American Universities Abroad: The Leadership of Independent Transnational Higher Education Institutions

By Ted Purinton

Across the globe, American-style and liberal arts universities are being established. From the first, the American University of Beirut, established in 1866, to the liberal arts institutions being established in Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and elsewhere in the twenty-first century, there is a clear sense of the global desire for the American approach to higher education as a way of counteracting traditional, more narrowly defined university educations. However, these universities operate in a distinctive dynamic that must learn to bridge one culture with another, and leadership of such institutions must by its nature focus on such complexities and tensions. Throughout the chapters of this book, this unique element of these universities will be better understood through the stories and experiences as presented by their presidents, provosts, and other academic leaders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781617978463

Book preview

Preface

In the summer of 2016, we were getting ready for the new semester at the American University in Cairo (AUC) to start and completing the manuscript for this volume. AUC had just welcomed its twelfth and newest president, Ambassador Francis Ricciardone. Among his first tasks was to listen to student complaints about a recent tuition increase that compounded financial difficulties for families in a country experiencing a foreign exchange crisis. Many on the campus felt sympathetic to all the challenges he would face in his first days and weeks on the job. While the particular troubles in any country would ordinarily be enough to keep a new president busy, the massive shifts global higher education is undergoing on a daily basis compound these situations. Students are becoming more sophisticated in their expectations of their universities; faculty are increasingly being asked to solve some of the most difficult social and technical problems in society; and employers are demanding better-prepared graduates. Indeed, the job of a university president has become more intense and precarious.

Yet on August 24, 2016, just as the final touches to this volume were being made, we were alerted to news from Kabul: The American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) had been attacked by militants. The siege began during evening classes and lasted until the next morning. Fifteen people were killed and dozens were injured. This came only a month after two of their international faculty members had been kidnapped.

Undoubtedly AUC’s president will have his hands full with very serious issues in overseeing a unique university—a learning institution that bridges two increasingly distant cultures, the United States and Egypt. And the same will be true for all the other presidents of independent, transnational, American-style or liberal arts universities around the globe. Maintaining fidelity to a unique, rigorous, broad, and distinctly creative and analytic curriculum poses challenges difficult to comprehend.

But their jobs now pale in comparison to the task the leadership of AUAF will have in the years ahead: they must regain a sense of security on the campus while also fulfilling the university’s educational mission. This is not a task that will be done in a vacuum, as leaders in other American international universities have handled similar responsibilities of reassuring a campus community in the wake of deadly or traumatic experiences. Calvin Plimpton took the helm at the American University of Beirut (AUB) within the same year President Malcolm Kerr was killed outside his campus office. Margee Ensign, president of the American University in Nigeria (AUN) until 2017, worked tirelessly to engage her university community in support of refugees facing distressing terrorist threats in northern Nigeria. Lisa Anderson, previous president of the American University in Cairo, fought to keep the campus open following the Rabaa al-Adawiya massacre in Cairo in 2013, and prior to that, just weeks after taking office, fought to reopen the campus following the January 25th Revolution in 2011. Celeste Schenck, the current president of the American University in Paris, struggled to regain confidence of American families who sent their students for a semester abroad in Paris at a time when terrorist attacks seemingly became a staple of French existence. Though not at a branded American university, President Leonard Chang of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, a liberal arts university, worked to maintain open dialogue and freedom of speech during the potentially explosive 2014 Umbrella Revolution.

Such reminders are not intended to portray globally located American or liberal arts universities as constantly managing security concerns. And indeed, these reminders do not discount the challenges university presidents within the United States currently encounter: potential mass shootings, pervasive sexual harassment, and so much more. All of these challenges demand a quality of leadership never expected in previous decades.

