AAUW Dialog

Although the permanent home of Marcia Grant, a 1963–64 fellow, is a beautiful old stone farmhouse in a small village in France, when I called her for an interview she was in her apartment in Karachi, Pakistan, waiting out a thunderstorm. She’s been living there since 2005.

Marcia is in Pakistan to oversee the completion of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which would expand the Aga Khan University in Karachi from medical and nursing schools into a comprehensive university with a liberal arts campus. Marcia’s goal is to provide some of the more than 178 million people in Pakistan with an alternative to the traditional style of rote learning and a wider variety of career opportunities through a liberal arts education. Many Pakistani people have been inspired by the work of Marcia and her team, and there are many Pakistani youth currently studying outside of the country who are anxiously awaiting the opportunity to return home to teach in the program Marcia is helping to establish.

When Marcia was nine years old she lived in Mexico. One day a teacher sent her home with a paper about key players in the United Nations, and these people became her role models, helping to solidify her future career in international development. After spending a year in Peru and a summer in Cameroun, Marcia, then 23, went to Nigeria to conduct research about the Nigerian press for her doctoral thesis. The AAUW fellowship Marcia received helped support this field research. She says of the award, “I am very grateful for the fellowship. It made all the difference.”

Marcia stayed in Nigeria for four years, teaching first-year politics at the University of Ibadan. When I asked her how she got along as a 23-year-old white woman in Nigeria in the 1970s, she said she had a wonderful group of Nigerian graduate student friends, she always brought along her flute, and she got good at dancing the highlife, a popular West African style of music. Marcia said that of all her educational experiences, in many respects, Nigeria was one of her most important “universities.”

Marcia went on to have many global adventures, but one of her proudest achievements is the women’s college she helped found: Effat College in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Just last year the college became a university, and now the dean of the school, Haifa Jamal al-Lail, is called “president,” making her the first woman in Saudi Arabia with that title.

Although Marcia’s team is finishing up and plans to be out of Pakistan by the end of the year, it sounds like her home in France won’t have company for long. She plans to go back and forth between France and Pakistan until the university is finished. Looking into the future, Marcia feels she has one more university in her. Her dream is to start a women’s university somewhere in the developing world.

This back and forth between developing the university in Pakistan and finding refuge in her home in rural France seems to exemplify Marcia’s favorite quote by Gerard Manley Hopkins: “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Hopkins knew that beneath all the politics and the developing and the building is the ability for nature to bloom and prosper.