Students in countries affected by the Arab Spring are failing to get a proper university education because they still feel unable to challenge their tutors. Speaking at the annual conference of the European Association for International Education (September 10-13) in Istanbul, Khaled Fahmy, professor of history at the American University of Cairo (AUC), said the culture of deference to lecturers is more damaging to student development than overcrowded classrooms or lack of university resources. Prof. Fahmy was a Fulbright scholar who taught at New York University before joining AUC.
Fahmy traces the culture of undue deference towards academics back to the hierarchy between teachers and students found in the French academy, which was the model for most Egyptian universities. “This is the curse (of) Cairo University… far more than the large numbers of students,” he argues, citing his neighbouring university, which has about 280,000 students.
But Michael Willis, King Mohammed VI fellow in Moroccan and Mediterranean studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, says attitudes may start to change because young people feel more empowered to question orthodoxies since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. “What most depressed me about living and teaching in Morocco was the sense of fatalism in young people,” says Willis. “They felt the future could not be changed and everything was fixed and tied down by self-appointed elites, but there is now a sense things can be changed.”
Fahmy also believes the current status quo is “untenable”, but that vibrant democracies cannot be established unless liberal arts begin to flourish within universities. “There is actually no term in Arabic for liberal arts,” he says, adding that universities are too focused on providing degrees in science, engineering and medicine. “The result is that it is very difficult for critical thinking to take place on campus.”
Without new ideas arising from the humanities subjects, vocational skills cannot be effectively applied to real-world problems, he adds. “In engineering, our expertise is how to pour concrete, but there is no knowledge of urban planning or how to organise public spaces.”
The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt after growing discontent with its administration may also be attributed to its failure to engage with the liberal politics demanded by people nowadays, says Fahmy. “The common critique of the Muslim Brotherhood is there isn’t a single poet, artist or writer in their leadership — 85 percent of them hold engineering or medical qualifications.”
(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)