A Wonderful but Complex University Experiment in Bangladesh
Wow, what a week in Bangladesh. The Asian University for Women is a bold experiment that launched in 2008. Its mission is to provide a liberal arts education to high-potential, mostly disadvantaged women from across Asia. Full financial support is provided to nearly all of the students; it’s single-sex because many students come from societies with no concept of gender equality, sometimes shunning women being educated at all. The atmosphere around the AUW campus is energetic and electric — these women are thrilled to be at the university and dedicated to their studies.
I had some doubts before my visit: Only a small proportion of the roughly 400 students are on the math & science side of things, and even fewer have any programming background. (The university canceled its computer science major recently, although they do recognize that basic programming skills are an important part of any education.) Planning my teaching agenda was a challenge, with the faculty and new leadership not entirely clear on how best to make use of my stay. Security is a big concern in Bangladesh at the moment — it seemed I would be restricted to the small enclosed campus, my guest quarters in the nearby gated faculty apartment building, and the van shuttle between the two. Although my doubts were not unfounded, they ended up being unimportant. I had an invigorating, fascinating, all-around terrific week.
I ended up conducting a one-day workshop in Design Thinking & Collaborative Problem Solving, with the remainder of my time devoted to a short-course in Big Data; it’s been a typical schedule at many of my stops. A relatively small cohort of students had the guts to commit to the three-day hands-on Big Data course, though many more probably had the necessary background. Visiting during the last week of fall semester classes wasn’t ideal, though my sense is that the modest turnout also had to do with confidence, which is still an issue for some of the students. But what a group of students I did have — they were highly excited and totally engaged, a joy to teach. (Many faculty and administrators cite the eagerness of the students as their primary reason for being at AUW.) The Design Thinking workshop was also a lot of fun, with day-long enthusiasm among all the participants. The press had gotten interested in my visit, coming by for photographs and interviews the day of the workshop. One of the reporters was so excited by the Design Thinking process and the atmosphere of the workshop that she asked if she could join in!
Over lunches and after teaching each day I spent a fair amount of time talking one-on-one with students. Thanks to a 1-2 year preparatory program offered by the university before college-level work begins, English is generally good, maturity is high, and the students have a solid grasp of the academic landscape. One of the primary concerns of the science/tech students is that the breadth of AUW’s liberal arts education means relatively few technical classes, in contrast to the focused curricula of most universities in Asia. (As in much of the world outside the US, students in Asia decide their major well before entering college, and study little else once they get there.) It came up so many times that I eventually got my college sophomore computer-science major daughter on video chat to tell the students “in person” that she’s taking even fewer technical classes than they are!
AUW seems largely to be achieving its mission. It got a terrific writeup in the New York Times in 2012, and a new program providing education to some of Bangladesh’s garment workers while continuing to pay their needed salaries has received considerable attention. The whole endeavor has some growing pains though, with a variety of obstacles and complexities. The primary reason for locating in Chittagong was a large land grant from the government. I visited the site and it’s stunning (particularly compared to the surroundings), but the university is still in the process of raising funds to build; presently they’re hoping for a loan from the World Bank. Central Chittagong, where the temporary campus is located, is gritty with not a lot to offer. While a couple of years at AUW might be an exciting lark for young foreign faculty, they won’t generally stay longer than that, and it’s much harder for the mid-career faculty who should be forming the university’s backbone, particularly if they have families.
University leadership has also seen turnover, in part because of the living difficulties, but also because the university itself is fraught with challenges. Putting the building and faculty-retention issues aside, day-to-day operations are based entirely on philanthropy, so fundraising pressure is constant. Also it surprised me at first, but some of the students develop an attitude of entitlement, asking the university for a variety of additional support and favors. Balancing the needs and desires of this group of high-achieving but disadvantaged students against the practicalities of running a university on a tight budget must be difficult indeed.
Statistically speaking, Bangladesh is no more dangerous than many much more developed countries. But the July terrorist attack in the capital city of Dhaka shook up the country and the university more than I realized. Two other foreigners visited AUW the week I was there, but apparently the three of us were the first to come since July. The university very much hopes it marks a turnaround — in the past they’ve had a stream of visitors, some fairly high profile. When I arrived at the Chittagong airport an armed escort traveled with me to the university, and one came along another time when I was driven to the ATM. Perhaps the security was meant primarily for my peace of mind, as things loosened up as the week went on. I started walking to campus with a faculty member (though I never did jog outside, being relegated to the treadmill in the small faculty gym), and I finished up my stay with some tourism: a day-trip to scenic Rangamati in the Chittagong Hill Tracts near the Myanmar border, and a walk through the streets and markets of Chittagong city — vibrant, but not for the faint-hearted in terms of traffic, garbage & sewage, poverty, and general chaos.
My productive and rewarding visit to AUW was a perfect finish to the sabbatical fall. I’ll take a teaching break for a few weeks to spend holidays with family, though I won’t be staying put: we leave shortly for a 3-week adventure to Oman and other points in the Middle East. The instructional odyssey resumes in mid-January, focusing next on South America and Africa.
