Address by Dean of Academic Affairs of the American University of Afghanistan Dr. Frank Petrella

Ceremony Marking the Opening of the Undergraduate Program
Kabul, Afghanistan
September 6, 2006

Good evening honored guests, staff, and students.

I am pleased to welcome you to the opening of what will become the finest university in Afghanistan and the region. To be honest with you, I have never opened a university before. With the single exception of the American University in Dubai, each of the seven other universities that I have been affiliated with has been at least 150 years old. I don’t mind telling you that it is with a huge relief and, at the same time, not a little apprehension that we open AUAf. Perhaps this process, for all of us, has been a little like building a bridge across a huge chasm. For as much as we believe in our hearts that what we have designed and built has been set on a solid foundation and has a strong infrastructure, there is still a moment, when the first car is driven across to the other side, that you stop and hold your breath.

This address is really aimed at you, the undergraduates here this evening, you are the reason that all of the rest of us are here. This is the day that your formal university education really begins, the day you are expected to begin to think and reason. Today…now…starts the process that will change the way you look at…perceive…the world. I predict there will soon come a morning when you wake quite certain that world has changed, it will look different, sound different and feel different. Of course the world will not have changed, but you may think that it has because the ways in which you interpret it will have changed. Professor Carter and I were just speaking of that a few days ago…because we can each remember that specific day in our lives when, because of our education/through our education, we saw the world differently. Education is a door that, once you have passed through it, you can’t go back to where and what you were before. Though your education will open, and continue to open, a world of opportunities which you can not yet begin to imagine, you may also lose a few things that are dear to you along the way. I can relate this through personal experience because my own education closed the door to the life that I knew in the small village of Mingo Junction, Ohio that I had grown up in. I discovered that, the more I studied and learned, the more difficult it became to interact with some of the people that I knew and loved. The new and exciting ideas that I was learning weren’t very interesting to those of my friends who were happy with the ideas that they already had. They weren’t interested in debating new philosophies. And, in the end, I had to move away to find others who were as excited about learning and new ideas as I was. So, I want you to ask yourselves if you are really willing to pass through that door. I have never regretted opening the door to knowledge and education because, ultimately, it has brought me here, to AUAf, with something to offer.

To the undergraduates here today, this is your first lecture, your introduction to the American University. It is my practice, developed over nearly 30-years of university teaching, to begin each lecture with a question. We each have a different knowledge base, we each have specific knowledge that others around us don’t have and, because of that, we may perceive the subject under discussion in ways that are different from the ways in which our classmates, or even our professors, perceive it. This is significant…the fact that a professor in a classroom is acknowledging that you have insight into the subject that he or she may not have. It is significant because it is an invitation to open a dialog rather than a monolog. When you enter that classroom, you have an opportunity to become both student and teacher…as long as others in the classroom are receptive to your ideas as you must be receptive to theirs. It involves mutual respect. They may accept your ideas and interpretation and they may reject them. That is part of academic discourse, the freedom…no the responsibility, to discuss issues within the academic forum. Many of your professors feel so strongly about discussion in class that a certain portion of your final grade for the course will be based on how much you were willing to participate in class discussions. To survive higher education, you need to be open to and be able to accept criticism. Here, in the confines of the university, the criticism is professional…not personal. If a professor challenges your ideas, and the most common challenge here will simply be "why", it is because he or she wants you to be able to defend or back-up the statement that you just made.

Classes in a liberal arts based university tend to approach their subjects in a more philosophical way than those in a more professionally oriented school would approach it. For example, I have taught photography for nearly twenty five years and, for the last fifteen of those, I have opened my lectures on day one…not with a discussion of the anatomy of a camera…constituent parts…but with a question. "How do we know what we know when we see it?" Now, photography is a mechanical process, but it doesn’t need to be approached that way. My students and I spend the next week or two discussing the philosophical parameters of the photograph and society, the photograph as a historical document, the psychology of a photograph, the photograph as magic. My students and I asked the question of "why", far more often than the question of "what".

