A Moroccan University Weaves Wellbeing into the Liberal Arts 

Visions of Morocco often conjure vast deserts and bustling cities. Al Akhawayn University, quietly tucked in among the Middle Atlas Mountains, is more likely to be covered in a dusting of snow than sand. The surprises don’t end there. 

Since 1995, A.U.I. has led with an American style of liberal arts education that is different from every other university in the country. The idea came out of a partnership between two monarchs — King Hassan II of Morocco and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia — who also inspired the university’s name “Al Akhawayn,” meaning “two brothers” in Arabic.

That founding emphasis on connection and mutual support — global and local — remains. Current President Amine Bensaid has been building out a particularly robust approach to student affairs based on helping students, struggling with wellbeing much like in the U.S., develop meaningful relationships with both each other and the world.

With LearningWell, Bensaid talks about pioneering and preserving the liberal arts core, while adapting to the unique needs of his students — and the country.

LW: I’m interested in how the liberal arts model came to A.U.I. and to Morocco. Could you tell us more about that?

AB: The vision for an American-model university in Morocco is something that late King Hassan II had, in the late 70s or 80s, I believe. The rest of the education landscape in Morocco is all modeled after the French system, so the general idea was to have a pilot, or just an experiment, in Morocco for an American-model university. And then when he finally got to do it — that was in the early 90s — it was clear that it would violate a number of things in Moroccan law on higher education with respect to pedagogical norms and governance. 

As a result, a separate law that would govern the university was created in the form of a Royal Dahir. In that royal decree, in the preamble, it was almost like he saw September 11th coming: He wanted the university to graduate a different breed of graduates who would be ready, willing, able to contribute to mutual understanding between different civilizations. We were not only going to do a university based on the American model but specifically a liberal arts and sciences kind of university. 

So that's really where the whole thing came from. It felt like a little bit of a vision for a monarch that saw that there was this system that could give better results for the kind of transformation that he was imagining.

LW: And maybe with that, your work around student life is also really unique, right? What goes into that approach?

 AB: Historically, the model for student life in Moroccan public universities has been inspired by the model in French public universities, where it’s not designed to play a role in student success and identity. In Moroccan public universities, typical student life consists mostly of housing and meals, with housing provided to a relatively small percentage — maybe 10 to 20 percent of the student population. At A.U.I., about 85 percent of students live on campus; campus life and student activities make up a significant part of a student’s college years. By design, it is meant to be immersive and provide a transformational experience. A.U.I. also brings some of the learning even closer to the dorms through living and learning communities — for example, for first-year students. Today, many private universities in Morocco do offer student activities — in a way probably inspired more by A.U.I. than by the French model — in addition to housing and dining, although they’re still not on an immersive and transformational model where student life is at the heart of the university experience.

LW: How did you get so invested in the student affairs and residential life piece?

AB: The investment is really in the convergence between student affairs and academic affairs to provide an integrated transformational experience that makes a difference in the life of the student. So the short answer is we were looking to have an impact where it was most needed, which really is just being true to A.U.I.’s mission. The long answer has to do with A.U.I.’s history and journey.

A few years after A.U.I. started, it came to feel important to further institutionalize its practices and for some third party to make an external evaluation regarding A.U.I.’s mission of implementing the American liberal arts model in Morocco and the benefits it sought for its students. So A.U.I. embarked on NECHE’s process of accreditation, which was a process of seven years, and we received our first accreditation in 2017. In 2018, when the thinking started towards a new strategic plan, the reflection was: ‘Okay, well A.U.I. has now delivered on its mission because NECHE has certified that we have done what we were supposed to do.’ The question then became: ‘Okay, so what do we now do?’

Considering A.U.I.’s history and DNA, the answer came very naturally: ‘Let’s use what we’ve learned to contribute to Morocco’s human development efforts. Let’s capitalize on our experience to act as a living lab to address one of our country’s challenges.’ The colleagues who were working on this came back with a proposal: The economic situation in Morocco included a highly respectable G.D.P. growth of about 3.5 percent per year on average over 20 years. But socio-economically, it had not created enough jobs. 

And especially, there was a challenge of unemployment among young graduates. The team further suggested: ‘Considering the fast pace of change in the world of jobs and employers, shouldn't we also be concerned at A.U.I. about what would happen to our graduates if employers start asking more for technical skills than for general education? So why don't we extend our liberal arts and sciences model to extend our definition of student success as including career success?’

