The library at the American University of Cairo, which aspires to teach students new ways to learn and to think for themselves. Credit Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

CAIRO — When Rafik Gindy graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to become an engineer. So he enrolled at the American University in Cairo and prepared to immerse himself in math and science.

But the university had a different idea.

Mr. Gindy knew what he wanted to be, but did not exactly know who he was. That was what the university wanted him to think about, in a class called “The Human Quest: Exploring the Big Questions.”

“I thought identity was just your name, your culture, but now I know it’s really complex,” said Mr. Gindy, a slender freshman who shook his head at that revelation.

Who am I?

What does it mean to be human?

These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.” During disorientation, the students — 85 percent of them Egyptians — are taught to learn in ways quite at odds with the traditional method of teaching in this country, where instructors lecture, students memorize and tests are exercises in regurgitation.

“It’s different here because there is room for people to express themselves,” said Manar Mohsen, a junior majoring in political science and journalism. “It is not that simple outside, where it is more about conformity.”

Egypt, like much of the Arab world, demands conformity in many corners of life. Education is based on the concept of rote learning, and creativity in the classroom is often discouraged. Students at Cairo University say they memorize and recite, never analyze and hypothesize.

So the idea of a liberal arts education aimed at developing critical thinking skills is often new to the students. That can make for a difficult transition. Plagiarism is often a problem at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, officials here said, because the students — accustomed to rote learning — see nothing wrong with spitting back someone else’s work and have never been held to rigorous academic standards.

Students talked during a break in classes at the American University of Cairo in New Cairo, Egypt. Credit Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

“For a lot of the kids here, the idea that you are supposed to have your own ideas is a novelty,” said Lisa Anderson, the university provost who is on leave from Columbia University. “There was nothing in their previous education that would have exposed them to these standards.”

American University is a private, elite school, although university officials sometimes recoil at the elite label. Yet, the school is expensive and so is generally out of reach for all but the wealthiest families and a handful of scholarship students. Tuition and fees for Egyptian students run about $19,600 a year, a princely sum in a country where about half the population lives on about $2 a day.

The campus exudes affluence. Students joke about the “Gucci corridor,” a spot where well-coiffed students gather each afternoon. There is no cafeteria, only expensive fast-food stands.

“We are all rich and spoiled,” said one student, upset that more of her classmates were not more politically aware. But in some respects, the elite label is a strength. American University plays a central role as a sort of intellectual boot camp for young people who will become leaders in government and the economy.

“If we teach the elite to be good citizens, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Anderson said.

Nabil Fahmy, the former longtime ambassador to the United States, said that over his nine years in Washington, at least 40 percent of the embassy staff was made up of American University graduates, as was he.

The university was founded in 1919 by a group of Presbyterian missionaries. Unlike the satellite campuses of prestigious American universities in oil-rich Persian Gulf states, it is quite homegrown and often reflects the community around it.

The university was located originally in Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo, a hyper-urban landscape where the air is thick, the din overwhelming and the mosaic of Egyptian life on every corner. That was part of the university’s appeal.

But over the years it has grown, and now serves 5,000 undergraduates on an architecturally inspiring, if geographically isolated, $400 million, 260-acre campus in a suburb called New Cairo. Instead of urban grime the campus is surrounded by villas and developments with names like Golden Heights.

American University of Cairo serves 5,000 undergraduates on an architecturally inspiring, $400 million, 260-acre campus. Credit Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times

The location redefined the university just as the university was beginning to redefine itself, as a first-rate university rather than a finishing school for Egypt’s elite. But as the school has grown, so has a conflict within the university itself: can it change its mission while retaining its liberal arts core and preserving classes like the Big Questions?

Some say it needs to move away from that way of thinking.

“We are moving more and more into professional schools, like business, engineering, sciences,” said Mr. Fahmy, the former ambassador, who is the founding dean of a new school of global affairs and public policy.

“The challenge we have now is we have moved from a small college that thought it was a university, to a university that has to change its thinking from being a small college,” he said, defining a view that is anathema to some others on campus.

There are other pressures, too, coming from a society that holds engineers in such high esteem that the profession is also a courtesy title, like doctor.

“The humanities in general, and philosophy specifically, are seen as either frivolous or, at the very least, not financially prudent, by many of the very people who seek what makes A.U.C. unique,” said Nathaniel Bowditch, an assistant professor of philosophy. Dr. Bowditch argued that “learning how to think rather than what to think prepares a person for all professions,” and that without that “the academy becomes nothing more than a trade school.”

For now, the university leadership says it remains committed to its core mission, and will continue to ensure that incoming Egyptian students relearn how to learn, officials here said. “We want our students to be imaginative in their fields,” Ms. Anderson said.

So for the time being, at least, the Big Questions class remains safe, which seems to suit the students just fine.

“I took the course because my brother took it two years ago,” said Mr. Gindy, the freshman construction engineering major. “I like how it explained things we never knew, like how the world began.”

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