Yet, to recognize the threats leaders of American and liberal arts universities operating abroad undergo is to know the daily struggles inherent in the acts of bridging academic cultures and communicating complex intellectual ideas within naturally delicate and transcendental institutions. While most of these universities are widely perceived to be the best in their respective host countries, some of them are also perceived as colonialist operations supporting American foreign policy. Others are considered too liberal or too risky for existing host governments. Nevertheless, these academic institutions follow a historical model of higher education that, at its fundamental core, rejects blind adherence to authority. Consequently, they have evolved into universities that blend the best elements of higher education in the United States with the most critical and important aspects of host culture and tradition:

The missionaries who founded AUC and AUB did not, as many other missionaries of the time did, seek to convert people to Christianity; instead, they desired to show their values through the institutions they created. They believed that without a robust education, people would not be able to think for themselves and realize the prospects of self-governance. The exportation of the liberal arts model today purports the very same thing. And thus, it is through a university like AUC that Egyptians can see what the US is and aspires to be. Conversely, it is an institution through which Americans can better understand Egypt. The American model of higher education, as the critics in the US contend, is not dying; it is alive, growing, and spreading. And it is, and has proven over time, to be a force for good in the world. (Purinton 2015, 82)

The pages ahead portray the courageous leadership of presidents, provosts, deans, and others who model the very best of intercultural, transnational academia. Whether at universities adhering to the historical principles of the liberal arts, or those branded as American, these leaders can teach us how to walk the fine lines of fidelity and accommodation. And as a result, they provide insight into the exceptional place our institutions hold in the global realm of higher education.

Though it is little comfort to the faculty, students, families, alumni, and staff in Kabul, the targeting of AUAF by extremists is a clear indication of the effectiveness of its role in Afghan culture, economics, politics, and science. Whereas many of the higher education institutions operating alongside these universities in their respective host countries offer a narrow curriculum, American and liberal arts universities are shaped as institutions deliberately promoting freedom of expression and liberation of the intellect. In a time when democracy is in decline across the globe, these universities must persist and thrive to meet employer demands for independent and critical thinkers. Thankfully, under the leadership of their passionate and skilled presidents and provosts, they will. However, as these leaders maneuver their institutions toward ever greater excellence, there will be occasions when they are forced to pause, in order to deal with often tragic crises testing the determination of their faculty, staff, and students.

And so we begin this book with condolences for the entire American University of Afghanistan community and for families of the staff, faculty, and students who died in Kabul in August 2016. Our AUAF colleagues continue to do their part in a great experiment, even in a time of significant loss.

References

Diamond, L. 2016. Democracy in Decline: How Washington Can Reverse the Tide. Foreign Affairs 95, no. 4: 151–159.

Purinton, T. 2015. How a University Connects Two Countries: The Role in Egypt of the American University in Cairo. Diplomatic Courier, September 2015: 80–82.

Introduction

Understanding American and Liberal Arts Universities Around the World

Ted Purinton and Jennifer Skaggs

Three-quarters of a million international students currently study at universities in the United States. As this is the largest share of international higher education enrollments in the world, it is clear the education provided by American universities is still coveted around the globe. It is no surprise, then, to see so many American universities going abroad, either as independent institutions using an American model, or as branch campuses of existing US-based universities. These universities capitalize on either the brand of an existing university, or the brand of American higher education as a whole. In either case, the American brand is usually described as having a broad-based curriculum, or labeled as providing a liberal arts education. Even though American universities at home face political, financial, and educational challenges, with the roots of some of those challenges often understood to be the very characteristics of a liberal arts education, they are increasingly demanded as transplanted universities abroad.

This book focuses on independent universities outside the United States that explicitly utilize the American model of higher education, and in particular, the liberal arts approach to curriculum. The first two, and best known, are the American Universities in Beirut and Cairo. Following their lead, around the middle of the twentieth century, American universities were next established in Paris (the American University of Paris), Rome (John Cabot University; the American University of Rome), Lugano (Franklin University Switzerland), and other European cities. Most recently, American universities have been established in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and elsewhere throughout the globe. In addition to the universities formally centered on the American model, and frequently certified through US-based accreditation, a variety of universities have been created utilizing the American-style liberal arts model, but without the US accreditation, or any desire to be recognized as American. These include: Ashesi University College in Ghana, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, Effat University in Saudi Arabia, and so forth. An American university, supported in part by DePaul University but owned by a Jordanian hotelier, has been recently proposed in Malta. Thus, American universities abroad range from the highly academic (AUC and AUB) to the highly commercial (Malta).

Such universities are distinguished from their better-known transnational counterparts, the foreign branch campuses (for example, Texas A&M at Qatar). Branch campuses, as a subfield of transnational higher education, focus primarily on formal linkages. For instance, some universities create branch campuses in other countries and offer the same degree being offered at the original home campus; others offer degrees to students abroad through online or blended online and periodic face-to-face courses; still others partner with institutions abroad through twinning or joint/dual degree relationships (Knight 2006).

