When I left for Iraq last November, some of my colleagues and family thought it was a foolhardy adventure. But I decided that if millions of Iraqis have managed to live their entire lives under siege, I’d probably survive for a week.
I was consulting for IREX, a Washington nonprofit whose Iraq University Linkages Program is helping to modernize an educational infrastructure that has suffered decades of war and corruption. I led workshops for academics at the University of Dohuk in the north (the region self-identifies as Kurdistan) and at the University of Baghdad, once a premier Middle Eastern institution. I wanted to play a small part in restoring the functionality of Iraqi universities. Helping to rebuild a society my country had helped destroy seemed the least I could do.
I convinced myself that the potential dangers were worth the risk to advance the academic values that I’ve lived by and that have been so easily accessible to me. Moreover, going to Iraq was an obligation that I owed to my profession; not going would have felt like a personal and moral failure.
I traveled with a security detail, and, in Baghdad, which teemed with heavily armed Iraqi troops, I wore a flak jacket and helmet while moving through the city in a three-car armored convoy. Nothing bad happened, but it was scary at times, increasingly so as I heard war stories from Iraqi faculty members, security teams, and NGO staff about the chaos that the country had suffered for decades: from car bombs and insurgent attacks to the Kurdish genocide of 1986-89, during which tens of thousands of people were killed. A landscape of agony swarmed with the ghosts and memories of unimaginable suffering.
I was amazed that the people I met were able to get out of bed every morning and come to work. Their determination to persevere through seemingly endless violence and destruction inspired me in a way that I cannot adequately convey.
Iraqi professors who attended the workshops told me they thought life was better and more secure than it had been a few years ago. Among the professors and administrators I met, there’s a sense that rebuilding is under way, that the worst is over. But there is still a pervasive feeling of threat and danger. All the faculty members I met (and, by their accounts, their families and their students as well) seemed to be experiencing some degree of post-traumatic stress. They tried to be optimistic about the future, but flashes of anger, fear, and malaise surfaced recurrently.
In my workshops, I talked about developing research agendas, both individually and institutionally: conceiving and executing publishable projects; finding journals, conferences, and even discussion boards that could connect Iraqi academics to conversations in their disciplines. The word faculty members used most often to describe their plight was “isolation.” Few Iraqi scholars are up to date on the latest trends and developments in their disciplines.
“We need to be like Americans so we can be a productive society,” one professor told me. “We are a nonproductive society.”
I showed them how to find lists of calls for papers and explained the nuts and bolts of peer review. They asked about how to develop a stronger sense of research ethics (plagiarism is common, they said, among both students and faculty) and create research offices.
We discussed strategies for identifying critical perspectives that are uniquely suited to Iraqi professors. In academic discourse about globalism, postcolonialism, international business, public health, and ecology, for example, scholars in the rest of the world need to hear their insights, I told them; many such conversations are incomplete because Iraqi scholars have not been able to take part.
They were especially interested in recent movements like digital humanities and ecocriticism. A few have been able to travel—my own university hosted 20 Baghdad faculty members last summer—though visas are still extremely difficult to obtain. They are eager to bring current classroom practices to their own universities. “My students sit in a U-shape now!” one of the professors who’d visited Georgia State told me proudly.
Many basic aspects of academic protocol were unfamiliar to members of the group, who dutifully wrote down all my advice. Still, I sometimes wondered how relevant it was. “What you are talking about is like a utopia to us,” one professor said. I felt both gratitude and bitterness in his words.
He seemed grateful for my pointers, but also disappointed because there are such formidable obstacles that hinder their research. Scientists don’t have the equipment they need. Humanists don’t have time to write. Iraqi journals are not very good. A highly entrenched Ministry of Education stultifies curricular and institutional reform. The government supplies insufficient support. Though there’s considerable oil money in Iraq, it is not flowing to the universities. At the University of Baghdad, faculty told me that their labs, classrooms, and libraries are decaying because of neglect. Facilities that suffered war damage are being repaired slowly, if at all.
When we talked about using the Internet to facilitate international contacts, I suggested that participants create individual Web pages and showed them my own. “If I set up a site like that,” one professor said, referring to my prominent headshot, “I might get assassinated.” Professors have been targeted regularly, she told me, for kidnapping and murder. Insurgents perceive, accurately, that threats to academics and campuses destabilize the civic fabric. In 2006, the University of Baghdad professor Saad Jawad told the Middle East Studies Association that more than 200 Iraqi faculty had been killed and thousands of others had fled the country out of fear that they are especially vulnerable.
Conversations like those reminded me how superfluous my pep talks on research might be, how many other more urgent things Iraqi faculty had to worry about. I felt intense pressure to make each workshop valuable. Some participants seemed to have taken real safety risks just to travel across the city to attend the sessions. (In Baghdad I stayed on a compound run by a private security firm. Faculty members, who had to undergo extensive background checks, came there for the program.)
Yet despite the differences in our working conditions (to say the least) and our cultural disparities, there were still so many ways in which I felt a close kinship: We were all part of the same guild, the same tribe.
The lives of Iraqi academics, in the one-week slice I experienced, are profoundly depressing, but at the same time, amazingly vital. Life goes on. With inexhaustible hospitality, the scholars I met told me how thankful they were that I had come to spend time with them. It was great for my ego, and I wanted to believe that my visit was helpful to them, though I was also wary of casting myself as the great American savior; they’ve already seen that movie.
The IREX project director, Lori Mason, who has dealt for years with the kinds of challenges and frustrations that overwhelmed me during my visit, has an infectious conviction that “if we help make improvements in education, they can work out the solutions to all their other problems themselves.” Other NGO staff I met at the Baghdad compound had similarly expansive ambitions for this troubled society. “You have to plan big,” a USAID worker told me. “And maybe you’ll get a tenth of what you aim for. I’ve learned to find solace in small things.”