Mar 1, 2019

The American University in Cairo (AUC), founded in the aftermath of World War I in 1919, has over the years seen monarchs and military men come and go across Egypt's political stage and stood witness to the Arab Spring and 2011 revolution as it unfolded outside its gates on Tahrir Square. This year, the institution, with a global ranking of 420th by QS Top Universities, celebrated its 100th year by inaugurating the Tahrir Cultural Center (TCC) on the site of its original campus in downtown Cairo, where its first graduating class of 28 students received their diplomas in 1923.

One of the first exhibitions presented at the TCC, which opened in February, was “Bint al-Nil/Daughter of the Nile,” featuring paintings by Sherin Guirguis, an Egyptian American artist paying homage to the Egyptian feminist Doria Shafik. The choice of a feminist-focused exhibition seems apt for a university that admitted women in 1928, years ahead of many universities worldwide.

On Feb. 19, 1951, Shafik, founder of Bint al-Nil, a women's party, and an eventual political exile, organized 1,500 women in front of the university and then led them to the nearby parliament building for a demonstration demanding the right to vote. Their four-hour protest was one of the key events leading to Egyptian women's right to vote and to stand for office being enshrined in the 1956 constitution.

The main building on AUC's downtown campus was originally a palace built in the 1870s in neo-Mamluk architectural style as the residence of Ahmed Khairy Pacha, who at the time served as education minister. Ewart Hall, built as an annex to the palace in 1958, has hosted conferences and other events attended by key figures from Egypt and around the world, including the singer Umm Kulthum, the educator Helen Keller, the writers Noam Chomsky and Naguib Mahfouz and a number of politicians and leaders, among them Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Kofi Annan.

When the original campus could no longer accommodate AUC's growing faculties, the university established a new campus on the southeastern edge of the city, in New Cairo. The then-first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, inaugurated the facility in 2009. Today AUC has 5,568 undergraduate students, 56% of whom are women. There are 455 faculty members, 56% of them from Egypt, 21% from the United States and the remaining from various other countries.