Faculty members at two Egyptian universities staged silent demonstrations this month, publicly joining an anti-government protest movement that has been gaining momentum across the country.
At Cairo University, the nation’s largest, more than 100 faculty members gathered silently in front of the main administrative building, some carrying signs with pro-democracy slogans. They called for an end to interference by Egypt’s state-security services in many aspects of academic life, including hiring decisions by individual departments and the content of lectures.
A day earlier, according to Cairo professors, about 30 faculty members held a similar protest at Menia University. The university is located in a religiously conservative town about 150 miles south of Cairo.
Mustapha Kamel El-Sayed, a professor of political science at Cairo University, said the protests were organized by an informal faculty organization known as the 9th of March group. It holds a ceremony each year on March 9 to reassert the autonomy of Egyptian universities.
Protests that are organized by academics and are explicitly critical of the state are a startlingly new phenomenon in Egypt, where universities have long been essentially politics-free zones. Students are forbidden from distributing information about political parties, for example, and student-council elections are monitored by state-security officers to ensure that national politics aren’t being discussed on campus.
But since February, when Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, announced that Egypt would hold its first multi-candidate elections later this year, public expressions of dissent have become far more common. Thousands of students participated in a multi-campus demonstration against Mr. Mubarak this month, defying the ban against campus political activity.
Amr Attiyeh, an oncology professor at Cairo University’s medical school, said the recent protests have created great excitement on the campus, even among those who did not participate. “This is the first time that Cairo University professors have protested against the government,” Dr. Attiyeh said.
Mr. El-Sayed said police interference is a constant thorn in the side of academics. “Last year I invited a TV anchor to deliver a guest lecture on globalization,” he said. “The security services ordered me to cancel the lecture, with no explanation. Now more of us are speaking out against this interference.”
Faculty protests were expected to continue at other campuses, Cairo professors said.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 51, Issue 34, Page A39