A women’s university with a potent formula for fighting evil

Rubana Huq, the vice-chancellor of the Asian University for Women (AUW), has the sort of presence you can feel, even through the screen. We invited her to speak at an Innovative Universities webinar and were somewhat nervous: there is something exalted, elevated, almost towering about AUW, despite it being a small and still young university.

Huq adjusted her shawl and started speaking: “I would dare to say that we actually produce magic,” she said.

AUW is a women-only university in Chittagong, Bangladesh. From there, it caters to female learners from the whole of Southern Asia and the Middle East, focusing on under-served groups.

Bangladesh is a perfect location for such a higher education institution. Bangladesh is the local leader in gender equality, but it is still 99th in the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index. The region as a whole ranks sixth out of seven, with only the Middle East and North Africa behind it.

Social engineering

In 1978, Gerald Grant and David Riesman published their book The Perpetual Dream on new and renewed colleges in the 1960s to 1970s in the United States. They divided new (and transformed) institutions of the time into two types: popular reforms and telic reforms. Popular reforms modify higher education processes. Telic reforms experiment with the ends and purposes of universities.

AUW is an impressive modern example of a telic reform. It views a university as a social lift for a whole society, not just for individual students. “We experiment with social and global conditions,” commented Huq. Radical access education for Southern Asian women means not only a different future for graduates, but also for their communities. It is an exercise in social engineering.

AUW was founded in 2008, dreamed into the world by Kamal Ahmad, a Bangladeshi-American educator and social entrepreneur and conceptually backed up by the famous Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and promise report.

Peril and Promise was a 2001 high-profile collaborative project carried out by the joint World Bank-UNESCO Task Force, funded by several international organisations and drafted by Henry Rosovsky and David Bloom.

The report argued that regional higher education had to grow significantly. It also had to become more diverse, expanding not only in size but in the types of communities it serves and the functions it can perform.

Finally, it emphasised the importance of university autonomy. AUW, fiercely independent with its special charter and with a reach beyond what even the authors of the report could imagine, is the embodiment of these recommendations.

Radical access

AUW’s curriculum is inspired by the Seven Sisters, seven US colleges established back in the 19th century as a female-catering counterpart to male-only private elite universities. Their character has changed (one has gone co-ed, another merged with Harvard, and all serve a wider audience of female-identifying students now), but they still occupy a special place in the American higher education system.

AUW is different from the Seven Sisters. First, it is regional – combining Southern Asian, South-East Asian and Middle Eastern women – in its student body composition. More importantly, it specifically aims to extend access to women who might not get another chance at higher education.

A rudimentary typology of target groups includes women from poorer socio-economic groups, such as daughters of microfinance borrowers; from tribal communities and historically neglected groups like Dalit (the ‘untouchables’ caste in the Indian system); low-wage workers from textile companies and tea estates; displaced people, including refugees; women from under-served geopolitical spaces, such as Afghanistan; students whose school education was in the madrasah system; and, finally, those whose families have been affected by human trafficking.

The university treats its mission with solemn, firm determination and reaches out to prospective students in what seems like a myriad of different ways. AUW has been recruiting Afghan women since 2021, making sure that the search for target students – those who are curious, driven and have an entrepreneurial and enterprising mindset – extends to as many provinces as possible.

AUW collaborates with NGOs, industries and grassroots media to spread information. And then, when the entry test is offered, it can be passed in a language a candidate is comfortable with, with the help of an interpreter. Because it is not about the level of one’s English, it is about fit. And if a candidate fits, everything will be done to help them on their way.

Foundation curriculum

AUW’s mandate creates unique issues. There is the logistics of enabling students to start their studies in the first place – which is not an issue if a student is from Chittagong, but it is a challenge if they are from a refugee camp. Moreover, students from under-served communities often lack or have not had enough quality primary and secondary education.

