NEWS
Students might soon take finals on their understanding of the Arabic language, attend community dance performances, and sample foods from across the world through the College of Arts and Letters. That is, if Dean Manjunath Pendakur can raise enough funds to create the Middle East Institute at FAU.
Pendakur and Robert Rabil, an assistant political science professor, along with a committee of other interested professors, are working on creating an institute that would educate students and the community about Middle Eastern culture. Currently, the institute is in the planning and fundraising stage.
“The dream is big. Our hope is that we’ll raise upward of $5 million for this activity that can make a big impact,” Pendakur said.
The big impact he hopes to make is one that affects students and the surrounding community.
For example, the Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics would teach Arabic, and the Department of History would offer classes on the history of the Middle East. Also, Pendakur hopes that the institute will facilitate communication between religious communities around FAU through public events.
Rabil also aims to use the institute as a vessel of community outreach.
“This institute, God willing, is going to be not only important on the local level but on the regional and international levels,” Rabil said. He believes that the Middle East Institute is especially important in today’s world because the Middle East is at the focus of U.S. politics.
Beyond giving students a textbook understanding of the region, Rabil hopes the institute will help them understand the culture even better than those running for government offices.
“You have senatorial candidates that don’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni in the Middle East,” Rabil said. “The most important thing is importing knowledge [of the Middle East] to the students of FAU and building a new generation that is versed in the issues of today.”
Don’t expect to see a physical institute being built on the Boca campus. The Middle East Institute would mainly be composed of classes, ideas and events. Right now, it exists in the idea sense, as the committee is still feeling out exactly what the institute will comprise of.
Still, the committee does have the solid ideas of credit classes for FAU students, cultural dance performances for the community, film screenings, lectures, and even professors visiting from the Middle East. With all these facets, Pendakur and Rabil insist that the institute is being formulated under one goal: to foster understanding.
“Our hope is that this would only help people understand each other better. So, if that is considered opening a can of worms, so be it,” Pendakur said.
