Universities should consider remodelling courses around global development challenges rather than disciplines, the president of a leading Saudi university has suggested.

Speaking at Times Higher Education¡¯s Global Sustainable Development Congress, Tony Chan, who has led King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)?since 2018, said higher education institutions should be ready to tear up traditional discipline-led teaching and offer more interdisciplinary courses based around Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as sustainable cities, clean water and sanitation and marine conservation.

¡°When I was younger students would say, ¡®I want to study mathematics or science.¡¯ Today students are much more interested in studying sustainability, and are much more motivated by SDGs,¡± said?Professor Chan,?a former California Institute of Technology professor who led Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for nine years.

These courses could include ¡°some economics, some science and some mathematics¡±, explained Professor Chan at the event at the University of Glasgow. He urged universities to ¡°have interdisciplinary courses in these areas ready¡± for students given the changing interests of potential undergraduates.

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Speaking to?THE?after the talk, Professor Chan said that this type of curricular change reflected the set-up of his own graduate-only university, which is organised around research themes, such as clean water or green energy, rather than disciplines.

¡°We have a lot of chemists but no chemistry department,¡± he explained, adding that these chemists might be working on?ways to improve water desalination. ¡°Not everyone has the luxury of doing away with departments so they can work in this way,¡± he added of his institution, which was founded 13 years ago with a $20 billion (?17.4 billion) endowment.

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Professor Chan also defended the situation faced by women in Saudi Arabia, and pointed to KAUST¡¯s own record on gender equality ¨C one of the United Nations¡¯ 17 SDGs ¨C as a reason to be optimistic. Forty per cent of its students are women, of whom two-thirds are PhD candidates, he said.

¡°Anywhere in the world it is difficult to attract women students in STEM subjects,¡± said Professor Chan, who described the proportion of female graduate students at KAUST as ¡°quite amazing¡±.

¡°Finding female faculty is more challenging ¨C the problem isn¡¯t culture as everyone wants to do it. But we don¡¯t want to people to say a female faculty member was hired because she was female ¨C it has to be on academic quality,¡± he added. Professor Chan said he was, however, delighted to hire a Saudi-born female researcher who had taken her PhD at Imperial College London before moving to Caltech. ¡°She could really write her own ticket, and I hope she will be an inspiration to others,¡± he said.

Reflecting on the relatively recent gender shift within science, Professor Chan, who is 70 years old, said: ¡°When I graduated from Caltech [in the 1970s], I did so with the very first women to go there ¨C so, even in my lifetime there has been huge change. These things can take time.¡±

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jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com