“This has injected a higher level of passion”
It was impossible to miss the excitement and pride in Saieda’s voice.
I had called the University of Delaware student for a final conversation before The Chronicle published an article about her and a fellow displaced Afghan student, Zahra. (The Chronicle is not using the women’s full names for their safety.)
I have been following the students for two years, ever since they and 146 of their classmates were airlifted out of Kabul in the wake of the Taliban invasion. Their escape could sometimes seem ripped from the pages of a movie script — the group tried for days to make it to the safety of the city’s main airport, their bus caravan coming under fire — but these days, they’re mostly living the lives of typical college students: Playing volleyball. Watching Netflix. (A recent favorite: Anne With An E, the latest adaptation of the Anne of Green Gables novels. “I like her imagination,” Zahra said.) Trying to decide on a major.
This summer, Saieda got her wisdom teeth removed. And last month, she was picked to work as a welcome ambassador, helping new University of Delaware students adjust to the Newark campus. That was what Saieda was telling me about in our last call, how she had drawn on her own experience as a newcomer to help others feel more at home. “It was amazing,” she said.
There’s much more left in Saieda and Zahra’s stories, of course, but I’m grateful to them for trusting me to write about this chapter. You can click here to read the full article — nonsubscribers who register for a free Chronicle account can read two articles each month. Your readership helps support our journalism.
American colleges rallied to take in all of the Afghan students in that group, but the United States was never meant to be their destination. They were supposed to head to the Asian University for Women, a Bangladesh university that works to provide a liberal-arts education to young women from across the region, regardless of background.
I recently checked in with Kamal Ahmad, a Harvard-trained lawyer who is the university’s founder. The airlifted students are likewise just part of the story of AUW’s support of Afghan women, Ahmad told me.
Afghan students have long had a significant presence at the decade-old university, and, at the time of the Taliban takeover of the Afghan government, in August 2021, they were the second-largest group among the student body.
Educating women who otherwise would have little opportunity to earn a college degree has always been central to AUW’s mission. With the Taliban in control, education for Afghan girls and women beyond the sixth grade was ended, giving new urgency to that goal. “This has injected a higher level of passion in us,” Ahmad said.
While the initial group was able to leave Afghanistan on a military transport before American and other western forces withdrew from the country, that route out is no longer feasible. Instead, Ahmad and his colleagues went directly to Taliban authorities, meeting with top officials in the foreign-affairs and higher-education ministries. To try to help prospective students secretly leave the country could have put their families at risk, Ahmad said.
The case AUW made was straightforward: Some in the Taliban government have said they would support the education of women if classrooms were gender segregated. AUW, its administrators argued, could help prepare critically needed female teachers — and the Taliban agreed.
Since January 2022, some 500 Afghan women have come to AUW, and the university hopes to reach 600 by the end of this year. It has not always been easy. The cost of obtaining passports and other travel documents has soared. AUW has had to open a second campus to accommodate the new students.
The newcomers have also strained the university’s instructional capacity. AUW has recruited recent graduates from top American and British institutions, including Harvard, Oxford, and Wellesley, to teach for a year in a pre-college program that helps students improve their English skills while getting used to college-level work. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is supporting nine postdoctoral fellows to fill out the faculty ranks.
And the students who have made it to Bangladesh are already working to keep the educational pipeline open, teaching online courses to female high-school students back home in Afghanistan who couldn’t otherwise enter a classroom.