As research about these transnational operations is proliferating, independent universities are opening (or undergoing branding makeovers) and promote a particular style of higher education based on pedagogical or curricular approaches employed in other countries. In some cases, this merely involves foreign backing. (This is true in the case of the French government aiding the development of the Université Française d’Égypte in Cairo.) In other instances, the brand of the country itself can provide credentialing appeal. As demonstrated in the case of the Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology, or the American University in Cairo. Yet the literature has been rather silent on these independent, yet transnational, institutions (Naidoo 2009). Perhaps this can be explained by the relatively small number of such universities across the globe in comparison to the number of affiliation-based transplanted ones. With the conspicuously titled universities such as New York University in Abu Dhabi or Yale-NUS College in Singapore, these affiliation-based institutions expound on the commitment to another institution’s reputation. As a result, the smaller independent universities are likely to go unnoticed as they blend in more with their host countries.

This distinction becomes illuminating to the study of international and transnational higher education, because the primary affiliation an American university abroad has with the home country is accreditation. However, while branch campuses from accredited universities are responsible to uphold procedural and other quality assurance standards, individual identity is permitted within the independent, transnational universities, resulting in wider variations of educational experience (Coleman 2003). It is important to recognize accreditation is technically less an affiliation than a certification, and it is one that many of the American universities abroad have not actually attained.

Ling, Mazzolini, and Giridharan (2014) suggest the structural features at the top of the institution, including the management staff and university leadership, become the valves through which the values and procedures of the brand flow into the organization. Utilizing Giddens’s proposition that local identity increases rather than decreases with modern organizational structures spanning wide geographic territory (Giddens 1991), Ling, Mazzolini, and Giridharan point out that postcolonial interference via higher education transplantation is reduced when responsible institutional leadership balances local taste with a technical sense of home-based quality control. Yet, as the transnational higher education literature strongly demonstrates, it is the cultural aspects of universities, not the technical ones, that become more fundamental to student, faculty, parent, and employer expectations and experiences. For example, concerns regarding divergent learning styles have resulted in studies examining the pedagogical approaches between a host and home country in the attempt to ensure that the host country learning styles are accommodated (Heffernan et al. 2010; Wilkins and Balakrishnan 2013). And the concerns regarding the fidelity to curricula have yielded studies about the nature of instructional delivery, academic processes, and curricular contexts with the ultimate aim of identifying how intercultural communication may be responsible for divergences (Waterval et al. 2015). Continued application of the literature on transnational higher education to independent international universities will undoubtedly provide a unique perspective on this very rich and growing field.

In addition to adding new perspectives to the existing transnational higher education literature, such universities, which have adapted the American model to their respective countries, can tell us quite a bit about American higher education. They provide a different angle and lens than institutions operating within the United States. It is, in fact, this intersection between the model and the location of implementation that poses unique challenges to institutional leaders, faculty members, accreditors, and students. When a model is based on institutional beliefs, passed through organizational and societal cultures, in the ways that institutions replicate their underlying structures, it can often be difficult to deconstruct what is essential and what is superfluous or a product of local taste.

What Can Liberal Arts Institutions Outside the United States Tell Us About the Essence of the Model?

With dozens of universities around the world having adopted a liberal arts approach to curriculum, and with a handful of associations attempting to organize and publicize their efforts, we are seeing an expansion of this model and various adaptations to it. Though the concept of the liberal arts is old and does not originate in the United States, in modern history, the liberal arts approach to higher education is perceived as American. In fact, this perception has encouraged the label of American University as a branding mechanism for many such institutions operating outside the United States. While the American label is often utilized to connote quality, and the liberal arts label utilized to clarify the curricular approach (see chapter by Detweiler in this volume), in the most prominent of such institutions around the world (the American Universities in Paris, Beirut, Cairo, etc.) the two labels are often wrongfully understood to be synonymous.

Drawing from our various interactions with international liberal arts institutions, we examine the trends shaping the distinctions in the model across the globe. By applying DiMaggio and Powell’s theories of institutional isomorphism, we look at factors involving regulatory constraints (governmental oversight, international accreditations, rankings schemes), normative influence (faculty and staff turnover, international faculty mobility), and mimetic pressure (local student markets, international student mobility, credentialing trends, labor market demand, and postcolonial developing country education trends) (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). By contrasting core features of the American interpretations of the liberal arts with adaptations both in the United States and around the world, it is possible to get a sense of where the model is headed.

