The fourth annual International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education in Riyadh, an impressive event, provided the arena to expand and promote Saudi Arabia’s relationship with universities and academics throughout the world — at this conference alone, 37 countries were represented.
During the event, a variety of conferences and workshops took place on a range of topics, but most of them focused, directly or implicitly, on the larger theme of social responsibility.
Today we are facing the challenges of educating students within a global culture. While our own Saudi universities retain some culturally distinct elements, we all understand that to truly educate students, we have to expose them to a broad, and universal, set of ideas. The responsibility rests with all of us, then, to teach both the values and the concepts that will make our Saudi students thoughtful, well functioning global citizens.
What does social responsibility mean today, and how can universities help to foster it? The concept implies that universities have an obligation not only to the students they educate, but to each other and to the larger community, both domestic and global. Social responsibility may include politics and economics, but may also transcend them. We have a social obligation to both preserve cultural heritage all over the world, and to work toward solutions to our weightier problems, including climate change and other environmental challenges. Poverty, injustice and political persecution are all issues that will engage, ideally, the insight and skills of someone other than the politicians who may have much riding on the outcomes. By truly educating our youth, we can hope to benefit from their knowledge in the future. Aside from learning facts, they will learn how to think creatively, critically and fairly.
Perhaps this global cooperation and integration can better take place in the academic world than anywhere else. After all, the very word “university” comes from “universal” — connoting a world of knowledge in which ideas truly transcend national and even cultural boundaries. It is in this global context that students become truly educated, both about specific concepts that will help them in their future career, and perhaps more importantly, about ideas that may not be immediately applicable but which expand the mind and the perspective. In partaking of “universal” higher education, our minds expand and embrace the collective wisdom of various ages as well as places. In fact, it could even be argued that this higher-level, expansive knowledge is what makes us fully actualized as humans.
The forth International Exhibition and Conference on Higher Education was a way of taking seriously our commitment to university education and all that it can provide, for the individual student and the society as a whole. The Conference on Higher Education made our intentions clear to the world, and provided a well-run and well-publicized form that will — God willing — gain us domestic success and international renown.
