Mrs Suzanne Mubarak and President Barack Obama joined an AUC mood of festivity, Dina Ezzat reports For students and professors of the American University in Cairo the inauguration of their new campus in New Cairo meant many things. For some it meant leaving behind years and years of memories of the famous and elegant Tahrir Square campus with its Arabesque buildings that had been the venue for 90 years of academic and cultural Egyptian-American engagement. "We really left behind so much," said Madeline who is graduating in a few months. "We left Ewart Hall that hosted so many speakers. We left our favourite spots in the sun on the main campus and our corner in the library overlooking Mohamed Mahmoud Street and the stroll and cafés between the two." For Madeline, the new campus is "more spacious and more modern but it is also so far away". For other students, moving to the new campus at the beginning of this academic year meant a good sense of expansion. Ahmed, who spent two years in the old campus, says he is overcoming the early sense of nostalgia that bewildered students, staff and faculty during the early days and weeks on the new campus. "At the beginning we, coming from the old campus in Tahrir, were always complaining. We complained about the dysfunctional facilities, about the lack of adequate directions around the vast campus and indeed about being suddenly detached from the very heart of the city." Now, however, Ahmed says there are "fewer and fewer complaints as people learn to find their way around and as the campus itself functions better and above all as we start associating the place with new layers of memories." For those who joined the AUC only when it found itself a new campus in New Cairo, it is a new beginning anyway. For all, however, the new campus brought about a sense of festivities as AUC celebrated the inauguration of its new venue with the presence of Mrs Suzanne Mubarak on Saturday. Addressing a few hundred students and a dozen professors who represented the over 5,000 students and 200 professors, Mrs Mubarak, herself an AUC graduate and mother of two AUC graduates, not to mention mother-in-law of yet another graduate, described the move as "a historic moment" for AUC, "a centre of learning that encompasses the traditional and the novel" and that attempts to keep the beacons of "tolerance" and to "breakdown the barriers of prejudice". AUC students and professors were also joined in their festivities by a message from no less than new US President Barack Obama delivered by his ambassador in Cairo Margaret Scobey. To the applause of the students Scobey conveyed the good wishes and kind words of the US president whose message was one of a man for whom good quality education meant that he could part from the bias that his society exercised for long against Americans of African origin to the extent that he became the first ever black American president. Beyond the festivities, the euphoria and the nostalgia, moving on to a new campus built on 260 acres with a huge and modern library, smart classrooms and laboratories and a mega sports complex means, according to Amr Salama, AUC councillor, that AUC is expanding to become a "world class university" that will expand its "quality education" for an extra 20 per cent of the current 5,000 plus graduate and undergraduate students who can afford tuition fees totalling thousands of pounds a year and few scholarships for graduates of public schools from across the nation. Moreover, Salama said, it will continue to set the "example" for "private non-profit" universities as "an added arm to promote education" in a country like Egypt where a better quality education for more citizens remains a top challenge that would not be met "without the accessibility of subsidised and tuition-free education for the largest number of graduate and post-graduate students".
