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Academic responsibility: The changing mission of HE
A profound change is taking place in our understanding of the mission of higher education. Increasingly, we have realised that academic freedom must be accompanied by the exercise of academic responsibility, in the sense of making a contribution to civil society. Actively responding to societal challenges is one way of doing so – as many universities have demonstrated in the case of COVID-19.
It is by now a commonplace remark that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed everything, everywhere. We should all prepare for a ‘new normal’.
This is true, in particular, for residential universities, whose beautiful and comfortable campuses, in which they have invested so much care and money, were suddenly swept clean of students and professors in early 2020.
Students create a business model for combating hunger
For 35 years Huzaifa Ahmad’s mother opened her home each afternoon to people who were hungry and fed them food she had cooked for them, hundreds of them.
Then one day in 2015 Huzaifa was pondering on the contradiction that lots of eating places throw away food every day when so many had nothing to eat, and he turned to his friend Qasim Javid Khan and said: “There is a lot of food being wasted and a lot of people going hungry. Let’s do something.”
Huzaifa and Qasim were both second year students at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan. Not sure what to do, but with another student friend Musa Aamir, they set up a Facebook page saying: “If anyone has excess food, give us a call.”