By Ebele Orakpo

PROFESSOR Margee Ensign, President  of the American University of Nigeria (AUN), has said that respect for traditional, religious, and cultural heritage of students has brought AUN to its enviable position.

She said this while speaking at the annual national management conference of the Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM) in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. “A commitment to helping our community and society achieve equitable and sustainable prosperity,  where all have the freedom and opportunity to pursue their dreams in peace, is based on respect for the traditional, religious, and cultural heritage of its students.”

The university, she said, prides itself on having a faculty “who are comfortable connecting and applying their theoretical knowledge with the aim of solving social and economic problems.   A  development university trains students to understand and solve problems in accordance with their deepest values and beliefs using  an interdisciplinary approach to  education.

“Cutting-edge universities, she argued, have  increasingly  realised  that the traditional division of learning into airtight, narrow academic specialties is not the best training for the modern world.  This lack of conversation between specialists in most universities has severely limited the understanding of change and the approaches needed to solve  development problems.

“Such development education entails working with people in your local community. For example,  AUN has  an ongoing  sustainability initiative  that provides hands-on training for local people while protecting and enhancing the natural environment,  to  preserve  it for future generations,” she said.

Meanwhile, US-based African Leadership Development Foundation Inc., in conjunction with the pan-African magazine, African Leadership, which reaches an audience of international business and governmental leaders concerned with Africa’s many under-reported success stories, has named the AUN winner of the African Leading Development Institute award for its leadership among Nigerian institutions of higher learning.

The award comes up as part of the 2nd US-Africa Trade, Investment and Exchange Forum in New York City, according to a release by the organisers.

This is the third time AUN will be recognised by the London-based magazine. In 2011, Prof. Margee Ensign won the Distinguished Leadership Award in Personal Excellence, and in 2012, AUN won the African Leading University of the Year Award.