December 26, 2010
The following is a transcript from an interview of Kamal Ahmad, Founder of AUW, by Voice of America News (VOA) Vietnam. The original interview is in Vietnamese and available on the VOA website.
Q: Could you tell us when the university officially was established? And when did the first program start?
A: The University was established by way of a charter from the Parliament of Bangladesh in 2006, but our classes started two years later, in March 2008.
Q: What was the reason behind the establishment of an university for women only?
A: The reason is really the recognition that for any country, Vietnam, Bangladesh, or any country in the region, that in order for them to become developed there’s an essential need for highly educated people in the society. How do you govern it effectively, how do you spur economic development, how do you solve problems if you don’t have people with skills and knowledge to solve the problems? So, the unversity springs in large the recognition that higher education is the essential key in the making of any development in any country. The focus on the women is also recognition that in our part of the world in Asia, wherther in Vietnam, India or Bangladesh, there’s a long history of neglect women education, and if you are to start a new university in a way you are most likely effective if you focus on a group that have been in many ways neglected in the past.
Q: But as you know, there are now thousands of universities worldwide, and for the case of Vietnam, the women who can afford to or are eligible for international education now have more options for their education, and they may chose to go to the U.S., Australia, or European countries. So besides educating only women, how is your university different from other universities?
A: Well, I think what we offer is in some way quite unique, although lots of the educational methods have been borrowed from some of the best universities in the world, wherther they are in the United States or in Europe. I think the main distinction that we would like to establish for our university is that it provides an education that we think is particularly appropriate for cultivating the next generation of women leaders. How do we do that? We do it in part by the type of education. We provide what we call liberal art education at the undergraduate level with the fair emphasis on Math and Sciences, then we also urge all of our students to enter into one of our graduate programs, whether in business management or engineering, with the idea that the combination of these two types of educations, one broad liberal art education that exposes student to not only Math and Sciences but also to History and Humanity and Anthopology with the graduate professional education which focuses on how do you get things done will prepare them to take on positions that will make a different in their context. The other part is the university is located in Bangladesh where the grave human problems that afflict us all is quite apparent, and our hope is by studying there, and by everyday interacting with the people and the issues that are so prevalent in that part of the world that you become more knowledgable about the problems that we must overcome. And the idea that knowledge is really an ornament for solving problems become that much more forceful in that context. So we are different not only in focusing in women alone, we are different in the type of the mix of education, the liberal art and graduate professional education, by focusing on the problems of the developing world and in nurturing really a network of women from across the region, we don't have students only from Vietnam but also from China, from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, with the hope that when somebody graduate from the women university they will have a network that spans the entire region and that will make them that much more powerful.
Q: So one of your missions is to educate Asian women to become highly motivated and effective professionals and leaders, so how do you select your students – what criteria do you use to determine if she is the right candidate to become a future leader, or someone who can make a change in her community, in her country?
A: That’s an excellent question. Its always difficult in some respect to say when you talking to an 18 year old and say is it person will be a leader, what is the glimpse of the eye of the young woman that tell you that they are different from everybody else. And I don’t think that we an exact formula yet, but what we look for eventually besides academic competence we really look for two things: one is the indication of courage, we asked all our applicants what have they done in their lives that show us that they have the courage to step out of the normal situation, and the second thing is to sense the measure of their sense of justice. We don't believe that anybody can be a leader of our context unless they have courage and they are outraged by injustices that surround us in all respects. So these are the two critical factors that beyond academic performance which of course lay the basic in the admission process.
Q: What programs and activities are you offering/providing to the students in order to achieve the university’s goals and missions?
A: Lots of the goals are pursued outside of the acedamic programs. Through extra curricular activities to social engagement most of our students are involved in community service. We expect all of our students to participate in a series of internship during the summer that expose them to the world of work, how do you get things done. One of the challenges we have is we really trying to nurture in every student an imagination that some people would say only the poet have the capability to dream big, but also have the engineer’s knack for getting things done. The one way we think that can be cultivated especially the knack for getting things done is by exposing our students to various organizations that are effective and connecting them with the mentors so that they are guided in their lives by examples that they can follow.
Q: One of the most important factors that affect the operation of any university is perhaps funding, what are your sources of fundings and how do you plan to sustain the operation of the university? As you know, every student wants to be assured that their university will not just last for a short period of time, is that right?
A: Exactly, we have been actually quite fortunate because great many prominent philantrophic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, the Hewlett Packard Foundation, that have all supported our endevor, and as a result we have been able to open this university and have practically all of our students on full scholarship. So, we are dependent hugely on philantropic support, but the good news is that many foundations around the world have been responsive to the idea of creating this university, and have hugely supported of it, something we hope that will continue. In the meantime, of course we are trying to broaden our basic support to include not just foundations but also governments and individuals, not just in the West but also across Asia. Particulary in Asia, with places like Vietnam and elsewhere with their rise in greater prosperity, we hope that more and more Asian philantopics and business organizations will take the interest of our university and help buid the institution in an enduring way.
Q: So how about tuition?
A: Our room, board and tuition per year cost about US$10,000, but as I mentioned, almost all of our students are on full scholarship at this point, something we hope will change over time, and as we broaden the scope of our recruitment of our students I hope that will change our goal ultimately to get about 50/50, split 50% on scholarship and 50% on fee paying.
Q: And one last question, Mr. Ahmad, what is the long term vision of the university?
A: I think a university’s vision is never ending, you want your university to be sucessful only when it is able to adequately response to the imperatives that are driving the society. Our hope is that we will be able to establish exactly such an instution that has excellent resources, excellent students, excellent faculty, excellent facility, but also has its soul in the right place so that as the society change and demand new solutions to the problems as there are new cries for justice that our students, our faculty and institution will be able to response in the sharpest possible way to those particular challenges. So that’s really our hope to be not only an institution of great excellence but also one that is responsive to the need of the region.
Kamal Ahmad serves as the President and CEO of the Asian University for Women Support Foundation. Educated at the Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and the University of Michigan Law School, Mr. Ahmad has combined a career in private transactional law practice and international development. He focused on corporate mergers and acquisitions as well as U.S. federal securities laws while at the New York offices of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson (1996-2000) and the London office of Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw (2001-2002). He has also worked with the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and UNICEF. In 1998 he helped launch the World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education and Society and co-directed it with Professor David Bloom of Harvard University. As a freshman at Harvard College, he founded and directed the Overseas Development Network - a consortium of campus organizations devoted to international development. As a teenager growing up in Bangladesh, he founded a series of primary schools for working children in Dhaka.
Mr. Ahmad was named as "one of the 20 outstanding undergraduates of the nation" by Time magazine in 1987. The Paul G. Hoffman Awards Fund, created to honor the first Administrator of the United Nations Development Program, gave him a UN Gold Peace Medal and Citation Scroll for his "outstanding contribution to national and international development." In 2002, the World Economic Forum based in Davos, Switzerland elected him as a "Global Leader for Tomorrow."
