A preoccupation with technical skills means many Middle Eastern graduates lack broader knowledge and understanding, according to university leaders who called for a re-imagination of liberal arts in the Islamic world.

Robert Whelan, former president of the University of Wollongong in Dubai, told the Times Higher Education MENA (Middle East & North Africa) Universities Summit staged in Al Ain, UAE, between February 2-4, that the content of some science and engineering courses offered in the region had become “narrower and narrower”, to the extent there’s no space for training in areas such as ethics and humanities.

Asmaa Shaei Alshuaifan, dean of quality assurance and academic accreditation at Saudi Arabia’s Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, said students’ demands are focused on vocational skills that they believe would be useful in the job market.

But Ali bin Saud Al-Bimani, vice chancellor of Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, said graduates of technical courses need to be “human beings” too. “I have engineers, doctors and nurses (who) know their jobs but they don’t know how to deal with people,” Dr. Al-Bimani said.

Hassan Rashid Al-Derham, president of Qatar University, agreed. Academic programmes should produce “self-rounded” students who, on graduation, would “join society in a very productive way”.

However, Dr. Alshuaifan warns that MENA countries should not simply import liberal arts models from the West. “This is a very tricky subject (where) no one formula can fit for all. (You would need) a conference by itself in how to infuse ethics and our own Islamic identity into our programmes, even if they are Western-influenced.”

Panelists agreed that no one university could solve the problem by itself, and Dr. Al-Derham suggested that national universities such as his should take a lead. “This is the heart of the challenge and national universities should be the custodians for meeting such a challenge,” he said, adding that at Qatar University the problem is not as pronounced in technical programmes, since curricula are often adapted from Western models. Instead, it is in areas such as humanities, social sciences and Islamic studies that the need for broader-based education is more pressing.