Hundreds of students have set up camp outside the Ministry of Higher Education in downtown Cairo, hanging banners, laying out mats, and stowing duffel bags under the building’s awning. “I’m a graduate. I’m specialized. I have skills,” reads one sign. “But I can’t find a job.”
“We young people are the ones who started the revolution. But we’re not considered important,” says one of the protesters, Abdelrahman Nada, a student at one of Egypt’s industrial-education colleges, where, after a series of mismanaged government reforms, degrees have become essentially worthless.
Although problems at his college have dragged on for years, Mr. Nada and thousands like him see Egypt’s recent revolution as their first chance for real reform in higher education. Across the Middle East, the story is the same: Hundreds of thousands of young people graduate each year from overcrowded, underfinanced universities and find themselves without job prospects. As many as one third of Arabs in their 20s can’t find work, and studies show that pursuing higher education actually increases one’s chances of being unemployed. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, only 29 percent of young Egyptians think the leadership in their country “maximizes youth potential.”
Young people’s indignation over their meager opportunities contributed to the revolts and protests that are sweeping the region. And now governments both in power and in transition are suddenly faced with high expectations and clear demands.
Even in the more politically stable countries, such as Saudi Arabia, rulers are hastily offering government jobs, concessions, and subsidies for education and research in an effort to demonstrate that they are addressing these problems.
“Including young people has never been a priority in the entire Arab Muslim world,” says Rachid Benmokhtar Benabdellah, head of Morocco’s National Observatory for Human Development. “But it’s become a priority now.”
Change Under Way
In Egypt and Tunisia, where political reforms have already begun, universities are undergoing historic changes.
The secret police, which used to approve key academic matters—faculty hiring, visits by foreign scholars, trips abroad—and interfere in student and faculty elections, are gone. Universities now arrange their own private security.
For the first time in more than half a century, universities are holding free and open elections for student unions, with neither Islamists nor opponents of the government being excluded. Campus officials are appointing teaching assistants who haven’t been vetted by the intelligence services.
Protests against corruption, ties to the former regime, and the repression of campus politics haven’t been limited to national universities but have also touched private institutions, like the German University in Cairo, the American University in Cairo, and Al Azhar University, a historic seat of Islamic learning.
University administrators are also facing a flood of demands, from both students and faculty—demands voiced with a new assertiveness.
At Alexandria University, Fouad Sharkawi, vice dean of student affairs in the Faculty of Arts, points ruefully to his desk: “I have many papers here in front of me. Students come to my office all day long.”
The students who wait every day outside his door are there seeking relief from overcrowded classrooms, revisions to the way exams are graded, and the inclusion of student representatives in faculty and administrative meetings.
“Everybody wants more rights,” says the university’s president, Hind Hanafy, during a hurried break from a meeting with assistant lecturers and teaching assistants, who were asking for raises. “Of course they are right,” she says of the request. Their salaries should be triple what they are now, she suggests, but she has no way of granting such raises at the moment.
“Everyone is very anxious” for change, Ms. Hanafy adds, smiling but also looking somewhat overwhelmed. “And they are not giving you any time.”
The challenges facing universities throughout the Middle East and North Africa are staggering.
Governments across the region have overseen an enormous expansion in higher-education enrollments in recent years without a corresponding increase in funds. As a result, the flood of students has nearly debilitated many universities. In Egypt, the region’s most populous country, the number of college students doubled from 1997 to 2007, reaching nearly two million. Cairo University alone has more than 200,000 students, yet its overflowing lecture halls can accommodate only half of the students enrolled in certain classes.
Institutions have dealt with this increased demand by expanding humanities programs, which don’t require the same infrastructure as science departments or the same level of math and science skills among applicants. Instructors’ salaries, which account for the bulk of campus budgets, are low, investment in research facilities minuscule. According to a 2009 report from the Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, which promotes education and development in the Arab world, spending on scientific research does not exceed 0.3 percent of the gross domestic product in most Arab countries. By contrast, the United States spends 2.6 percent of its GDP on such research.
“For populist reasons,” says Ridha Chennoufi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis, “we’ve adopted an educational policy of quantity over quality,” setting admission standards too low and allowing unqualified students into universities.
The result, says Feisal Yunis, a professor of psychology at Cairo University, is that today “we have a community of students that are not completely fit to to receive university education, and a community of scholars that are not well qualified to teach at universities.”
Without a serious reallocation of resources—and with the exception of Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich emirates of the Persian Gulf, which have the money but face political, social, and demographic challenges of their own—most countries in the region don’t have the means to significantly increase their higher-education budgets.
Both limiting enrollment and raising student fees are considered politically impossible now.
Professors and administrators have suggested a variety of other measures, like promoting distance learning, breaking up large universities into smaller institutions, soliciting financial support from the business sector, and creating postgraduate training programs to provide the job skills that universities don’t.
“We need to look at other experiments in development,” says Mr. Yunis, mentioning South Korea, Malaysia, and Turkey as models that have made education a high priority and developed dynamic economies.
But even radical higher-education reforms would address only one part of the problem, warns Lahcen Achy, a resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, in Beirut, who is an expert on development and labor markets in the Middle East and North Africa.
Students need jobs once they graduate, he points out. “In the past, the public sector was a large provider of jobs for university graduates. But with the public sector shrinking in all these countries, ... there is a need to have a private sector.”
