Meet the man leading Zayed University's move into a new kind of education

Dr Michael Allen says the institution's focus on interdisciplinary studies will prepare students for a fast-changing world of work

Dr Michael Allen was recently appointed provost and chief academic officer of Zayed University. Photo: Dr Michael Allen

As the UAE works to transform its economy, higher education will have a central role in ensuring that employers have a pool of skilled jobseekers to draw on.

Zayed University, one of the country’s three federal universities, has taken its responsibilities in this regard seriously by introducing what some might see as a radical curriculum.

Traditional subject divisions are being put aside with, instead, the university offering four interdisciplinary programmes — business transformation, social innovation, computational systems and sustainability — to Emirati and non-Emirati applicants.

Among those leading this change is Dr Michael Allen, an American historian and author.

Now in his 17th year at Zayed University, he was recently appointed provost and chief academic officer.

“As higher education institutions typically don’t move very quickly or change course very often, it’s exciting to be working in higher education at a time and in a place where we can see the results of our efforts in, for universities, a very short time,” said Dr Allen, who has worked at universities in the US, Canada and New Zealand.

Preparing students for future job market

Zayed University is, Dr Allen said, trying to “stay ahead of the curve” and transforming its curriculum so that students would be ready for a world of work that is changing quickly.

Employees will have to be prepared to adapt and learn new skills during their careers, and Dr Allen said the new approach could help to “inculcate that attitude in our students before they even leave the university”.

“While our programmes in many ways seem to be a departure from traditional higher education curriculums, they are intended to meet the same need which traditional curriculums met, which is to prepare students for the job market,” he said.

“It’s just that the market has changed so dramatically that we felt that our approach to education had to change quite substantially to stay out in front of that.”

Dr Allen acknowledged that the university’s new approach may have seemed like too radical a change to some, but he said that the new courses did not lack subject-based content and were taught by experts in their field.

“We have tried to bring disciplines together so that the insights from one discipline, history in my case for example, are informed by not just the information that comes from other disciplines, but the ways of approaching knowledge that come from other disciplines,” he said.

“We believe not only that the problems of the world resist disciplinary solutions — the problems of the world are complex and interdisciplinary — but we also believe that the most innovative solutions to problems come at the boundaries of traditional disciplines.”

As well as changing course content, Zayed University, which was founded in 1998 and has campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, is teaching in a different way, one that “require[s] a lot from students”, Dr Allen said.

“They have to be engaged in their own learning,” he said. “It’s not an educational approach where you can sit in the back of the class and hope that the instructor won’t notice you and make it to lunchtime without having to do anything dangerous.”

In this “highly active, highly experiential” system for people “who want to be leaders and not just employees”, students will move in and out of the workplace during their university career.

The approach is “not for everybody”, but Dr Allen said that those students who wanted to deal with cutting-edge problems and to be exposed to new ways of thinking would “receive something they couldn’t get at any other institution”.

It offers the ideal preparation, he said, for young people who may in their careers end up dealing with challenges linked to the circular economy, green energy or the fourth industrial revolution, the umbrella term for fields including artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality and more.

Zayed University is one of the three federal universities in the UAE. Photo: Zayed University

Interdisciplinary education

The university is, Dr Allen said, committed to interdisciplinary education for the long term. Alongside the new courses, it continues to offers its conventional arts and creative enterprises degrees.

Interest appears to be growing.

About 1,000 students enrolled on the new interdisciplinary degrees in the 2022-2023 academic year compared to 120 in their inaugural 2021-2022 academic year.

Zayed University’s move towards interdisciplinary studies reflects a wider interest in breaking down subject barriers.

Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Oxford and author of books including Higher Education and the Common Good, said that interdisciplinary studies had become “an active area of consideration” in the past two decades because “disciplines narrow things”.

“I think practical problem-solving lends itself to an interdisciplinary approach,” he said. “Business is a natural area for interdisciplinary [studies]; some parts of engineering also.”

He said, however, that there was still “strong demand” from students for pure academic disciplines, albeit with a few exceptions such as philosophy.

While pure disciplines may not point as directly to careers, Prof Marginson, who has worked at universities in Australia as well as the UK, said degrees in these subjects could usefully be followed by vocational training.

“There’s a fair bit of evidence that employers [like] that double combination of a general degree with lots of sophisticated language and analytical concepts, with something more vocationally specific, like accountancy,” Prof Marginson said.

At Zayed University, the hope is that the new curriculum will appeal to Emirati and non-Emirati students, and to men and women.

Set up originally to teach female Emiratis, the university has broadened its entry criteria, but male students are outnumbered, as is the case in UAE higher education as a whole.

Under the new curriculum, Dr Allen expects the university to move closer to gender parity, and there are signs that this is happening, with a 65:35 ratio of females to males in the first intake, compared to the institution’s traditional ratio of about 80:20.

Dr Allen said, though, that it was a good thing that the university continued to attract large numbers of female Emiratis.

“We do have a deep commitment to and a long history of engagement with higher education for Emirati women and we continue to be committed to that even as our mission has changed,” he said.

In terms of his own role, Dr Allen said that some might imagine academic life to be mundane, but his working life had been anything but.

“Other than maybe a career in skydiving, I can’t imagine a more exciting career,” he said. “For me, the rewards that come from an academic career I find difficult to imagine in any other sort of career.

“You’re moulding generations of leaders and watching them go out into the world … To see them go out and do that based on the experiences they’ve had at university, whether it’s been in the US or New Zealand or here in the UAE, is just extraordinarily rewarding.”

Zayed University — in pictures

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  Zayed University describes itself as one of the Middle East’s leading universities for student development and research. All photos: Zayed University

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  Zayed University's president is Noura Al Kaabi, Minister of Culture and Youth.

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  Degrees for Emirati students are free of charge. Fees for international students are dependent on the degree type and programme.

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  From the autumn term this year, Zayed University will offer four new degree programmes: business transformation, social innovation, sustainability and computational science.