In particular, as we study an institutional model that is perceived to be American yet gets applied in distinct ways elsewhere, we are forced to apply a definition to something that has resisted explicit categorization (see chapter 5 by Schenck and Sprenger in this volume). Many commonly recognized features in the United States (for example, residential campus experience) do not exist within the models labeled as ‘American’ or ‘liberal arts’ abroad. Does that make these institutions lesser versions of the model, or does it signal there is an underlying evident quality that can, on the surface, look different across contexts? Given that American and liberal arts are often used globally as brands, it would be very tempting to treat such institutions as adopting lesser or mutated versions. But this does not seem likely given that the liberal arts model is changing and fluctuating rapidly in the United States as well. There has recently been an assumption that perhaps the model, as a whole, is dying and that this slow death is the cause of these changes. Regardless, examination of the mechanisms by which the values are carried from one country to another will help us better understand which features of a liberal arts model are most salient.

How Institutions Disseminate

The varied types of universities within America contain many characteristics in common that one may not find in the majority of universities located outside the United States. And there is a common set of characteristics defining the liberal arts college or university as an institutional model. How do liberal arts and US-located universities gain those commonalities? Is there a checklist a new university must utilize in order to ensure all the components are there before calling itself liberal arts? Is there a complete authenticated package new university founders can open up right off the shelf for implementation on the set of an idyllic grassy campus anywhere in the world, including the United States?

Organizational science shows institutions replicate themselves in ways that are, in fact, not prescribed or top-down. Rather, they replicate through culture, mobility, competition, and the pursuit of legitimacy. The neo-institutional theory of organizations claims institutions are categories of organizations that help consumers, citizens, and governments know what to expect of the organizations. For example, an American high school is an institution. Central High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, must adhere to the basic culturally mediated principles of the institution of American high school, just as North High School in Fairfield, Connecticut, must, lest families, employers, universities, and communities get confused about the aims, procedures, and purposes of the institution. In sum, it is just easier for an organization to operate within the principles of the institution.

How does an organization, then, know how to fit within the institutional model? The most widely accepted view is called isomorphism: organizations replicate their structures based on coercion, mimesis, and norms (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Ultimately, this is done to inspire a sense of legitimacy. In other words, a replicated structure assures a customer that the organization knows what it is doing, and in turn, the customer is already prepared to accept the structure. This results in more efficiency for the customer as well as the organization.

To illustrate, a liberal arts or American university outside the United States will seek American accreditation or accreditation from a well-regarded international accrediting body. In some cases, particularly if an American university abroad accepts many US students on study abroad and thus receives governmental financial aid, that university will also be required to follow US Department of Education policies. These top-down policies shape organizational behaviors and give structure to the range of services provided to students, the procedures for adopting and delivering curriculum, and so forth. For a private independent university in most of the world, these top-down policies are not required, as none of them must accept US study abroad students or attain accreditation from a regional accrediting body in the United States. But, these universities accept and conform under the coercion due to the benefits that accrue from the legitimacy they get by subjecting themselves to these high-level imposed standards.

A liberal arts or American university outside the United States will see itself in competition with other similar institutions around the world, with local universities, and with universities located in the United States. For these universities, the similarities can be striking— with many presidents and board members coming from the United States; many of the faculty members earning PhDs in the United States; faculty members who are, themselves, American—and their considered university peer groups are often universities in the United States. While these similarities with the United States allow the institution to distinguish itself and justify the tuition costs, this type of university still needs to be similar enough to the local universities so as to ensure that the local population finds it to be legitimate. Indeed, given that universities are composed of academic departments, which are, themselves, part of their disciplinary institutions, higher education practice begins to look increasingly similar across the globe. This similarity is perpetuated by the impact of global rankings on how universities pursue various strategies, making them look remarkably similar from one university to the next.

With such divergence and uniqueness of the geographical settings of these institutions, how do these similarities develop and persist? DiMaggio and Powell (1983) provide some enlightenment in their identification of the mechanisms by which isomorphism within an institutional type takes place. Organizations within an institutional type replicate structures and behaviors through regulation (top-down mandates), norms (behaviors that spread through the mobility of staff among organizations within an institutional type), and mimesis (competition-based emulation of peers). To succumb to isomorphic pressure is to pursue legitimacy: it is easier to fit within a commonly understood construct for both production and purchase than to be so unique that employees and customers do not know how to assimilate concepts of the organization.

