Our first day at "work"

This is a bit out of order, as our first day was Sunday (the work week is Sunday-Thursday here) and the visit to the Grameen Bank (below) was on Monday, but I wanted to give a little background on the University as we learned more from Kamal, one of the founding members.
First, here is a photo of some beautiful students who held a brief assembly for the new arriving faculty. they are Bangladeshi (left) and Afghani (right). They had a fun little Powerpoint presentation of photos of their past year at the Access Academy. The best part of the assembly were the samosas and tea afterwards! Sometime during the 1990s, the WorldBank and UNESCO formed a task force on higher education. The following was told to us via Kamal, so I haven't checked any of these 'facts'..... The general trend leading up to this was in the 50s and 60s, colonial states were overthrowing their ruling powers and creating their own officially recognized countries. They needed a flag, a constitution and a national university. Then, during the 60s and 70s these universities became hotbeds of radical thought and sources of political upheaval and for various reasons, many countries were not funding them properly. In order to have upwardly-mobile developing countries, it's necessary to have highly trained and educated populations, so countries like Bangladesh were really struggling (Bangladesh did not become an official country until 1971 and had natural disasters and famine on top of corruption and new government structure).
Therefore, this small, informal task force was formed with Worldbank/UNESCO and the idea of an autonomous university was shopped around to a few different governments. Apparently Bangladesh was open to the idea at the time.
Their requirements were that there needed to be 100 acres of contiguous, undeveloped land and that there be an existing international airport. This quickly narrowed it down to only Chittagong, as Dhaka did not have that much contiguous, unbuilt land. (I'm not really sure why they needed 100 acres...there are certainly many campuses in the US that are much smaller....)
Finally, there needed to be an official parliamentary charter so the school would not be at the whim of changing governments, and this happened in 2006.
The first class of Access Academy began in 2008. The Access Academy is a one-year program to prepare the students' english, writing and math skills for University. So this coming fall we will have three levels of students; one access academy and a first and second-year university level.
The initial funding was started with foundation money, primarily from the US (Bill & Melinda Gates, Hewlitt Packard, Goldman-Sachs, etc.) but these are not long-term funding sources and so the AUW will need to transition to something more sustainable and it will probably be structured where some students who are able will pay full tuition and others will be need-based. There is some funding to begin the initial construction of the permanent campus, mainly from Brunei and one very wealthy anonymous donor woman from Hong Kong, but the rest of the funding is yet to be realized. Here is a rendering of the permanent campus, which was designed by a famous architect. We are currently housed in a cluster of temporary buildings, which are pretty nice. There is also a lot of construction at this current campus for added dorm space, new labs and classrooms and faculty offices, which is ~supposed~ to finish sometime in mid-August.
The admission process begins with country-specific recruiters identifying likely candidates and then consists of the students taking a "Michigan Test" for scholarly aptitude and then a personal interview where the interviewers look for courage, and a sense of fairness and/or outrage at inequalities. Kamal said the goal is for a lot of flexibility for entry, but very little flexibility for exit to maintain a high standard of academic and intellectual excellence. The students are purposely housed with other students from different countries, socio-economic and religious backgrounds to create more understanding and encourage english-speaking. I did notice they mostly all segregate by country at lunchtime so they can speak their native languages (understandable).
The overall goal is for the students to then return to their home countries to become leaders and role models for other women and also fomenters of change.
The structure is what we know in the US as liberal arts, where the students have three years of well-rounded core classes, with some areas of specialization and then one more year to complete a bachelors or two years for a masters.