Once a leader in research, the region now struggles to keep up
Eleven centuries ago an Islamic renaissance occurred in Baghdad, attracting the best scholars throughout the Muslim world. For the next five hundred years, Arabic was the lingua franca of science. Cutting-edge research was conducted in cities such as Cairo, Damascus, and Tunis. In the ninth century, algebra (al-jabr) was invented by a Muslim mathematician in Baghdad under the auspices of an imperial Arab court dedicated to scientific enrichment and discovery. Ibn Sina’s monumental Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin in the 12th century and dominated the teaching of the subject in Europe for four centuries.
Today, no one looks to the Arab world for breakthroughs in scientific research, and for good reason. According to a number of highly self-critical reports that have come out in the past few years, the 21 countries that make up the region are struggling to teach even basic science at the university level. For poor countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, the problem is a lack of money and resources. For wealthier ones, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, complacency and a relatively new and underdeveloped university system have hampered progress.
Many Arab universities are also burdened with a bureaucracy that stifles innovation and bases promotion on cronyism, not research, scientists there say. The lack of significant private industry throughout the region also means that universities are essentially dependent on governments to pay for research and provide jobs for their graduates.
These problems have received special scrutiny in the last couple of years. Scientific research can fuel economic growth, scholars and government leaders say, lessening the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism, which has thrived in parts of the economically depressed region.
But there is much work to do. “The teaching of science in the Arab world is a disaster right now,” says Farouk el-Baz, director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University and one of the most famous living Arab scientists, for his work with NASA during the Apollo moon program. “Science education has not been given the support or significance it should have. Among Arab leaders there is a belief that science and technology, research and development, is something that only rich countries can do, and it’s a very defeatist attitude.”
The Bust After the Oil Boom
Despite the perception that the Arab world is awash in petrodollars, at the end of the 20th century the gross domestic product per capita of all Arab countries combined was slightly more than that of Spain, which has only 15 percent of the population of the Arab world. Following the oil boom of the 1970s, most economies in the Arab world shrank or stagnated. Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, has one of the highest birthrates in the world and a middle class that is becoming increasingly impoverished.
The Saudi government is studying ways to limit the number of students it allows into its public universities and the stipends they receive, which account for 40 percent of the Ministry of Higher Education’s annual budget.
Still, many Arab scientists believe that the region is capable of improving science education and research.
During the past couple of years, scholars like Mr. el-Baz have become increasingly vocal about what they perceive to be widespread failures by Arab governments to provide basic science education to university students, and opportunities for meaningful scientific research for scholars.
Last October the United Nations’ Development Program and the Kuwait-based Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development released a study showing how dire the situation is. Among the findings:
- No Arab country spends more than 0.2 percent of its gross national product on scientific research, and most of that money goes toward salaries. By contrast, the United States spends more than 10 times that amount.
- Fewer than one in 20 Arab university students pursue scientific disciplines.
- There are only 18 computers per 1,000 people in the Arab world. The global average is 78 per 1,000.
- Only 370 industrial patents were issued to people in Arab countries between 1980 and 2000. In South Korea during that same period, 16,000 industrial patents were issued.
- No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium, equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year.
Taking Charge
There are some glimmers of hope. Last fall the United Arab Emirates announced that it was creating a national research foundation to pump more money into scientific research and help establish research-based Ph.D. programs in the emirates’ universities, which do not now offer doctoral-level education.
“One of the issues in the emirates is that higher education is still very young,” says John Connolly, vice president for research at Zayed University, in the United Arab Emirates, and an adviser to the committee planning the foundation. “It’s not uncommon in the United States for undergraduate institutions to take 30 years or so to transform into graduate institutions where research is done.”
Mr. Connolly, who previously worked at the National Science Foundation, says one of the main reasons for underdevelopment throughout the gulf has been the widespread tendency to hire Western consultants who provide no long-term commitment to the culture or its development. It is hoped the creation of the foundation will change that, he says.
Another group of Arab scientists has begun developing a gulf-based Arab Science Foundation, which, like the National Science Foundation in the United States, would grant money competitively to top researchers from around the Arab world. And specialized private universities, most of them for-profit, are mushrooming throughout the region, creating competition in a realm that until recently was dominated solely by state institutions.
The proliferation of private science-oriented universities is a concern for some Arab scholars, however, who question the quality and motives of for-profit institutions of higher education.
One of the surest ways to improve Arab universities and their teaching of science, scholars say, is through a system of accreditation that monitors and ensures quality. “We need that process, especially for science education,” says Maen Nsour, a specialist in Arab higher education and a program director for the United Nations Development Program’s Regional Bureau for Arab States.
Arab scientists also say universities can do more to help improve science education in local high schools. At the American University of Beirut’s Science and Mathematics Education Center, professors work with high-school science teachers. “We feel this is our responsibility, but there is a self-serving motive,” says Saouma BouJaoude, the center’s director. “If you improve science education, then you get better students at the university.”
Still, most academics are pessimistic about short-term change. “There is a total lack of vision,” Mr. Nsour says. “We don’t have a strategy regarding science education. If education does not change, then the only kinds of people that will be produced will join the long lines of the unemployed. This is something that will not only impact the Arab region disastrously but also will have a spillover to the rest of the world,” creating political turmoil that is not contained by sovereign borders.
Those woes are exacerbated by the mass exodus of graduates in scientific disciplines. “Even if we have good people, we don’t offer them opportunities to work, and they have to go abroad and benefit someone else,” says Mr. BouJaoude.
