By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

CAIRO - Who am I? What does it mean to be human?

These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering the American University in Cairo during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “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 .

“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.”

In Egypt, 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. “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 in New York.

American University is a private, elite school, expensive and 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 large sum in a country where about half the population lives on about $2 a day.

“We are all rich and spoiled,” said one student, upset that more of her classmates were not more politically aware. American University plays a central role as an intellectual incubator for young people who will become leaders in government and the economy.

The university was founded in 1919 by a group of Presbyterian missionaries. The university was located originally in Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo, a hyper-urban landscape with 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, 105-hectare campus in a suburb called New Cairo.

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 ?

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

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.” .

“We want our students to be imaginative in their fields,” Ms. Anderson added