For the most part, regulation is seen across the globe in two ways: national policies that instigate differences among institutions across borders and accreditation practices that instigate similarities. Most American international universities—and especially many of them represented in this volume—have sought or already attained accreditation from one of the US regional accreditors. Such accreditation is likely the highest level of legitimacy for an institution not found in the highest rankings of the international league tables. But having this high-level endorsement requires universities to follow very stringent expectations. However, the key to accreditation is not the necessity of following predetermined rules set by an outside entity. It is instead the codification of habits, traditions, values, and procedures that have, over time, been deemed essential components in the creation and maintenance of authentic American universities.

Normative forces within these institutions occur through the mobility of staff and faculty. In the pursuit of obtaining terminal degrees, faculty do not only receive their formal education from the universities they attend; they are also apprenticed into the normative cultures of academia within their respective disciplines and within the institution of higher education at large. Throughout their academic careers, faculty will pick up new norms or obtain reinforcement on the various traditions and functions inherent within their disciplines in their institutions of employment as well as wider academic conventions.

Finally, in the case of universities, student applicants and their families begin to understand what they should be able to expect from an institution, and they apply that knowledge when investigating choices. These expectations and the potential variety of choices generate mimesis, as these institutions begin to compare their offerings with those of peer institutions. These offerings tend to include not only the curricular practices and academic component but expand to the co-curricular opportunities and institutional facilities as well. For example, if every other similar university has an athletic program, it seems only logical to include an athletic program (and the necessary facilities) in the lineup of outside-of-class options for students.

Ultimately we see the core features of an American university—or in the case of some of the universities featured in this volume, the core features of a liberal arts university—are not easily understood. While including a broad-based curriculum and a holistic approach to student development are common elements in the narratives of such universities, there are fundamental underlying aspects of these features that require a deeper level of tacit knowledge. These implicit understandings are gained through a greater understanding of and experience with the mechanisms described by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) in regards to the effectiveness of these liberal arts institutions.

Indeed, the necessity of such knowledge is in large part the rationale for intensive PhD/early faculty apprenticeships. These comprehensive apprenticeships not only prepare doctoral students in the mastery of their disciplines and the particular approaches to inquiry and analysis; they also foster a multifaceted understanding of the academic environment in various milieus. A doctoral student not only learns how to be an academic but also how to behave as a professor and a scholar within a community of scholars. 

Adapting the Institutional Model to Local Circumstances

This book portrays, in vivid detail, the challenges of maintaining institutional fidelity and global legitimacy as liberal arts or American universities, while also attending to the particular elements of local culture, preferences, and higher education markets. As the chapters demonstrate, there is no formula. Indeed, the main challenge the leaders of these universities face is finding the right balance. In some regard, the features of the American or liberal arts university are tangible and specific (for example, the format of the curriculum); in others, the features are abstract. Consider this statement about the recently established Fulbright University Vietnam (FUV) (established in part with support from the US State Department):

The first private, nonprofit Vietnamese university founded on the principles of accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry. FUV will serve Vietnamese society through the creation of human and knowledge capital that enhances Vietnam’s well-being, prosperity, and sustainability. FUV is a new kind of Vietnamese university, a learning focused community that is rooted in Vietnam’s rich cultural traditions, embraces universal values, and leverages the latest advancements in teaching, learning, and technology to maximize learning outcomes. FUV will conduct transdisciplinary, impact-oriented research aimed at contributing to the resolution of the grand challenges facing Vietnam. Although FUV is a private initiative, it enjoys the support of the US and Vietnamese governments.¹

This statement speaks to the mixture of forces in the development of the university. These include the abstract features of American higher education, the tangible features inspired by the global pursuit of academic excellence, and the local customs welcomed as institutional flavor. As these forces converge, the leader’s role is to welcome certain influences, and more importantly, keep others at bay in order to sustain a viable equilibrium.

