New Campus, in New Cairo

Entrance to the AUC Press bookstore.

Out the window of the construction site office, “I’m actually looking directly out at the back of the playing field where we have our football field, as they call it, a soccer field, I call it (being from Canada), and the track that goes around it.... I can see the tennis court; I can see the back of our indoor facilities. I can’t see the pool but I know it’s right there beside it.”

Looking to the left, Paul Donoghue sees a cluster of academic buildings constructed around the new campus’s central spine, though his line of sight doesn’t extend all the way down to the 400 meter-long University Garden on the other end, all the plants but the date palms propagated and grown at the university’s Desert Development Center.

“It’s not just an issue of a quantitative difference in space, but also significantly a qualitative difference,” says Donoghue, vice president for planning and administration at American University in Cairo. The nearly 90-year-old institution is moving this fall from its historic, yet small and fragmented, location downtown to the new, $400 million, 260-acre campus on the city’s eastern outskirts in what’s called “New Cairo.”

Read the rest of the article at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/13/cairo