A number of Iraqi-American academics meeting over the weekend for a conference on how to rebuild Iraq’s battered higher-education system criticized the Iraqi government’s plan to send thousands of students abroad annually, saying it would lead to a “brain drain” of a new generation of the nation’s top talent.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Malaki has proposed spending a portion of Iraq’s oil wealth to send 10,000 students abroad to Britain, the United States, and elsewhere each year for the next five years to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees.
The plan was derided, however, by Qais Al-Awqati, a professor of medicine at Columbia University, as “failed policy.”
“What will happen is what happened then,” Mr. Al-Awqati said, with a gesture to the audience, many of whom were faculty members at American colleges who had first come to this country to pursue an advanced degree. “We’re all here.”
But other speakers during the two-day meeting, organized by the Embassy of the Republic of Iraq with support from the National Academies, offered possible criteria for selecting students to go abroad, such as giving priority to students studying in fields in which Iraqi universities lack strong faculty members or to those in disciplines seen as critical to help revive the country’s economy and society.
The goal of the Iraqi Academic Conference was to draw together Iraqi and American academics to discuss ways to improve and support Iraqi higher education and to develop collaborations between universities and faculty members in the two countries.
Iraqi higher education has been “cut off for decades,” said A. Hadi Al Khalili, the cultural attaché at the Iraqi embassy here who was involved in organizing the event. “The vision of Iraqi academics has narrowed. We need to broaden their vision.”
A New Strategy
Depleted of resources and isolated during the years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, Iraqi higher education came under further siege during 2006 and 2007, years of heavy sectarian violence that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of Iraqi professors were killed, and thousands more fled the country. Classes were rarely held.
The security situation has since improved, but Iraq needs help to restore its once-flourishing higher-education system, Dr. Al Khalili and other speakers said. Universities must cope with outmoded laboratories and libraries that are short of needed books and reference materials. Research has languished, and many academics who remained in the country are unfamiliar with the latest pedagogical and technological developments.
“We’ve got to teach old guys new tricks,” said Ihsan A. Al-Shehbaz, an adjunct professor of botany at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.
Mr. Al-Shehbaz said he was leaving on Monday for a trip to Sulaimaniya, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He and three other Western professors had already shipped 40 copies of the latest book in the field to give to Iraqi faculty members and graduate students, and planned to hold workshops and seminars.
“Let’s not talk about God reviving Iraq or the Iraqi government reviving Iraq,” Mr. Al-Shehbaz said. “We’ve got to do it, every one of us.”
Salih J. Wakil, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Baylor College of Medicine, recalled that he had been part of a review team that had visited the University of Baghdad’s medical school in 1978. American academics could form similar groups to assess the current state of Iraqi medical schools or other colleges or programs in Iraqi universities, he suggested. They could make recommendations, provide continuing advice, and even help set up laboratories.
Other panelists said that American universities should open their doors to Iraqi faculty members on sabbatical or to delegations of Iraqi university administrators. Nariman Farvardin, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Maryland at College Park, said small groups of Chinese officials regularly visit his institution for one- or two-week training sessions on the latest practices in higher-education administration. Such sessions would be “fairly easy to do” for Iraqi university leaders, he said.
But Iraqi faculty members and students have continued to have difficulty securing visas to travel to the United States, despite a policy shift last fall to permit the Embassy of the United States in Baghdad to accept visa applications. Until then, students were forced to travel to embassies or consulates in neighboring Jordan or Syria.
Haydar Al-Shukri, a professor of applied science at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, said one Iraqi student accepted for graduate studies at Arkansas had been waiting two years for a visa.
Zainab Bahrani, a professor of Near Eastern art and archaeology at Columbia University, said one immediate action the assembled academics could take as a group would be to make an official request to the U.S. Department of State to facilitate Iraqi academic visas.
Ms. Bahrani also argued that the focus could not be solely on building up the capacity of Iraqi faculty members and students. Iraq also needs help restoring its academic resources, like its libraries and museums, she said.
“If you send 10,000 students to the U.S. and they go back to Iraq and there are no books, then it’s useless,” Ms. Bahrani said.
Other speakers proposed repairing Iraq’s research infrastructure through joint projects with American academics. And there is money available to do such work. For example, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide matching funds to support international research partnerships. (The NSF supports the American scientist, while the Gates foundation underwrites the foreign partner.) So far, 32 projects have been awarded $2.5-million apiece, but Turkey is the only Middle Eastern country to apply as part of a team, said Osman Shinaishin, a program officer at the National Science Foundation.
Karim Altaii, a professor of integrated science and technology at James Madison University, said American universities needed to effectively leverage government and philanthropic resources to help support Iraqi higher education. Until now, too often the efforts have been “piecemeal,” said Mr. Altaii, who is now on a fellowship at the State Department focused on studying Iraqi higher education. “There needs to be a strategy.”
Tempering Expectations
But if there was general consensus around Mr. Altaii’s point, fissures remain over the Iraqi government plan to send students overseas. There are also differing views on which students should receive the scholarships. For instance, some speakers expressed concern that students in fields like medicine and engineering could be given priority over those in the humanities or social sciences.
Eric Davis, a professor at Rutgers University, made a plea on behalf of his discipline, political science, which he said was important to helping re-establish Iraqi civil society. “You can have the best science, math, chemistry programs,” he said, “but if you don’t have an environment in which society can function, it doesn’t matter.”
Still others questioned the value of sending students abroad. The money would be better invested in Iraq’s higher-education system, they argued.
Idris Hadi Salih, the minister of higher education and scientific research in Kurdistan, said there is not a single route to restoring Iraqi higher education. Iraq’s parliament has yet to approve the scholarship money, he noted, although he has been using regional-government funds to send some students, as well as academic-support staff, overseas for training in high-need fields, like information technology.
“We’re suffering from a lack of academic staff,” Mr. Salih said. “Our capacity is limited.”
Mr. Salih said he also wished that the Iraqi-Americans attending the conference could visit universities in his region, rather than trying to diagnose the needs of Iraqi higher education from afar. “They need to hear it from us,” he said.
For his part, Dr. Khalili, the Iraqi cultural attaché, said he had a modest goal for the meeting, that Iraqi and Iraqi-American academics would begin to know one another and work together. “Whatever else we get is a bonus,” he said.
Dr. Khalili said one of the next steps would be to build a Web site to link academics and to share resources. Eventually, he hopes more complex institutional partnerships between American and Iraqi universities can be established. But, he said, such high-level relationships “have to be in two-way directions.”
“We realize that this can’t go beyond reality,” he said.
