Iraq’s universities, once among the best-regarded in the Middle East, have withstood a succession of blows in recent years. Cut off from the international scholarly community during the isolation of the Saddam Hussein era, they then faced the devastation and turmoil that accompanied the American-led invasion.
Optimistic talk of swift and sweeping reconstruction failed to materialize, and institutions have continued to struggle with the challenges of fulfilling their academic mission in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, often making do with outdated curricula, antiquated equipment and textbooks, and damaged facilities.
A new State Department program seeks to build on the lessons learned from past missteps and involve Iraqi universities as equal partners in their revitalization. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Christopher R. Hill, described the project, known as the university-linkages program, to American and Iraqi educators at a conference in Baghdad last week to mark the program’s inauguration.
The program consists of partnerships between five American institutions and five universities in Iraq that will focus on curriculum review, the development of online courses, real-time instruction via videoconferencing, career development, and faculty, staff, and student exchanges.
Representatives of four of the American institutions involved—Ball State University, Oklahoma State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Kentucky—were in Baghdad to begin working out the specifics of their collaborations with their Iraqi counterparts. (Delegates from the fifth American institution, Cleveland State University, were unable to attend because of travel difficulties.)
The American universities were selected by the Academy for Educational Development, a nonprofit organization that is administering the three-year program’s $6-million grant in partnership with the State Department. The organization, known as AED, focuses on education, health, and social and economic-development projects.
Sandra MacDonald-Davis, director of the Center for Academic Partnerships at AED, says that the organization’s call for proposals prompted interest from nearly 30 American universities. Finalists were selected on the basis of specific academic expertise they offered, and the needs of the Iraqi universities they were matched with. Partner institutions will be collaborating in areas such as business administration, engineering, information technology, and English-language education.
Oklahoma State’s participation, for example, was solicited after AED officials realized that they did not have an American university that would be a good fit for the petroleum-engineering expertise the University of Basrah wanted.
Striving to Improve
The University of Kufa, in Najaf, in southern Iraq, is just a few months away from finishing construction of a brand-new campus, and does not face the infrastructure problems that still beleaguer so many other Iraqi institutions. Nonetheless, its president, Razzak Al-Essa, is looking forward to making the most of the opportunities the new links will provide. “Yes, we have a good grade compared to other Iraqi universities, but we are behind if I compare our university with a Western university,” he says. “We have a shortage of labs, of books, and we are now behind on the latest things that are happening in the very good universities around the world.”
Mr. Al-Essa’s institution has been paired with the University of Kentucky, which will help Kufa develop programs in civil engineering, business administration, and English as a second language. Jeannine Blackwell, dean of the graduate school at Kentucky, was in Iraq for the conference and says that Mr. Al-Essa’s eagerness for his university to rejoin the international academic community was typical of the sentiment from the Iraqi participants.
“They are really ready to get back into collaborative mode with other universities and other faculties,” she says. “Even if you’re just 10 years behind in keeping up with new developments in teaching and research, that’s a huge chunk of time in intellectual terms,” she notes.
George Blandford, chairman of Kentucky’s department of civil engineering, visited Kufa while he was in Iraq and calls its new engineering building “pretty phenomenal.” Still, the institution lags behind in some measures, such as the percentage of faculty members with doctorates. Only eight of Kufa’s 77 civil-engineering faculty members have Ph.D.'s, he says, so one goal of Kentucky’s collaboration will be on eventually increasing the number of Kufa faculty with doctorates.
Mutual Benefits
The linkages are intended to benefit both American and Iraqi participants, and Mr. Blandford envisions a potentially longer-term connection between Kentucky and Kufa after State Department sponsorship ends. “We are a Ph.D.-granting institution and we are very interested in enhancing our Ph.D. capabilities,” he says.
In the long term, he hopes that more Iraqi academics come to Kentucky to pursue their doctorates. In the short term, however, the focus will be on curriculum review, conducted in part through videoconferenced joint faculty meetings, with plans for Kufa faculty members to visit the Kentucky campus sometime this winter.
One potential hurdle that became apparent to some of the American participants as the Baghdad conference progressed is the extent of the central government’s control over higher education in Iraq.
Kenneth Holland, dean of Ball State’s M. Rinker Sr. Center for International Programs, recalls an Iraqi professor of English relating that “he is not allowed to make any changes to the curriculum without permission.” Ms. Blackwell, too, came away with the impression of a “fairly heavy-handed, centralized control of teaching” in Iraq, but also of a higher-education establishment that is very “interested in moving to a more flexible structure.”
Mr. Al-Essa agrees that universities are looking forward to “liberating” themselves from the ministry’s control over details such as the duration of course terms. “We are asking to do the same things as programs in the U.S or the U.K.,” he says, “Each university should have its own programs.”
Support of Education Ministry
Gary Gaffield, director of the Iraq university-linkages program at AED, emphasizes that the Iraqi education ministry fully backs the program and says the ministry’s degree of control over curricula “might not be as extensive or overbearing as some U.S. faculty members might fear.” Individual instructors and departments often exercise considerable leeway in terms of course content, he says, although the ministry might prescribe such elements as learning goals or the number of courses offered.
The establishment of career centers, another of the program’s principal goals, may also run up against cultural obstacles. “One of the things the Iraqis pointed out to us is that there is no private sector in Iraq,” says Mr. Holland. Students’ expectation after they graduate is to get a government job, and there is little transparency in hiring, with most employment secured through contacts or family and tribal connections.
The Iraqis have been receptive to the idea of career centers, which the State Department identified as a priority. “We recognize that it’s a new concept and were happily surprised by how eager the Iraqi universities were at the idea,” says Ms. MacDonald-Davis. The centers will be developed on “models appropriate for the context in which they’ll be operating,” she says, and will focus on such skills as résumé preparation.
As for Mr. Al-Essa, he emphasizes that the University of Kufa’s new link with Kentucky is just part of a growing portfolio of activity intended to strengthen it. When reached by phone on Thursday in Iraq, he was preparing for a trip to Oregon State University, with which Kufa also has ties, and he hopes to forge connections with many more universities abroad. “Each university would have a specific role,” he says, in helping his own institution build its global profile.