Though many lessons can be drawn from the chapters ahead, we highlight one in particular: the role of people in maintaining fidelity and in shaping appropriate implementation. Within knowledge-intensive institutions, people are especially critical to successful implementation. In the concept of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980), implementers modify intended policy based on street-level realities. This is demonstrated by faculty, staff, administration, and students responding to immediate pressures, which vary widely by country. Thus the liberal arts and American model is modified according to both what these different constituencies know and what they see is needed. If those on the street-level are unfamiliar with, or have never experienced an authentic liberal arts model of higher education for themselves, they will be hard-pressed to appropriately modify the model as intended. This furthers the idea that the more an institution has faculty and staff who have experienced the liberal arts educational model in its fundamental and original form, the more likely that model will be effectively maintained abroad.

As the chapters will demonstrate, this is diminishing for American and liberal arts universities abroad. First, the global academic labor market has become more fluid, resulting in a much more diverse faculty in universities everywhere. Second, many of the American and liberal arts universities abroad cannot necessarily afford the costs of importing large numbers of American or otherwise international faculty. Indeed, the importation of faculty is the primary lens through which many scholars have viewed the transnational role of American international universities.

However, this book also illustrates how the essential values of American or liberal arts universities are universal values. They are values that focus on accountability, meritocracy, transparency, self-governance, mutual respect, and open inquiry, as the statement regarding the Fulbright University Vietnam emphasizes. The literature on institutional dissemination confirms that legitimacy is paramount to how an organization arranges and portrays itself. American and liberal arts are, as readers will discover, labels signifying the aspirations of the universities. Yet as readers will also discover, each of these universities has endeavored more to be accountable, meritocratic, transparent, independent, and respectful. These values are fervently being pursued for the sake of learning and social improvement.

Notes

1http://www.tuiv.org/fulbright-university-vietnam.html

References

Coleman, D. 2003. Quality Assurance in Transnational Education. Journal of Studies in International Education 7, no. 4: 354–78.

DiMaggio, P.J., and W.W. Powell. 1983. The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields. American Sociological Review 48, no. 2: 147–60.

Giddens, A. 1991. The Consequence of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Heffernan, T., M. Morrison, P. Basu, and A. Sweeney. 2010. Cultural Differences, Learning Styles, and Transnational Education. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management 32, no. 1: 27–39.

Knight, J. 2006. Higher Education Crossing Borders: A Guide to the Implications of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) for Cross-border Education. Paris: UNESCO.

Ling, P., M. Mazzolini, and B. Giridharan. 2014. Towards Postcolonial Management of Transnational Education. Australian Universities’ Review 56, no. 2: 47–55.

Lipsky, M. 1980. Street-level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Naidoo, V. 2009. Transnational Higher Education: A Stock Take of Current Activity. Journal of Studies in International Education 13, no. 3: 310–30.

Waterval, D.G.J., J.M. Frambach, E.W. Driessen, and A.J.J.A. Scherpbier. 2015. Copy but Not Paste: A Literature Review of Crossborder Curriculum Partnerships. Journal of Studies in International Education 19, no. 1: 65–85.

Wilkins, S., and M.S. Balakrishnan. 2013. Assessing Student Satisfaction in Transnational Higher Education. International Journal of Educational Management 27, no. 2: 143–56.

1

Achieving Liberal Arts Education Transnationally: Where From, How, and Where To?

Richard A. Detweiler

It seems a great curiosity that something called ‘liberal arts’ should be an approach to education of great and, indeed, growing interest globally. Whether education in the tradition of the liberal arts is described as an ‘American-style’ approach to higher education or whether it is attributed to ancient Greece, the interest seems equally puzzling. This is true particularly since the term, in public perception, is so often understood to be either a political ideology (‘liberal’) or a focus on the study of impractical subjects (‘arts’). As a result, in many national contexts, this tradition is referred to as ‘American’ or ‘American-style’ education, a description intended to communicate that it is different from what is typical in one’s own country and that it has a pragmatic character.

Where did this approach to higher education come from, and what is its fundamental character?¹ The seeds of liberal arts education were planted in ancient Greece. With a purpose of educating the type of leaders needed at that time, its initial focus was on military training. As city-states matured and warfare became less a daily concern, gymnastics was added to the content of the curriculum as symbolic conflict became a more frequent substitute for real combat. The study of the ‘muses,’ meaning culturally valued aspects of poetry, music, and art, were added to this higher education since these military leaders were also expected to further the values of their society (Kimball 1995). Ultimately, areas of study included classical poets and writers, composition, mathematics, and music, followed by various areas of study with the two that were most typical of advanced education [being] philosophy and rhetoric (Marrou 1948, 186–87).