Finally, addressing psychological adaptation may be the most complex challenge of all. There is a difference between teaching students who have always known they would go to a university and students who never entertained the notion. And there is a difference between teaching students whose sorrows have not gone beyond regular teenage troubles and those who have seen extreme poverty and violence.

So, in the words of David Taylor, interim pro vice-chancellor, AUW comes up with varied special provisions and access schemes. In response to uneven preparation, AUW has created the Foundation College, a pre-undergraduate curriculum, offering courses in English, mathematics, computer science and leadership, with independent reading time, group study sessions and peer and professional mentorship.

While a pre-undergraduate programme is fairly common in universities aiming for wider access, AUW’s is unusually long – six levels are offered over six trimesters – and adaptable to students who can proceed to the undergraduate curriculum once they are ready and not necessarily after going through the whole programme.

To deal with logistical challenges, the university uses its networks of colleagues and friends (just one name, to share, among many: Cherie Blair, human rights lawyer and wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, is AUW’s chancellor). It comes up with ingenious schemes, such as flying students from Kabul through third countries. A martial arts class in the pre-undergraduate curriculum and a workshop on trauma-informed teaching for faculty is one answer to the trauma students might be carrying.

Huq mused: “...You see, I don’t think we should ever despair when we are in a tough position, when we have a tough challenge. I think we should just be innovative and have enough courage to push through it.” Which brings me to this point: AUW is undoubtedly an innovative university. But it innovates because there is no other choice, because it must. And maybe this is innovation in its purest sense.

Challenges

AUW is not without problems. Its philanthropy-driven funding model lacks revenue diversification for long-term sustainability. The region and Bangladesh itself, as we saw last summer, are turbulent. Chittagong is not among the top destinations for international scholars.

Its influence on regional higher education is smaller than it could be, given the importance of what the university is doing and its success.

It is difficult for other universities in the region to borrow the radical access approach from AUW. First, the institutions already offering wide access are typically more localised, focusing on their immediate surroundings or at least are targeted at one country. AUW’s international model requires an international faculty body and therefore significant financial investment.

Second, AUW is too unique, too focused, too embedded in the global community of educators for its footsteps to be easy to follow.

And yet, the Asian Women’s Leadership University College (AWLUC), a fledgling higher education institution in Malaysia, has followed in AUW’s footsteps. Several regional universities have borrowed or explored elements of AUW’s approach, ranging from BRAC University in Bangladesh to Ashoka University in India.

In the meantime, a new campus, designed by Moshe Safdie as a climate-resistant dream, is almost ready. With each graduating cohort, AUW gets new supporters and new champions who carry its ideas forward – the aforementioned AWLUC was co-founded by an alumna too. We should expect more big things from AUW in the future.

Fighting evil

I co-hosted the Innovative Universities webinar with Isak Frumin. During the AUW discussion I was uncharacteristically quiet, mesmerised. Isak stayed alert and commented on the model. He said that AUW gave students knowledge, skills and hope. That triad sounded like a formula or a recipe. Or maybe it sounded like what a hero would get from a magical helper: I grant you knowledge, I grant you skills, I grant you hope. Now you can go and fight evil.

I later realised that this last part – fighting evil – might be the most important and powerful aspect of AUW’s model. AUW believes that students who have witnessed struggle will be compelled to help end it, and those who understand the ills of a lack of education will support and protect the efforts of others, be it by creating start-ups or teaching in refugee camps.

As a result, a fair share of AUW graduates end up in NGOs and international organisations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Programme and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Graduates also create jobs for local people by setting up small enterprises.

What can you learn for your institution? The core of AUW’s model is quite simple if you think of it: define what you want to do, then go all in. Do what must be done. It’s not a bad way to operate a university. Or a bad way to live your life. What do you think?

Dara Melnyk is a strategy consultant and a writer, specialising in university transformation and innovative higher education. This is her regular column. If you have ideas about universities that should be explored, please contact Dara at dara.melnyk.personal@gmail.com.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the authors only and not their employer and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.