Palestinian university leads the way in civic engagement

Al-Quds Bard College (AQB), a Palestinian university in East Jerusalem, the winner of the 2024 MacJannet Prize for Global Citizenship, the second and third place winners and three honorable mention recipients were honoured in a panel discussion on 2 October hosted by the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities (Talloires).

In accepting the award on behalf of AQB, Christopher Wedeman, the college’s civic engagement coordinator, said: “For many years, the programme was based on student-led initiatives inside the campus.

“Slowly, each year, the programme developed to include more partnerships with people outside of the university’s organisations, in Palestinian society and elsewhere.”

Established in 2009 by the Talloires Network and the MacJannet Foundation, the prize commemorates Donald and Charlotte MacJannet who, beginning in the 1920s, founded and ran schools and camps that pioneered experiential learning and were dedicated to promoting “cross-cultural tolerance, enlightenment and understanding”. The late Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India (1966-1977, 1980-1984) and Prince Philip were alumni.

For two decades starting in 1958, the foundation was housed in an 11th century priory in Talloires France, which was donated to Tufts University, Donald MacJannet’s alma mater.

In 2005, 29 college and university leaders from 23 countries met at the priory and founded the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities, which today includes more than 440 college and university senior administrators from 91 countries.

According to Catherine Parrinello, a member of the MacJannet Foundation’s board: “We like to think of it [the prize] as a small-scale version of the Nobel Prize. And, as one of our members likes to remind us, the Nobel Prize was named for the inventor of dynamite.

“Ours was named for two educators who really taught their students the value of public service and volunteerism.”

Founded in 2009 by Al-Quds University and Bard College (Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a hundred miles north of New York City on the Hudson River), AQB is modelled on the liberal arts curriculum taught at Bard.

AQB’s eight BA programmes – including molecular genetics, social thought economy and policy, human rights and international law, urban studies and an MA programme in teaching – are taught in English.

On-campus classes resumed this semester after having been suspended following Hamas’ attack on Israel almost a year ago and Israel’s military response in Gaza.

Approximately two thirds of the AQB’s approximately 275 students are supported by the Qatari foundation, Education Above All. AQB is partially supported by the Open Society University Networks.

A difficult year

According to Daniel Terris, dean of AQB: “It’s a great honour for the students and staff of our college to win a prize like this, especially, honestly, at this time.

“Our team of students and staff struggled mightily over the course of the last year to maintain and even expand our civic engagement presence, even after 7 October, even after our college had to go to zoom classes for the whole rest of the year.”

Terris told University World News: “We were determined not to let this aspect of our programme wither. We really wanted our students to engage in their communities as meaningfully as they could.

“And, so, Christopher Wedeman made great efforts to organise local activities in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, and in Jerusalem, so that students did not have to … take the risk of travelling the roads between cities but could do meaningful work close to their homes.”

Among the civic engagement projects were classes on writing a debate speech catering to young people in Ramallah and Bethlehem as well as artistic exercises in a refugee camp in Bethlehem. Other students fulfilled their requirement for civic engagement by tutoring blind students in a school in Hebron.

“In Jerusalem, our students were involved in creating a kind of historical tour of the Old City,” said Terris.

“Obviously there are not a lot of tourists now. But they [the students] were trying to lay the groundwork for thinking about a presentation of the city from a Palestinian point-of-view,” he added.

Mira Amarneh, an AQB student who was on the discussion panel, said that civic engagement projects could link people far from each other in need. Two projects she mentioned involved creating an exhibition with a university in Mexico and one with Argentinians that presented the Palestinian perspective.

Students in these countries, she said, welcomed the opportunity to cooperate with AQB students. “Their involvement helps to bridge the gap between the academic theory and practical application. The students witness the impact of their efforts first hand,” she noted.

Invisible University for Ukraine

The second-place prize was awarded to the Invisible University for Ukraine (IUFU), established in the wake of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Based in Budapest, IUFU is affiliated with Central European University (Vienna) and works with the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv) and other Ukrainian universities.

This semester, the IUFU has more than 500 students (most from outside Ukraine). The name, IUFU, Ostap Sereda, the director of the IUFU, told the panel, “evokes various 19th and 20th century undergraduate educational initiatives in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, such as the ‘flying universities’”.

Flying universities take their name from the fact that class locations were always changing, ‘flying’ between apartments in Poland where professors taught Ukrainians in Ukrainian when teaching in the Ukrainian language was banned by Imperial Russia; Madame Curie was a graduate.

Civic engagement, Sereda explained, is central to IUFU’s educational philosophy.

Some students are engaged in helping war veterans. Others work documenting war crimes.

As is the case among the students at AQB, some of IUFU’s students work to extend their local reality to a global audience; these students “help victims reflect on the immediate experience of war in an intellectual and critical way that would be meaningful for a global audience”.

Strathmore University, Kenya

The Msingi programme of Strathmore University (SU) in Kenya was awarded third place for a project in which students work with high school students in the slums of Nairobi preparing them for college or university.

Michael Babu, manager of SU’s Community Service Centre, explained how in designing the various parts of the programme, it was important to understand the educational needs of the high school students from their and their parents’ points-of-view.

It was also important to understand, as one of SU’s students told him: “There are two types of informal settlements. There is the informal settlement or slum where they live and there is the slum that lives within them. And what is more important to them is removing the slum that lives within them so that they can be able to change the slum they live in.”

Of this insight, Babu said: “No one had that depth of understanding about that reality [of the students in the slum]”.

SU’s students are a better fit to connect with the students in the slums partially, Babu explained, because: “I don’t know what it means to be 14 or 15 with TikTok.”

Through civic engagement, SU’s students develop self-awareness, self-esteem and come to understand their roles in terms of service to society, he added.

Honourable mentions

The panel discussion also included presentations by the three honourable mentions. The first is a programme at the University of Ghana in Accra.

According to the Talloires website, the Nufufest programme “leverages the power of youth engagement, harnessing the enthusiasm and creativity of student volunteers.

“Through a multifaceted approach encompassing educational workshops, free screenings, and community outreach initiatives, the campaign aims to empower women and men with knowledge, facilitate access to preventive healthcare resources, and build supportive environments for patients and survivors”.

The second honourable mention is an environmental project at St Andrews University (Scotland).

According to the Talloires website, the Third Generation Project “creates opportunities to educate diverse audiences – including Western policymakers, academics, students and communities – in practices and advocacy tools that prioritise the voices and local knowledges of marginalised frontline communities . . . [and] takes action to challenge the extractive practices of mainstream academic research by developing lasting partnerships with frontline communities and, importantly, taking their cues from them”.

The Tufts University Prison Initiative of Tisch College is the third honourable mention.

The Talloires website explains that initiative “brings Tufts University faculty and students together with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, educators, organisers, corrections staff, and scholars of criminal justice to facilitate creative and collaborative responses to the problems of mass incarceration and racial injustice”.

The first prize wins US$10,000, the second US$7,500 and the third wins US$5,000.