Between
Saddam and the American Occupation:
The old regime was no friend to
academic values. But Iraqi academics discover that life after liberation and
occupation poses new threats to these same values.
By Keith Watenpaugh
On
a cheerless Friday afternoon in January 2003, shortly before the American-led
invasion of
In
June 2003, shortly after the fall of the Baathist
regime, and after the
We
discovered that the dour mood of the prewar period had been replaced by genuine
excitement. The street was filled with Iraqis and others, poring over titles
and buying armloads of books. Many, especially those on Shiite Islam, had been
written by banned authors. This time, however, the titles also included books
looted from
The
old Baathist tracts were gone, but book dealers had
taken to selling artists' renderings of Imams Ali and Hussein, the Prophet
Muhammad's son-in-law and grandson, who are the most revered figures in Shiite
Islam. Next to them were photographs of bearded Islamic scholars like the Grand
Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the murdered father of Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Even
The
differences—and the stark continuities—between my two visits to al-Mutanabbi Street symbolize the larger problems facing
Ultimately,
to help create a viable national community and open society, Iraqi higher
education will first need to be restored to a firm and independent footing. And
the country's vast reservoir of academics must be reintegrated into
international networks of professional exchange as colleagues, friends, and
equals. How institutions outside of
Before
the War
While
we were in
The
architect Hussam al-Rawi
contributed to our understanding as well. Trained in
Among
our other interlocutors were two Iraqis who had returned to the country as
advisers to the CPA's Ministry of Higher Education: Issam
Khafaji and Farouq Darweesh. Khafaji is a leading
Iraqi dissident who has taught in the
All
the people we interviewed emphasized a pattern of systematic abuse and corruption
of higher education and scholarly re-search by the Baathist
state apparatus; they also related anecdotes about acts of individual cronyism
and the mental and physical abuse of professors by members of the ruling elite.
At the same time, they conveyed the sense that the Iraqi system of higher
education and professional development had no inherent flaws. Rather, social
forces exterior to the universities had robbed the institutions of their
prestige, vitality, rigor, and overall excellence.
Baathist policies toward higher education in
Others
point to the mid-1980s as the period that the system broke down altogether,
with the near collapse of scholarly exchange after the state made travel abroad
contingent upon ranking membership in the party. Before this time, Iraqi
academics enjoyed the right to travel abroad to conferences and meetings;
often, the state subsidized their expenses. Still, the security services
considered those who spent time abroad suspect, and these academics could face
harassment and interrogation on their return. Reduced freedom to travel had its
cognate in the abandonment of the tradition of earning at least one higher
degree at a school in Europe or
Although
most Iraqis who completed graduate work before 1979 did so abroad, few studied
overseas between 1980 and the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991. After the war,
almost no one did. The handful who traveled enjoyed close
ties to the ruling elite. For the humanities and social sciences, this lack of
mobility has been especially detrimental: foreign language ac-quisition has been poor and exposure to contemporary
research almost nonexistent. An entire generation of junior professors has been
unable to spend time abroad, attend international conferences, and build
connections with colleagues outside of
The
state used rewards and punishments in the tenure-and-promotion process to
induce and ensure loyalty. Iraqi universities employed, and still use, a tiered
system of faculty advancement accompanied by a kind of tenure that guarantees
employment but not necessarily rank. Ideally, movement from lecturer to
assistant professor to professor is based on successful teaching and a review
of research and publications by external evaluators.
But
in the late 1980s and 1990s, the regime made it increasingly easy for party
members to move through the ranks. Salaries, which were low even by academic
standards, were tied to rank. When one became an administrator or a chair,
one's salary increased steeply. Membership in institutions such as the
Sousa
left the university out of frustration in the early 1990s to work with the
United Nations. But she looked back fondly on her career in the academy. She said
that women professors received support for their research and development until
the mid-1980s, when the system became untenable. Her experience highlights the
fact that state policy encouraged women's access to higher education and
faculty positions. Not only was this policy in line with Baathist
tenets of secular equality, but it was also a pragmatic response to the
demographic realities created by the slaughter of many young Iraqi men in the
Iran-Iraq war.
Setting
issues of academic corruption aside, al-Rawi told me
a story after the war that he had neglected to tell me earlier about the
potential for arbitrary horror inherent in the old system. Luay
Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's most favored nephews, failed a required
engineering course because of attendance problems. Al-Rawi,
as head of the engineering section at the time, had to inform the nephew of
this fact. In retribution, young toughs from Luay's
entourage severely beat and maimed the professor who gave Luay
the failing grade and later tried to ambush al-Rawi
himself on the street. When the president's office learned of the occurrence, a
staged, videotaped beating of Luay's accomplices was
produced and shown to the faculty at
The
story underscores the vulnerable position of Iraqi academics in the prewar
period. Those in the arts and humanities were especially at risk, because they
did not have an obviously pragmatic value to the state, as did their colleagues
in the sciences. Historians were in constant danger, as the state placed a
premium on the maintenance of an ideologically "correct" portrayal of
the past.