The absence of that private sector, says Mr. Achy, is “related to the business environment, to institutions, to the prevalence of corruption, to the lack of incentives for real entrepreneurs compared to people who are connected to the regime.”
In Tunisia and Egypt, countries where the president’s family members and close associates monopolized most resources and opportunities, there is some hope of opening up the economy. But the process will be long and fraught. In the short term, says Mr. Achy, governments must communicate. “People need to understand that you cannot solve the issue of youth unemployment in one or two years,” he says. “There is no magic bullet.”
Ousting Loyalists
Deeper restructuring may loom in the distance. Right now, at universities in Egypt and Tunisia, the focus is on installing new leadership and applying the revolutions’ democratic ideals on campus.
Raja Bouziri, a professor of sociolinguistics in Tunisia, says that at an arts-and-multimedia institute where she teaches, students have begun demanding, “When will get computers? When will we have better Internet access?”
But the more significant change, she says, has to do with governance, not money. After decades of repression, “people want to change the hierarchical relationships” within universities, “to democratize relationships.”
The move toward greater participation and accountability has begun, for many, with the replacement of university leaders. University heads in Tunisia and Egypt, as in many other Arab countries, were appointed by the president. Administrators were vetted by the intelligence service, and many allegedly collaborated with them. Political loyalty was the criterion for advancement, critics say, rather than performance, and administrators’ No. 1 job was to keep universities politically quiescent.
In Tunisia, administrators with close ties to the disbanded party of the former dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, have been dismissed. “Those who were named to their positions by Ben Ali,” says Mr. Chennoufi, of Tunis, “they have no legitimacy in the eyes of their colleagues, and they’ve been replaced.”
Now he and his colleagues are looking forward to promised elections for top university posts, he says. “We want university structures administered by elected and not appointed officials.”
Egypt’s Ministry of Higher Education is also reportedly working on a proposed law that would set up a more democratic selection process for university and department heads.
In the meantime, Egyptian universities are witnessing ad hoc attempts to remove figures associated with the old regime immediately. Students and professors have staged dozens of marches and sit-ins on campuses across the country, demanding the resignation of university presidents and deans—and, in a few cases, succeeding.
The Faculty of Mass Communication at Cairo University has been home to one of the most heated battles of this new era. Many students and faculty there are adamant that the dean, Sami Abdel Aziz, a senior member of the former president’s ruling party, must go. After weeks of protests, students locked Mr. Abdel Aziz and the faculty’s board of directors inside a meeting room for several hours. The dean called in the army, and the soldiers’ behavior in removing the protesters—beating them and using tasers—caused an uproar.
The protests have continued, and today the faculty is riven between the deans’ supporters and his opponents, who have spray-painted messages such as “We Hate You Dr. Sami” and “I Want to Be Free” on the building’s walls.
Mr. Abdel Aziz has reportedly submitted his resignation, but it was refused by the university’s higher council, which is made up of fellow deans. “It’s against the law and against tradition” to remove a dean this way, says Fadia Elwan, vice dean of the Faculty of Arts. Perhaps more important, Mr. Abdel Aziz’s colleagues fear that his removal will lead to the same for other deans, and to continued unrest.
“Everything will break down,” says Ms. Elwan, who adds that while she is “supportive” of the protests on her campus, “I can’t do this every day.” Students and professors should be a bit more patient, she argues, allowing replacements to be made in an orderly manner over the summer break.
But Ahmad Gamal, one of the protesting students in mass communication, says the argument that time is needed for an orderly transfer “is the same argument Mubarak used.” Many university administrators were “agents of state security,” he says, and they are afraid of stepping down because as soon as they do, their records will be examined and their “corruption” exposed.
Mr. Gamal says that while students and faculty are focused on the university’s political independence, they also want to carry out academic and administrative reforms. In the Faculty of Mass Communication, he hopes that a new administration will tackle overenrollment and lack of access to labs and practical training.
Quick Fixes
Elsewhere in the region, universities continue to play a pivotal role in the unrest.
San’a University has been a gathering point for protesters in Yemen, who in the early days of the uprising against President Ali Abdullah Saleh were mostly students and professors. In Saudi Arabia, many of the signatories of an online petition calling for the kingdom to become a constitutional monarchy and grant greater civic rights are university professors.
In countries where there have been rumblings of discontent but no outright rebellions, governments have hastily announced initiatives that seem designed to pacify students and researchers, and to show that leaders are focusing on the problem of job creation.
King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia recently unveiled a number of government giveaways, including a $500 payment to all university students and full financing for all Saudis pursuing university degrees abroad.
In Algeria, which has been rocked by student strikes, President Abdelaziz Bouteflika repealed an unpopular higher-education-reform law and revealed a plan to build hundreds of research centers and laboratories and train 60,000 lecturers.
In Morocco, the government has pledged $63.4-million to support research and development and encourage university/business partnerships. Authorities also said government jobs would go to 4,304 university graduates.
But such measures are only likely to encourage more graduates to demand government jobs and participate in the continuing protests in front of Morocco’s Parliament, says Mr. Achy, of the Carnegie center.
Faced with the daunting challenge of overextended universities and dysfunctional labor markets, Middle Eastern governments tend to “choose short-term solutions, or quick fixes,” he says.
Despite the governments’ oft-stated aim of fostering research and innovation, he argues, most of them have not yet adopted a serious, comprehensive plan to support scientific research or meaningful higher-education reform.
Across the region, says Mr. Achy, “the university is seen as a threat, as a security issue, much more than a contributor to development.”
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