UA-R-GC-1914-01-01-1990-02_Page-017

President's Report Page 7 May, 1990 The rare book, or special collections, library, in which the Board knows I am so interested, also is important not only in itself - because it will provide significant support for Egyptology, Islamic Art and Architecture, and Middle Eastern Studies - but also because it will be a key AUC facility for developing the University into an important institution for scholarly research. If we make that library into "the best library in the world on Egypt", which I believe we can achieve by spending $ 100,000 a year or so on acquisitions, AUC will become the graduate research center in the world on Egypt. it will attract scholars from Europe and the United States, strengthening AUC's stature, and further raising our image of ourselves. It is thus an important component of AUC's next step forward. Besides raising our intellectual aspirations to the top level, building up the faculty, introducing a PhD program, and creating outstanding library research facilities, another qualitative development would be to introduce an undergraduate honors program. The adoption of the Core Curriculum - and in particular, the exposure of all our students to the fundamentals of philosophy and of scientific thinking - was an important step toward qualitative enhancement, more important in Egypt than in the U.S., as the Egyptian school system does not adequately expose students to such ideas. That should be augmented by an honors program. Several decades ago AUC conducted a regular honors program for undergraduates centered around a senior research paper. Recreating such a program would, I believe, further emphasize the tone of high academic quality we want to achieve generally in the University and create particularly high intellectual achievement targets for those who participate in it. We have discussed the idea sporadically within the administration but have not yet focused seriously on it. It should now be looked into seriously. The range of specific areas in which AUC can develop academically is, of course, a wide one. Closely related to the quality of what we do, I think, is the issue of "int~rnationalization". We examined this during our last long range plan discussions, but not much has yet been done. Essentially AUC's educational context is bi-cultural (Western and Arabic/Islamic). That is broader than the context of most American education. But we could make AUC graduates into even broader and more outstanding products if we truly "internationalized" our outlook