BY: Khaled Al-Abdulhadi
KUWAIT: The British council organized an academic meeting between Leeds University along with private and public higher education institutions to share experiences regarding development and leadership structures of an expanding institutions. Country director at the British Council, Anthony Skinner said: "We are delighted to have Leeds university with us giving their talk about academic leadership and to have such a good representation from local sectors in Kuwait,” stressing that the dialogue has been informative form both sides, as the British Council we look to foster international links between the Kuwait and the UK. "We are hopeful that this would lead to further discussions potential opportunities and partnership and development in institutions in the UK and in Kuwait.”
Skinner said that the initiative has been well received by both private and public universities in Kuwait. "This is the first of a series of discussion events. Other ones will be in December where we will be looking at quality assurance and in January which will be about AI, and we are going to discuss ways on how the UK is responding to problems of AI,” he clarified.
Dr Rhona Riley, Associate professor of cardiac physiology and deputy director of student education at Leeds institute of Cardiovascular and metabolic medicine said: "We were invited to hold a seminar about academic leadership that discuss higher education structures in the UK, and applying them here, as Kuwait is looking to strengthen and diversifying economic structure by expanding universities and training to make Kuwait self-sufficient in all areas and grow beyond energy fuel.
"The general idea is that local solutions should be delivered by local people. In Kuwait, issues aren’t highly understood with regard to development, as local population should be developed locally, as is the situation with all countries,” she clarified indicating that self-reliance is a vital part of development. Dr Arezou Harraf, Head of the Department of Business Studies at Box Hill College "I think this is a good initiative because it brings leaders from private universities in Kuwait and benchmarking it to international institutions provides an opportunity for everyone to discuss common problems and come up with framework for those problems in an informative format.”
DR Piruthivi Sukumar, Associate professor and ProDean in International faculty for Medicine and health at University of Leeds said: "The British council found that a lot of universities have come up, so any organization would need leaders who would develop them, especially in academics, as universities in the past had big professors as leaders, but leading is different from being a professor.
You need to work with people, have financial skills, management skills, and more.” "Developing academic leaders even for the UK is a challenge, and for new universities in Kuwait it is a big challenge,” he said indicating that they identified it would be good to hear from experienced leaders in universities to found structures in order to transfer that knowledge.
Regarding sharing structural experiences, he said: "You need to develop leadership not just managing who is delegating the tasks. A leader makes people buy into their vision so that all can benefit,” he clarified. Dr Sukumar revealed that there are flaws in the system, and they are discussing our problem solving experiences so local universities can benefit from it.