The education of Kamal Ahmad

BROOKLINE - The first time Kamal Ahmad started a school he was a 14-year-old boy in his native Bangladesh, the son of a university biochemist and a writer, living on a campus where children worked as household servants and couldn't read. So Ahmad organized classes for them in garages left empty by day.

Forty years later and living in Coolidge Corner, Ahmad has grander dreams. He is the founder of the ambitious Asian University for Women, built on the old saying that to educate a man is to educate an individual and to educate a woman is to educate a family.

In March, in Chittagong, Bangladesh's second largest city, AUW launched its pre-college Access Academy for 128 students from six countries and four religions. In September 2009, AUW expects to enroll its first undergraduates in an innovative program that combines three years of American-style liberal arts education with two years of professional training.

AUW has secured 100 acres from the Bangladesh government and a charter guaranteeing autonomy and academic freedom. It has so far attracted $35 million, including $8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It has hired renowned architect Moshe Safdie to design its campus, enlisted retired Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky to aid academic planning, and recruited Jack Meyer, former chief manager of Harvard's endowment, to chair its foundation. Its provost, biochemist Hoon Eng Khoo, a Smith College graduate born in Malaysia in a house without running water or electricity, was vice dean of the prestigious National University of Singapore Medical School. Microfinance pioneer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus serves on AUW's board of advisers.

In 2006 Ahmad quit his job as an attorney in Manila to work full-time on AUW. He shuttles between its foundation's bright Cambridge offices and Bangladesh. He traverses the country raising funds and recruiting faculty. The goal is a university of 3,000 students, half on scholarship and half fee-paying, whose graduates transcend national and religious boundaries to tackle the region's problems.

"This can be a force against fundamentalism and many of the sort of narrow identities that seem to be at the root of many social ills," says Ahmad, 43. "Women's education is the most effective way to bring about social and economic change."

The university joins a handful of women's colleges established recently in Asia and Africa - including the Dubai Women's College founded in 1989 and Zimbabwe's Women's University in Africa founded in 2003 - that focus, for the most part, on the professional education of women in their home country.

AUW is the brainchild of a soft-spoken man whose unassuming manner belies a history of transforming idealism into action. He traces his commitment to liberal arts to his education at Exeter and Harvard College. He traces his passion to a privileged boyhood in a desperately poor nation racked first by war in 1971, when he was 6, and then by famine. He recalls the "constant juxtaposition of fear and play," of blithely pasting paper strips to windows to keep glass from shattering, then cowering as bombers flew overhead. He remembers terrifying games of hiding his father, Kamaluddin Ahmad, from soldiers rounding up intellectuals.

"When you're that close to being vanished and you're not vanished," he says, "you have a different sense of what you may be able to do with life."

A framed copy of his father's obituary adorns Ahmad's home office, honoring the nutrition expert who described scenes of rampant starvation to his children. Ahmad's mother, Nahar Ahmad, wed at 16 and attended college while raising seven children. Years later, when Ahmad married, he and his bride, both Muslims, asked guests to contribute to a Hindu charity instead of bringing gifts. Today his wife stays home with their 6-year-old daughter.

Ahmad learned early to marshal support as classmates and teachers embraced the garage schools that ultimately served 400. When neighborhood opposition closed the makeshift classrooms, lessons moved outdoors. Children brought a brick a day, until they amassed enough to erect a schoolhouse overnight on an abandoned street.

Ahmad arrived at Exeter in 1980 to student complaints of "oppressive" rules regarding visiting hours for girls. "I came from a world where oppression had a very different meaning," Ahmad says. So he founded the Third World Society, which organized Oxfam dinners and brought Robert Coles, Noam Chomsky, and other luminaries to campus.

"It was social entrepreneurship before the term became popular," says Richard Schubart, Ahmad's history teacher at Exeter. "Kamal is one of the most extraordinary people I know."

A capacity for engagement

Ahmad, at Harvard, and his brother, in graduate school at Stanford, organized the Overseas Development Network, which spread to 70 campuses. For this, Time magazine in 1987 recognized Ahmad as one of the nation's most promising undergraduates. Following college, Ahmad earned a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship.

"He had an enormous capacity to bring people around the table for a project, people much more senior than him, and get them engaged," says Kenneth Prewitt, professor of international relations at Columbia University and former Rockefeller vice president. "He sees something ahead of its time, doesn't take credit, and understands what motivates people like me and Jack [Meyer]."

AUW stems from a World Bank/UNESCO Task Force on Higher Education and Society that Ahmad, then an attorney in New York, initiated and co-directed. It issued its report in 2000.

"The traditional development institutions have a view that if you're a poor country you don't need higher education. You need primary education. That ends up in a situation where the best thinking happens on one side of the world and the other side provides the foot soldiers," Ahmad says. "In a time of globalization it's even more important for poor countries to have higher education."

That AUW rises in Bangladesh is due only partly to Ahmad's roots there. Primary education is almost universal, and children receive stipends to continue schooling. Bangladesh, thanks to Yunus, the Nobel Prize winner advising AUW, is the birthplace of microfinance and the resulting networks of female entrepreneurs. Its textile industry employs legions of women.

"There was such a dramatic change in the status of women in Bangladesh in the last 20 or 30 years that it was ripe for the Asian University for Women," Ahmad says. "The extreme poverty of Bangladesh made this possible. Women could not afford to stay veiled up and at home. They responded to every chance, whether it was for a stipend for school attendance or microfinance or the chance to work at a factory."

A good beginning

Now the Access Academy, operating in rented space, offers its scholarship students, chosen from 1,200 applicants, a year of college preparatory work in English. Students come from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Nepal. They are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian. Among them is Res Phasy of Cambodia, 19-year-old daughter of a widowed food peddler. "I want to make my own company," Phasy says by telephone from Chittagong. "I will take this money to develop my village because the people in my village are poor and not educated."

In January, construction begins on AUW's first building, on the shifting soils of hills and valleys where reflecting pools will collect monsoon rains for reuse.

As promising as its start may be, AUW still faces hurdles. It needs another $55 million for the first phase of construction and $8 million to $10 million annually for operating expenses. Former Oberlin College President Nancy Dye, AUW's vice chancellor (the equivalent of president), resigned last month for reasons she declines to discuss, except to say, "It is an excellent project, and I very much hope it succeeds."

Building a faculty is another challenge. Initially, AUW seeks professors from American liberal arts colleges interested in a semester or two in Bangladesh. "Only the most adventurous would sign up," Ahmad says. "The logistical challenges of Chittagong are hard to overcome. It's a crowded city with limited infrastructure."

Ahmad remains optimistic. "The fact that we have students leaves us no choice but to get this done," he says. "If you're a 12-year-old girl in Afghanistan, nobody tells you you can be anything. We want to be able to tell everybody if you have the courage you can do this."