Asia.”
During their stay at Swarthmore, which lasted from Sunday until Wednesday, they met with the deans of the college and various other faculty and staff members in addition to attending various classes throughout the day such as Modernism: Theory and Fiction and Microbiology. They also had several opportunities to engage with students.
“I was most excited about showing them to the students. I hope that the student culture of learning filled with discussion and enthusiasm and the never-ending learning and acquisition of knowledge has made a strong impression on them during their visit at Swarthmore,” Registrar Martin Warner said.
They had lunch with the science associates and participated in an open fireside chat that took place in Kohlberg Coffee Bar Monday night.
“The idea of starting these liberal arts colleges from scratch is hard to comprehend but all of it sounded very amazing and exciting at the same time,” Robert Manduca ’10 said after attending the chat.
One of the biggest challenges they face is that in addition to cultivating independent and creative thinking, they must equip students with skills that will provide them with adequate job opportunities in a tight job market that remains largely based on a narrowly defined education and specific areas of specialty and skill.
“We are trying to provide an alternative system that will hopefully become a pilot of higher education and have far-reaching effects. We would like to create a whole new generation of people and create room for more creative thinkers and problem solvers,” Dhanani said.
At the same time, their challenge is also to adapt to a society with a narrow, traditional view of education emphasizing direct instruction towards a specific vocational purpose. Because of this challenge, UCA will not take a completely open-ended approach to a liberal arts education, but will instead create a hybrid form still focusing on a student-centered way of teaching that fosters discovery-based learning.
“The novel approach to teaching is one of the things we are most interested in. We will ask [our students] questions and challenge them to think for themselves. It will stun them,” O’Brien said.
“From the way they are taught, students will be anchored to be independent thinkers with the skills to be adaptable and take on challenges,” he said.
Because this is such a new educational approach in the region, UCA must spend a lot of effort promoting and gathering students.
Students will have the incentive of becoming academic leaders, bearing the cultural ethos of a liberal arts education and ultimately taking positions that command respect as part of a world-class institution. Although UCA is initially bringing in many staff and faculty from foreign countries, the university plans on eventually employing many of its own graduated students in faculty and staff positions.
“Liberal arts education is a very different idea of education that focuses on giving students the tools to think and then letting them work with the materials for themselves and instilling the ability to think for oneself,” Arabic Professor Walid Hamarneh said.
“What is important is to instill an understanding of this in a society where teaching is very much instruction and teaching the Truth. It will be a very difficult task and it will take time, but one needs to start somewhere,” he said.
Ismailimail 