But then a group of faculty said, ‘Well, you guys want to take young Moroccans, and you want to work with them in order to adapt to the fast pace of change of the job market. But you don't realize that for the past few years, we feel that these students of the new generation themselves have been changing!’ Some were saying, ‘Things I’ve done with my students that have worked well for 20 years now no longer work as well. I feel like they are different “breed” as students.’   

And so the team working on strategic planning went out and did some more desk research, and that's when we — I, for one! — discovered the concept of Gen Z for the first time. So the team came back saying, ‘Yes, this generation may be different and what the colleagues are saying may be deeper than we think, and here are characteristics of this new generation. And by the way, there is an elephant in the room, which is the wellbeing mental health of this generation.’

So we decided then that we were going to further extend our model. In addition to augmenting our liberal arts model with a layer we refer to as career success — we called it, actually, R.O.I., return on investment — we’ll add another layer that we called V.O.I., value on investment, or student fulfillment. We decided to work with our student and find ways together that, by the time they graduate, will better equip them to pursue fulfilled lives. We became very excited about these strategic choices. The only trick is that our board approved this in February 2020 to go into effect starting fall 2020, and then we were hit by COVID in March 2020.

LW: Ah, so what ended up happening to life on campus? Were you fully remote during that time? 

AB: When we learned about the wellbeing challenges facing Gen Z, we were initially not seeing anything on campus in relationship to that. The only reason we started looking at this is because the faculty were saying they seem different in their teaching and learning. But we had no challenges with wellbeing whatsoever, and no challenges with mental health. A.U.I. is the only university in Morocco that, since 1999, hired a psychiatrist on a part-time basis for student support. But that was it; there was no mental health issue at all, and certainly not the issue we were reading about in the U.S. studies. 

But when COVID hit, yes, students were away for a semester, and then they came back in the fall of 2020. And when they came back, everything seemed to have changed. So what we were reading about that we were not seeing, we now started seeing. We had one student suicide, albeit not on campus. We had a waiting list to see psychologists that was about five or six weeks. So it was like, ‘Oh my God! We’re starting to see what was already happening in the U.S.!’

And so while our strategic project was forward-looking and aimed at ensuring that by the time our students graduate, they're more resilient and better trained to pursue their fulfillment, they had a problem here and now! And we had to find the solutions, and the solutions that we discovered from universities in the U.S., we really did not think were adapted to us because they were just too expensive and not scalable for us. As we understood it at the time, the ratio of number of students to number of psychological counselors was key. For us, there were two or three challenges with that. One of them was that the Moroccan culture was such that it was a little bit taboo to actually go see a psychologist; two, it's still too expensive. We were thinking, if we go the ‘American’ way, then by the time our students graduate, they would be dependent on a service they cannot afford once they leave the university.

So we started looking for something else. We decided to develop what we called the holistic strategy that is based more on prevention. (But, still, we hired two more psychologists ourselves and another part-time psychiatrist, and we brought down the waiting time on the waiting list to 48 hours. Now we don't have any waiting list at all.) And we started working on this holistic strategy with sleep and sports and nutrition and substance abuse, thinking that we were going to speak to the emergency with the counselors but that we needed to do more work for a more fundamental solution. 

LW: Did you ever anticipate that student wellbeing would become such a big part of your work? How do you feel about it now?

 AB: I have an easy answer: No. I didn't think at all that this was going to be a part of my work! But I believe that we have a critical mass of colleagues who are really passionate about the education that they try to offer. And as a result, from that perspective, I’m not surprised we got into this. Because with the parameters of the current equation, we believe we have to do this because it’s the right thing to do. In the same way that if there’s a problem with employment, you would do something about it, well, you have to do something about this challenge. And it's deeper. And we feel it's more in resonance with the spirit of the liberal arts tradition that, if you really want to make a difference — a meaningful difference — then you cannot afford to ignore this. And it's a wicked problem. I mean, it's not an easy one. So no, I did not expect it at all. But in retrospect, I believe it's part of what we have to do if we're sincere about the kind of difference that we want to make. 

LW: Post-pandemic, what does ensuring students get that “value on investment” look like? What are the priorities from the V.O.I. perspective?

AB: We have decided to work on four pillars. One is to work with our students on purposefulness.* You probably know about all the research that you're more resilient when you have a purpose. Two is working on what we refer to as meaningful relationships. You know this long Harvard study on what makes a good life? So it turns out that the parameter that makes the biggest difference is these meaningful relationships or friendships. And so that's our second pillar.