Most,
if not all, Iraqi historians and other academics with international reputations
left the country over the three decades preceding the war to assume
better-paying or less-restrictive positions in the Arab Gulf, Jordan,
"After"
the War
The
co-authors of Opening the Doors surveyed conditions at three campuses in
the capital:
Postwar
looting harmed all state institutions, universities, libraries, and research
centers, although some looting and destruction was limited to the theft of
computers and other easily replaceable items. Vandals damaged classrooms and
research spaces; even in places they did not physically destroy, they stole
chairs, tables, blackboards, windows, and doors. Objects of unique value are
gone. And missing items extend beyond old Ottoman archives, historic
manuscripts, books, and documents. Student records and transcripts—the mundane
trappings of everyday life in a modern educational system—also disappeared.
Of
more pressing concern is the overt politicization of campuses that threatens to
suppress open exchange and freedom of thought. Incidents involving harassment
of nonveiled women students and teachers,
student-on-student violence, and assassinations of administrators occur often.
Conservative
estimates place at thirteen the number of academics murdered in
Women faculty note that their position in higher education
has changed for the worse over the past decade, and they worry that it will
continue to decline despite the fact that, historically, women have held
positions of prominence in Iraqi higher education and female students make up
at least 50 percent of the student population.
In
spite of the onerous circumstances, including a lack of tables, chairs,
examination booklets, and even chalk, by June 2003 the normal rhythm of the
academic year had begun to return to the city's campuses. Students, excited and
happy to be at school, had set up makeshift cafeterias, where they enjoyed each
other's company. They were all well dressed—a major accomplishment given the
heat and lack of running water. Their professors complained about them in ways
comparable to what we say about our own undergraduates, suggesting a certain
return to normalcy. The resourcefulness and adaptability of Iraqi faculty and
students were readily in evidence.
The
Occupation
In
the middle of the 2002-03 academic year, the
occupation authorities had forced sweeping administrative changes at all Iraqi
universities: CPA officials dismissed the presidents of universities and deans
of faculties as well as most department heads. Where CPA influence was minimal,
faculty elections proceeded smoothly on a consensual basis. At that time, the
heart of discontent at universities, as in other sectors of society, stemmed
from the CPA's ham-fisted purges of ranking Baathists.
Although the CPA subsequently abandoned this policy, it left a bitter residue
in the relations between the CPA and the academy.
By
the time my colleagues and I arrived, the CPA had lost much of the support and
goodwill it enjoyed after the overthrow of the old regime. Its perceived
inability to manage the basic needs of everyday life in the capital—for public
safety, electricity, water, telephone communication, and gasoline—was the main
cause of that loss. Few of our contacts then expressed virulent
anti-Americanism, but that has begun to change.
We
noticed a mounting frustration, even among members of the large educated Iraqi
middle class who had been willing to give the Americans the benefit of the
doubt, and who saw the occupation as a tremendous opportunity. For some, this
frustration has turned into radical antipathy toward the American presence and
assistance efforts. Those who are disaffected in this way make easy recruits
for the increasingly organized paramilitary resistance.
Adding
to the general sense of disempowerment was the perception that the CPA was
institutionally indifferent to the needs of Iraqis. The CPA's choice of Saddam
Hussein's former palace, for example, as the base of its operations and the
future site of the U.S. Embassy, sent confusing and mixed signals to the Iraqi
people. CPA officials themselves seemed in a permanent state of lockdown in the
so-called Green Zone, the high-security cantonment where
Although
this article goes to press just after the June 2004 handover of sovereignty to
an Iraqi government, it is already clear that the
Universities,
without independent budgets or endowments and with
The
The
appointment by the CPA of John Agresto as senior
adviser to the Ministry of Higher Education is one example of how
His
appointment signaled that the CPA intended to staff its bureaucracy with
politically loyal agents, rather than with those most objectively qualified to
assist
Agresto's last day in
Beyond
an ugly ethnocentrism and an unwillingness to shoulder any responsibility for
American failures in
Despite
Agresto's bleak assessment, the Iraqi interim
government took the bold move of appointing a university professional, Tahir al-Bakaa', as minister of
higher education in June 2004. A historian of the modern Middle East, al-Bakaa' had been elect-ed president of
Among
the many papers I brought back with me from
Keith Watenpaugh is assistant professor of
Islamic and Middle Eastern history at Le Moyne
College and associate director of peace and global studies. This fall, he is a
visiting scholar at Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His book, Being
Modern in the Middle East: Modernity, Colonialism, and the Emergence of the
Middle Class, is under contract with