New York, New York -- One goal Robert Haddad has set for himself as a university president is to preside over his institution from an office on its campus. Even one in the same country would be acceptable to him.
Mr. Haddad, however, heads the American University of Beirut, and right now the use of an American passport to travel to, in, or through Lebanon is prohibited by the State Department. So the president is working out of a tiny office in midtown Manhattan.
While the U.S. strictures complicate the challenges that Mr. Haddad faces, he says they will not deter him as he works to rebuild an institution buffeted by 15 years of civil war in Lebanon. His mission, as he sees it, is clear-cut: Restore the academic quality of the institution.
“A long period of civil strife has impaired the university -- this is a fact,” he says. “It was a horrendous period, and some of our best people did leave. So I see restoration of a first-rate faculty as one of the main concerns.”
He doesn’t think that goal can be fully accomplished, however, until the travel ban is lifted. “It would be very valuable to the university to have Americans -- people brought up in an American educational system and in the best American academic traditions -- playing a role in this restoration,” he says. At one time Americans made up about 25 per cent of the institution’s academic staff.
The university is chartered in the State of New York, and its administrative headquarters are in Manhattan. Presidents of AUB have been forced to work out of those offices for almost a decade, since living in Lebanon became, for Americans, extremely dangerous and, ultimately, prohibited.
During the worst times, says Mr. Haddad, “communication between Beirut and New York was often non-existent. The president was absent, and lines of authority tended to blur.” Events conspired to erode presidential authority at the university -- one more thing that Mr. Haddad is determined to restore.
The academic community in Beirut appears ready to help him accomplish his agenda, whether or not he has an office on the campus. His appointment has been praised both because he is the first American of Arab descent to serve as president, and because of his credentials as a scholar of Middle Eastern history and religion. His two immediate predecessors, who headed the institution for almost a decade, were both physicians -- the AUB includes a large medical school and teaching hospital. The university’s faculty, according to academics familiar with the institution, was anxious for a leader who came out of an “arts and sciences” background.
“In Haddad we have a humanist and an accomplished historian, but also a person who has devoted much of his life to teaching,” says Samir Khalaf, a Princeton sociology professor and former member of the AUB faculty who is now writing an intellectual history of the institution. “I have always felt that the heart of the university was its School of Arts and Sciences. In that sense, this is a very positive step.”
Mr. Haddad, who took up his new duties this summer, came to the post after an academic career both distinguished and long -- so long, in fact, that he was about to end it when he was asked to be a candidate for the AUB presidency. “I was set to take early retirement,” he says. “Fall of ’92 was my last semester of teaching” at Smith College, where he had been a member of the faculty for 30 years. He says he had been looking forward to the chance “to write, and to putter in the woods.”
But the AUB presidency, he says, “was a special job. This institution is just terribly important to the life of that region, and the life of that region is close to my heart.”
“My parents were born and brought up in Syria,” adds Mr. Haddad, who can read and write in Arabic, speaks it “tolerably well,” and understands it “almost like a native,” even though he was born in New York.
He sees his background as a resource. “It seems fairly obvious -- at least to me -- that the more deeply informed one is about the culture of the area in which this university is located, the more effective one is likely to be,” he says. “While it is not necessarily the case, I think the odds favor a person who knows the area, the religions, the languages.”
Michael Hudson, a Georgetown University expert on Lebanese affairs, says he thinks that Mr. Haddad is the right person for the job, but that the job is now complex and challenging.
“The university is in a very important but sensitive position in Lebanon as it tries to rebuild,” he explains. “The Lebanese are expecting him -- as are AUB’s faculty and students -- to give the university an important role in rebuilding the country. But this has to be done in a careful way.
“It will be tricky because, while there is still a good degree of respect and affection for AUB, there is also a general feeling of antipathy toward U.S. government policies that is pretty acute at this time.”
Mr. Hudson is a professor of Arab studies and of international relations in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and a member of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at the university. He has long-standing ties to scholars in the Middle East, and says the general view is that Lebanon’s international academic connections desperately need to be renewed.
“One of the costs of the war is a sense of parochialism, of intellectual impoverishment in Lebanon now,” he says. “There really is a need for an infusion, not necessarily of foreigners per se, but of people who are really up to speed in their scholarly disciplines.”
He says Mr. Haddad is right in setting out first to raise the quality of the educational experience at AUB: “That may be the most important thing he does.”
Mr. Haddad has been busy recruiting for his faculty and administration. Given the U.S. ban, he has been focusing his efforts on Lebanese who left during the war, as well as on those who hold dual citizenship.
“We are searching for a new dean of medicine, and there will be candidates from an extremely impressive pool in the United States, made up in large measure of people who were at AUB and left,” he says. “I think there are many Lebanese who are prepared to return once they are assured of security. Also, it is incumbent on us to get salaries up to a competitive level.
“There is wonderful talent out there that is not American, and we are determined to make every AUB appointment as good as we can make it,” he adds. “But I don’t really wish to fill every faculty line until we can truly recruit internationally.”
The university, Mr. Haddad admits, has financial problems. “We need money,” he says. “During the hostilities it wasn’t easy to raise money from private sources. The U.S. government was quite generous, but I think it now is easing away from large-scale support for American educational and cultural institutions abroad.”
“For us it’s now a matter of winning for the first time widespread corporate and private support,” he adds. “Quite honestly, I see organizing the alumni as our highest priority in fund raising. We have 30,000 alumni and alumnae, living all over the world, some of them very prosperous. This network has never been organized or exploited as well as it could be.”
Frederic P. Herter, Mr. Haddad’s predecessor, spent much of his tenure traveling in the Middle East, trying to raise funds for the university from Arab governments and industries. “I think he performed heroically in an impossible time,” says Mr. Haddad. “He held it together during the worst period of the university’s history.”
Mr. Haddad, however, plans to turn over many fund-raising tasks to his development professionals, and to devote himself to academic leadership. Already he has met in Damascus and Cyprus with his deans and faculty leaders. He says he plans to make such trips frequently, until he can take up residence in Beirut.
At an international meeting on the reconstruction of Lebanon held in Washington last week, the American travel ban was the subject of much discussion.
“Almost everybody feels that the absence of the president is a very serious obstacle to getting this university moving forward again,” says Mr. Hudson of Georgetown. “I have heard this from AUB faculty members, students, administrators, and alumni.”
Gary Sheaffer, a spokesman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the State Department, says the ban remains in place “because we feel Lebanon is still far too dangerous a place for Americans to be.”
“Even though the American hostages all have been released,” he adds, “the groups that took and held those people still operate freely in Lebanon, and we feel the danger is still quite clear.”
Malcolm Kerr was murdered on the AUB campus by unknown assailants in 1984, after 18 months as the university’s president. Several academics in Beirut were kidnaped and held for years.
Mr. Haddad says the security situation in Lebanon is improving steadily: “It may be that the habit of peace is rather like the habit of war, and I think the Lebanese have had enough of war. Or at least they should have had enough.”
He says he would have no difficulty going to Lebanon if he wanted to.
“These things can be arranged,” Mr. Haddad says. “But I couldn’t possibly consider going until the official State Department ban is lifted.”
He says one reason he is especially anxious to be on the campus is to have opportunities to be with AUB’s students.
“We get bright kids, and they manage to flourish,” he says. “And we still have our pick. We take one out of every seven or nine applicants. We don’t have much difficulty in placing our students in top graduate programs around the world.
“We are still the leading university in the Arab world. I don’t think anyone would contest that,” he says. “Assuming stability, security, and economic recovery, the future is bright.”