Newswise — Mount Holyoke College has signed a four-year agreement to help Effat University--the first private institution of higher education for women in Saudi Arabia--build its student development and academic support programs. The deal is the inaugural revenue-producing project from the newly formed Office of Complementary Program Development (CPD).
“Despite obvious and significant differences in institutional context, Effat and Mount Holyoke share many of the same values and goals,” said CPD director Jesse Lytle. “We're both very student-centered. Our educational programs try to link the liberal arts with practical outcomes--what we call purposeful engagement in the world. We both reject simplistic notions of leadership, while at the same time trying to prepare our students to be effective change agents. So, this relationship makes a lot of sense.”
Under terms of the agreement, Mount Holyoke will help Effat create a comprehensive leadership program that will include the expansion of the university’s career center and the creation of a writing center that will draw from the College’s Speaking, Arguing, and Writing (SAW) Program. The agreement also opens possibilities for Mount Holyoke faculty and staff to engage in a variety of teaching and consulting projects as plans progress.
This new partnership comes after a Mount Holyoke delegation that included Lytle, Dean of Faculty Donal O’Shea, and education and psychology professor Lenore Reilly Carlisle visited the Jeddah campus last January. The two institutions have been connected since Effat’s founding ten years ago, when Mount Holyoke served as a curriculum consultant to what was then Effat College.
“In light of the cultural, political, and economic differences between South Hadley and Jeddah, we know that we can't simply export what we do here,” said Lytle. “But we've had much longer to develop and refine the way we do things, and those are lessons that are worth sharing. Effat is an institution that's trying to show the value of liberal education for women in a setting where that kind of influence has the potential to do a lot of good.”
The university, which is named for the school’s founder, Queen Effat Al-Thunayyan, “aims to educate tomorrow’s diversity of leaders at an international standard by providing an interdisciplinary environment conducive to inspired teaching, learning, and research,” according to Effat’s website.
Lytle said Effat’s efforts would make Mount Holyoke’s founder proud.
“One wouldn't want to overstate the similarities between nineteenth-century Mary Lyon and someone like Haifa Jamal Allail, Effat's president, but at the same time the parallels between the larger themes are undeniable,” he said. “Effat is, in a real sense, what Mary Lyon's legacy looks like in a twenty-first century context.“
RSS