As ancient Greek civilization reached its pinnacle, higher education focused even more decidedly on those who were to be leaders of society. These prospective leaders were the ‘free’ people, in other words, men (never women) and not slaves nor foreigners. It was these prospective leaders who needed to be prepared to contribute in the most important ways to their city-states (Kimball 1995). Our contemporary use of the term ‘liberal arts’ for this educational purpose arises from the Latin liberalis which, in English, means ‘freedom’ since it was an education for those designated in that culture as ‘free’ people.

Thus, while there was a clearly shared purpose for this education, there was not agreement on its content apart from the fact that it was not specialized nor technical in character (Marrou 1948). It was understood the Greeks did not formulate an unalterably fixed body of studies, seven in number (West 2010, 6). To become leaders, some believed the content of study should involve the skills of oratory so their students could develop and deliver persuasive arguments in civic discourse; some emphasized the development of ideals of intellect and the pursuit of truth; and others focused on the development of traditional noble virtues (Kimball 1995).

Though the areas of study for a ‘liberal’ education were not consistent, the method of education was highly consistent. This approach to education invariably involved the direct intellectual engagement of the individual teacher with the individual student. Sometimes this occurred in so-called academies in which a number of students would come together at a single location to work with one or more tutors, and sometimes it involved the hiring of a teacher to become a tutor for a son in a family. The intensity of this education is indicated by the cost of providing it. In the fifth century bc the cost of this four- or five-year higher education was 10,000 drachmas. With one drachma equaling a qualified worker’s daily wage, this equated to about forty years of salary for the average person, so obviously it was only the wealthy elite who could afford it.

In the second century bc Rome conquered Greece, and like many other aspects of Greek culture, the Greek approach to education was appropriated by the Romans (Marrou 1948). This was made particularly straightforward because Greek teachers became Roman slaves, and they offered the same type of education to the rising generation of Roman youth who would become leaders. With the exception of gymnastics (the Romans of this time objected to the nudity characteristic of Greek gymnastics) the general, though inconsistent, content of Greek higher education characterized Roman higher education and consistently utilized the same student-focused methods, as had been the case in Greece.

The Roman Empire grew to its pinnacle and began its decline. In the fifth century ad, just decades before the demise of the Roman Empire, a North African, in what we now call Algeria, wrote an allegorical story in which the content of the liberal arts was, for the first time, defined. In On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (in its English translation), Martianus Capella codified the liberal arts as the study of logic, rhetoric, grammar, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music (Stahl and Johnson 1977).

But as the Roman Empire fell, not only did Capella’s book fall into obscurity, but the ancient Greek writings upon which the subject areas were based were banned in 529 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Europe descended into its ‘dark’ age and most copies of ancient Greek writings were destroyed. The few remaining scholars of the classics took refuge in Persia, in the city of Jundhi-Shapur, at an academy in what is now western Iran where they preserved these traditions, improved upon and added to them (Nakosteen 1964, 17).

A hundred years later, in 636, Islamic forces conquered Jundhi-Shapur but preserved the academy, and it flourished as an extensive intellectual reservoir having much influence on Islamic learning (Nakosteen 1964, 21). Nearly two hundred years after that the great Islamic institution, the ‘House of Wisdom,’ emerged in Baghdad as a great cultural center with caliphs of that region placing a very high priority on having books translated into Arabic, including the writings of the great classical Greek philosophers and writers (Freely 2009). With its emphasis on the written word (Tibawi 1972), this was the beginning of the Golden Age of Islam (750–1150). Books of many languages were translated into Arabic, and new areas of Islamic inquiry and scholarship developed (especially in mathematics and the sciences, but also including philosophy and other humanistic disciplines). The educational experience was based on a close, personal relationship between the teacher and the student (Berkey 1992) and it was not unusual for the teacher to sit on a low chair, with his students on the ground around him (Dodge 1962, 20). Indeed, teacher–student relationships were sufficiently close that it was not unusual for the teacher to help financially support the student (Makdisi 1981).

So classical thinking was preserved and nurtured in the far east of the Mediterranean and then spread by Islamic scholars throughout North Africa and, in the eighth century, to the Iberian Peninsula