Were this a smaller group, I may have opened with a question to the undergraduates: "As you travel through this program, how will you know when you are educated?" Perhaps one of those with a good memory will say that they will know when they wake one morning and the world looks different. But, seriously, how do we know? It involves a preconceived idea of what it means to be educated, and how can we conceptualize that which we have heard about, but not yet experienced?

An American university approaches education a little differently than you may be used to. We are, of course, concerned with knowledge and learning but we are also concerned with the philosophy that surrounds it. Let me talk a little about a liberal arts university, the concept of a liberal arts education and what we have come to term General Education. The main function of a liberal arts education is to teach you how to think. In preparing for this lecture, I read a paper titled On the Purpose of a Liberal Arts Education by Robert Harris. Now, Harris isn’t a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination but he does have a very simplistic, down to earth way of stating things and I thought his description of the liberal arts was a very easy one to understand. He said, quite simply, "The mind is like a muscle; exercise makes it stronger and more able to grasp ideas and do intellectual work. Exercising the mind in one area--whether literature or sociology or accounting--will strengthen it for learning in other areas as well."

Part of our task is to teach you a lot about the subject that you came here to study, but we will also teach you a little about a lot of other subjects that you hadn’t come to the university to study. We want you to have a broad base of knowledge to draw from, not just as you approach Information Communication Technology or Business Administration, but every other element of your life as well. According to Harris, "A thorough knowledge of a wide range of events, philosophies, procedures, and possibilities makes the phenomena of life appear coherent and understandable."

There are four goals of a liberal arts based General Studies program.

The first is Inquiry and Critical Thinking. This involves learning various modes of inquiry, problem posing, investigating, conceptualizing – in order to become active, self-motivated learners. Courses in Mathematics, Logic, Biology, Chemistry and Physics will accomplish this.

The second is Communication. This enhances your ability to communicate in various ways, writing, graphics and other visual and oral means. You should also be competent in appropriate communication technologies. Courses in English Composition, Oral Rhetoric, Arts and Humanities will help accomplish this.

The final two goals will be accomplished through courses in Philosophy and Social Science.

The third goal involves The Variety of Human Experience. Here we want to give you an understanding of the rich complexity of human experience through the study of differences in ethnic and cultural perspectives, class, race, gender and ability.

The final goal involves Ethical Issues and Social Responsibility. We want you to understand the value and impact of individuals and their choices on society, both intellectually and socially.

The liberal arts tradition in the US was forwarded by a man named John Erskine in the 1920s. He proposed a 2-year honors seminar at the University of Chicago with a syllabus that consisted of 50 to 60 books that ranged from the writings of Homer to those of William James. All were masterpieces in the fields of Economics, literature, science, philosophy and history. There were no courses as such, students read one book per week for two years and discussed them in an open seminar. The biggest drawback to that approach however, is that working class students cannot afford the luxury of the acquisition of ideas purely for their own sake. You, those of you here, need an education that will make you employable and we need to offer you an education that provides a balance of both.

In its pure form, a liberal arts school would have degree programs in history, political science, sociology, literature and fine arts. The question that we asked ourselves in designing this university was, does Afghanistan need citizens with an education in these fields? And the answer was yes! Because that is where the future leaders of this country will, hopefully, come from. For the time being, however, there are few opportunities in Afghanistan for employment with such an education. We have a moral obligation to see to it that you are employable after finishing this degree and we have a moral obligation to Afghanistan as well to train individuals who can take a place of leadership in the afghan workforce. Perhaps it was a value judgment on our part, but it was decided that we would open with degree programs in Business Administration and in the Information Communication Technology fields because those fields encompass the greatest need and opportunity for capacity building. However, rather than offering professional programs comprised of only Business or only IT related courses, we preface the programs with courses in English, Mathematics, Science, Humanities, and Social Science. One obvious reason for doing this is that we often need to look outside of our own discipline for solutions to problems.