Our third pillar is about giving or generosity. Since 2004, A.U.I. has had service learning as a requirement. We were developing student skills and we were trying to give back, but we had not thought of it as really benefiting students' mental health or wellbeing. We’ve now discovered we can also use it to loosen the grip of the ego and self-interest and shift the attention away from the self. 

And the last pillar is about an observation, but then we were told that there was also some research for this: Our observation was that in Morocco, we were in a societal transition whereby parents did not seem to be as invested in educating their children. Traditionally, most moms did not work, but now both parents are working and have very little time for the children. And when they have some time for their children, they seem to spend it trying to become friends as opposed to educating. And similarly, when many of our faculty who are my age went to school, the neighborhood was also part of education — the neighbors would see behavior from a kid and would say, ‘No, you do this; you don't do that.’ Similar things could be said about school.

So the feeling was that these components that went into a child's education were weakening. And in parallel, our surveys of our students showed that on average, our students spent 40 to 60 percent of their time on social media. So it was like two phenomena happening in parallel — that on the one hand, they had weaker ties with their own environment and culture, and on the other hand, they were living in some kind of culture not tightly coupled with what they were living in physically. 

And so our assumption at the time was that, well, with this lack of cultural anchoring, one may be less resilient and more fragile. And as a result, we decided that we were going to offer an anchor, and that's what we call the ‘cultural grounding.’ 

So these are the four pillars: purpose, meaningful relationships, giving, and cultural anchoring. Our assumption there — it's a big assumption — is that if we work on these four things and our students get better on these four things during the four years or so that they spend with us, then that would improve their readiness for fulfillment.

LW: How do you go about helping them with those four pillars? Are there required activities? How do you tackle each one?

AB: So maybe there is one more element I should share with you. When we were finishing the work on our strategic plan in early 2020, we asked ourselves the question: What kind of relationship do we want to have vis-a-vis each stakeholder of the university? And the consensus was that vis-a-vis our students, we wanted to serve them the same way we serve our own children.

And so when we thought we were done, and we presented to students and said, ‘Here's the kind of relationship we mean to have with you,’ then almost with one voice, consistently, they would say, ‘Oh, thank you. You're so sweet, but no thank you.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what kind of relationship would you like to have?’ They would say, ‘We already have a pair of parents, so thank you, but the relationship we would like a relationship is that of being a “partner.”’

So we decided that we were going to learn how to partner with our new generation of students. A.U.I. has had a student government from day one, but we decided to create another representative body of students that we call the Student Leadership Council, which is made up of the presidents of each club and association. We have over a hundred clubs, so it's a large thing. The idea was that we were going to learn how to partner through that — through students who were closer to other students day to day. 

And the relationship to your question is that we took the entire V.O.I. strategy to this council. So we already had some ideas. For example, we started the work on purposefulness before we establlished this council. We adopted the human-centered design thinking. We started initially with the graduating cohort because we did not want them to leave without doing it. And then we included it in the work that we do for career preparation. And then we included it in our first-year experience and courses for academic success.

But at some point, we brought it to the students and we said, ‘Here’s our strategy. Here're our four pillars. Here's something that we've already done, but here is what we have not done.’ So they started working on the meaningful relationships. And so they made a plan, and they identified things that we had never thought about. So one of the things they came up with, for example, is that they feel that developing these kinds of relationships has happened for them more when they were working in teams on challenging academic projects. 

For the generosity and giving, we had almost 20 years of work on service learning, but now we were also trying to see how it could be used to contribute to wellbeing. And then for cultural anchoring, we found it more challenging. So we decided to move ahead with some actions while we keep working on the strategy for that. So the something that we did was, starting last year, we decided to offer our students an opportunity to discover our country through the different genres of music in different regions of Morocco. So we had a composer give a semester-long course on this, where over the course of the semester, he actually brought in different bands from different regions of Morocco, and they would talk about the history, the cultural aspect. But at the same time, they would actually play; they would perform. It was interesting, and it looks like the students liked it a lot. We’re now enriching that with a focus on deeper values in our culture and the way they can contribute to strengthening ethical leadership in our students.

LW: Have you been able to find partnership with other institutions along the way as your plans develop and change?

AB: Indeed! You know you sometimes think you're the only one running into a challenge, and then you discover: ‘There are people like me out there.’ It's so delightful and so exciting when you do! So just to say, our connections among colleagues and institutions in the U.S. who have similar passions and are acting on them, I believe, have been — I was going to say instrumental, but not just instrumental — a blessing. 

*The Path to Purpose initiative is A.U.I.’s four-year, campus-wide effort to help students reflect on and develop their sense of purpose. You can read more about it through the LearningWell Coalition. 

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.