Professors @Work
MainGate asked AUB’s newly appointed Director of Global Engagement Rami Khouri about his new series of interviews with AUB professors.
“In October 2020, AUB launched Professors@ Work, a 20-minute podcast audio interview where I speak with individual AUB professors. We did this to back up our conviction that AUB’s original scholarly research is its most important and unique contribution to Lebanon, the Arab region, and the world.
No other single institution in the world does as much original research or preserves as much archived knowledge as does AUB about every sector of life and society in the Middle East—politics, history, art, biodiversity, education, religion, sociology and anthropology, philosophy, medicine, public health, nursing, nuclear power, military confrontations, engineering, business and entrepreneurship, youth culture, the needs of the elderly, refugees, civic activism, agriculture, environment, ongoing revolutions, and every possible endangered turtle egg nest east of Suez, to mention only the headlines.
What makes this research significant is that in one way or another it touches the real-life concerns of ordinary people in the Middle East and around the world. Water pollution or salination remedies? We’ve got them. Better refugee education in camps?
We’ve studied that. Nutritional danger signs among rural and urban youth? We’ve done books and conferences on those. New techniques of brain surgery on premature babies? Come to the AUB Medical Center for that. Any almost anything else you can think of . . . (The only major field of study that AUB never adopted is law, though our political science, history, and other professors routinely study the application or weaknesses of laws in Arab lands, leaving the training of lawyers and judges to other universities.)
AUB has built its reputation over the past 155 years on three pillars that are anchored in faculty research: generating knowledge about Middle Eastern life and society, teaching students our newly gained understandings of our world, and reaching out to public policy-makers, private business, civil society, and others beyond our campus who can use this knowledge to build stronger, safer societies—for young kids, the elderly, middle class shopkeepers, and every baby turtle up and down our coastline.
If you want to touch AUB as AUB touches people’s lives in the Arab region, tune in to Professors@Work and marvel at the thrills of men and women who expand humankind’s repository of knowledge about ourselves.”