I was recently asked what makes AUAf different from the other universities here. The biggest difference to you, the students, is the issue of accreditation through a US agency. We discuss this issue a lot as it is a question that is asked at nearly every campus visit, every meeting. One of our goals at the American University of Afghanistan is to create an education equivalent to the one you would receive if you were to study in the US. Many of you work for NGOs, you support your families and the expense of traveling to the US for an education is out of the question. We have modeled our general education curriculum after the best schools in the US and to make certain that our program is as strong as any in Pennsylvania, New York or California, we will invite an accrediting agency here as soon as we have graduated our first class of students…those of you who are sitting here this evening. We must wait until the first class has graduated so that the process can examine the creation of our first product…you.

Those of us here in the administration will do an exhaustive self-study and look back at all of the records we have kept concerning the admissions procedure, which courses we offered, how many hours per week students were physically in class with their instructors, and literally thousands of other bits and pieces of data. We, I, will be asked to justify the courses that have been designed into your program and even the sequence that they have been offered in. The accrediting team will want to know what schools our faculty received their degrees from, what percentage of them had PhDs, how many of them were employed as full-time faculty as opposed to being hired on a part-time basis from the community here. They will also ensure that each student who was admitted had a passing TOEFL or IELTS score.

They will ask these questions to be able to certify that all of our systems, requirements, and practices meet the standards that they have set and are equivalent to the other universities that they have certified. If we earn accreditation, for they will not give it to us… that is a guarantee that your degree will be accepted at a university in the US if and when you decide to study for a higher degree, a Masters or a PhD.

There are two other things that will set us apart form other schools here in Afghanistan.
Your first year at AUAf will be filled with liberal arts courses. You will continue your study of English just as your counterparts in the US do, through English Composition taught by Professor Schiffbauer and through Oral Rhetoric…Public Speaking, taught by Professor Carter. There will be courses in Mathematics and Logic…Biology, Chemistry, and Computer Science. We will also have a number of elective courses for you to select from in the area of Social Science and the Humanities. These, we hope to spread out over the four years that you are with us here.

In the second year, you will begin to schedule a series of foundation courses in Business Administration or in Information Communication Technology. These will provide a background in your chosen field for you to base the understanding of all of the upper level courses on. In your third semester here, you will be required to take a portfolio course that will teach you how to design and complete a project that incorporates the information that you have learned in your foundation courses…but you will also be expected to incorporate and integrate what you have learned in your liberal arts courses as well. Knowledge is not learned in isolation it needs to be incorporated into your approach to Business or ICT and to life in general.

Your presentation will be evaluated by a panel of instructors from your department with one of the member selected from outside of your department and they will look at how successful you have been in learning the material presented to you so far. They will evaluate how well you put relevant material together into a cohesive project, how well you were able to integrate other knowledge bases into this project. They will examine that, along with your grade record for the first two-years, and decide if you will be permitted to advance to year three. If you have been successful in designing and presenting the portfolio, and if your grades are average or above, you will be permitted to continue your studies here at AUAf. We have learned from years of experience that, if you have not been able to grasp and utilize the basic introductory material, you will not be able to grasp the more difficult ideas in the higher level courses. You must also realize is that a degree from this university is not a gift, you aren’t purchasing a degree and, by enrolling here, there is no guarantee that you will graduate from here. You will need to earn your degree through hard work and long hours of study. Your instructors will help you as much as they can, but at the end of the day, you must have the ability to assimilate this knowledge and to use it.

Let me leave you with one more quotation from the Academy for Liberal Education that echoes our philosophy here at AUAf:

 "Liberal education aims at creating free men and women, those who have control over their lives, not only vocationally, but as citizens and as human beings able to draw on the greatest minds and works of both the past and the present.

Successful participation in the international political and cultural arena and in a dynamic, global marketplace requires not only a knowledge of business and computers, but also organizing, writing and speaking skills in English, and a firm grasp of mathematical reasoning accompanied by a sound knowledge of the laboratory sciences.

The study of the great ideas in art, literature, the social sciences, and philosophy is a noble and reflective activity that requires no further purpose beyond itself. "

With those thoughts, I welcome you to the American University of Afghanistan.