When C. Michael Smith interviewed to be president of the American University of Afghanistan, he faced his toughest questions from an unexpected source: a group of 30 students in Kabul. “They really grilled me,” he says.
The students wanted to know how long Mr. Smith would stick around if he got the job. The university, which bills itself as Afghanistan’s “only independent, private, nonprofit, nonsectarian, coeducational institution of higher learning,” had already suffered from turnover at the top. The former minister of higher education who founded it, in 2004, was its first acting head. Its only previous president, Thomas M. Stauffer, resigned in September 2008, after less than two years of a controversy-marred tenure.
“I said, ‘Look, I believe it takes four to five years of leadership to accomplish goals in a university setting, especially in a new university,’” says Mr. Smith, who signed a five-year contract.
Another question for Mr. Smith was how much he planned to stay in Kabul. Critics said Mr. Stauffer had spent too little time there.
Mr. Smith, 68, took his cue from his four years as dean and then president of the American University of Nigeria, where enrollment grew from 124 to more than 1,200 by 2009. A president’s presence at a young institution “makes a big difference,” he says. “He needs to be seen walking the campus.” Mr. Smith moved with his wife to Kabul in September.
Afghanistan is the latest stop in a cross-continental career for Mr. Smith, who has a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in British and American literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Before his stint in Nigeria, he worked for accreditors in South Carolina and the United Arab Emirates.
Mr. Smith hopes the American University of Afghanistan will help stem the country’s brain drain and will attract Afghan-American professors back to their home country to teach. Something similar happened at the university’s counterpart in Nigeria.
Although news coverage of Afghanistan often focuses on the security issues that plague much of the country, Mr. Smith says living in and navigating around Kabul have so far proved not too difficult. He travels with a driver and a lookout in low-profile, beat-up-looking vehicles. “What we try to do is just be prudent,” he says. “At the same time, we have to be able to move around and go places, so we’re trying to be as free and relaxed as we can.”
Akram Fazel, chairman of the university’s Board of Trustees, says that residency in Kabul was not a requirement of the job, but that Mr. Smith’s presence shows his commitment to both the institution and the country. “When you go back to the history of Afghanistan and analyze what really went wrong, for almost 300 years, it was totally isolated from the rest of world,” Mr. Fazel says. “We hope this institution becomes a bridging factor to the outside world.”
The university, which has just over 400 students, receives the bulk of its financial support from the U.S. government through the United States Agency for International Development. While the official tuition rate is around $5,000, the average student pays about $3,000 once scholarships and financial aid are factored in, Mr. Fazel says. In a country as poor as Afghanistan, however, that is still a huge sum.
Mr. Smith plans to focus on raising money for scholarships and to help pay for construction of the 42-acre campus, across the street from its temporary facility. Increasing female enrollment, from 20 percent now to around half, is another goal. He wants to offer programs that are competitive with other universities internationally. He would also like to see the university’s students spend a semester or a year in the United States, and American students study abroad in Kabul.
He is confident that the American University of Afghanistan is well on its way to becoming a regional oasis of multi-ethnic, coeducational learning. “Despite the image that you might have of Afghanistan, this society is renowned for its flowers and its roses,” Mr. Smith says. “On the campus we’ve planted green grass everywhere. There are roses and flowers everywhere. ... There’s a lot of beauty here.”