Unlike in the United States, where graduates with degrees in science and technology find lucrative jobs or pursue graduate school, in the Arab world science degrees lead to few career options. Only the most basic sciences are offered, and graduates from those programs “have no options for work,” says Mr. BouJaoude. “There is no research, and funding is low so they end up either unemployed or working as teachers.”
Heading West
Many of the most promising and successful Arab scientists and researchers end up in the West. Khaled Bouri, a Syrian, has been a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health since 1996, where he has been searching for genes that cause neurodegenerative diseases like muscular dystrophy.
Mr. Bouri received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry at the University of Damascus. A lack of graduate programs in his field in Syria led him to Louis Pasteur University, in Strasbourg, France, where he finished his Ph.D. in pharmacology. “Those who are lucky try to leave Syria and go abroad, but most stay home frustrated trying to find other jobs,” he says.
Mr. Bouri chose biochemistry only because he was rejected by the University of Damascus’s program in architecture. “The only opportunity after graduation for science majors is teaching in schools, and that is not the best thing a young person would look for as a career,” he says.
He laments the state of science education in Syrian universities. His textbooks were almost a decade old, the labs were underequipped, teaching was solely by rote, and there were not even basic research opportunities.
On top of that, everything was taught in Arabic. “It was a nightmare for two years learning a whole new vocabulary in French and then English,” he says. “The Syrian education system doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on foreign languages -- definitely not enough to read a textbook in a foreign language.”
Mr. Bouri says he was so academically underprepared when he got to France that he had to spend a remedial year learning basic life sciences to enter at the graduate level. “There was a huge gap between what I learned as an undergraduate and what I needed to know,” he says. “There were technologies in my field that I had never heard of until I moved to France.”
Most countries in the region use English or French when teaching science, often supplementing them with Arabic. Syria is one of just a few that have experimented with an intensive policy of Arabization, using only Arabic for teaching and instruction. But most scientific literature is written in English, and universities rarely have the money to spend on translation.
“There are serious difficulties in teaching in Arabic because of a lack of a system that would enable universities to have access to up-to-date information in Arabic,” says Victor Billeh, who is director of the Regional Office for Education in the Arab States at Unesco and has a Ph.D. in science education.
The Arab world has found itself in a Catch-22. Without top-notch scientists, it cannot produce the research necessary to develop a strong private sector. But without a dynamic private sector, there is little money to invest in scientific research. Even at the best institutions in the region, like the Jordan University of Science and Technology, with 16,000 students and 650 faculty members, money for research is a pittance.
“Our research budget is very modest compared to Europe and the United States,” says Wajih M. Owais, the university’s recently appointed president. “We spend about $500,000 per year.”
Mr. Owais, who is considered one of the top geneticists in the Arab world, mourns the lack of industry and other private support for research, especially given how little the state contributes. He is also faced with a constant exodus of his brightest students and professors.
“Most of our research is geared toward promotion, and we find that faculty only do it as a requirement to get promoted,” he says.
Mr. Owais, who was appointed president in September, says his priority is to reorganize the way scientific research is financed, using the meager resources the university has at its disposal.
“Promotions should be based on good quality work, so we’re trying to emphasize research that deals with solving development problems in Jordan,” he says. “In the past we used to fund many projects with small quantities of money, and now we’re trying to support two or three larger projects with an emphasis on quality research done by teams of scientists rather than individuals.”
In addition to challenges with research initiatives, Mr. Owais has other things to worry about. “Another of our main problems is sabbaticals,” he says. “Instead of using that year for research, most people go to the gulf to work and don’t return, and others leave for private universities.” The starting salary for a professor at a public Jordanian university is about $1,100 per month, less than half what faculty members can get in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia.
Systematic Weaknesses
Although the lack of scientific research and the poor quality of science education have existed for years, those concerns are only now gaining widespread attention. Experts say that is because few governments keep statistics on such things as investment in research and the number of patents received by scholars.
“The lack of institutional research allows these problems to get well developed before anyone notices and pays attention,” says Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., an instructor at Harvard University and a specialist in Arab higher education. “It’s a big gap in the Arab world.”
Academics and consultants who monitor science education in Arab universities are pushing for the creation of systems for accreditation to begin assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Arab institutions. “There is a lack of accountability,” Mr. Billeh says. “Universities have become ivory towers, and in most countries in the Arab world, people don’t touch them. Our weaknesses are systemic.”
Mr. el-Baz, the Egyptian geologist at Boston University, understands the power of bureaucracy and the resistance to change in developing countries. In the mid-1960s, as a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Missouri at Rolla, he returned to Egypt to assume a teaching post at one of four universities that were vying for him. He was assigned to an institute to teach chemistry even though there was a need for geologists in the universities. Rather than toil outside his field, he returned to American academe.
“I was a victim of bureaucracy,” he says. To illustrate the bureaucratic paralysis still in existence today, Mr. el-Baz likes to quote a slogan that was popular during Gamal Abdul Nasser’s reign over Egypt in the 1950s and ‘60s.
“We used to hear all of the time that ‘promotion comes through trustworthiness,’” Mr. el-Baz says. “Imagine that. Promotion should only come through merit. It was that attitude that crippled inventiveness and innovation. People lost confidence in themselves and their governments.
Change comes slowly in institutions everywhere, but Arab scholars say the lack of real leadership, both in governments and universities, hinders the initiative for change in their countries. The appointments of deans and university presidents in public institutions are rarely done through search committees and instead happen through cronyism.
“In many universities in the rest of the world it takes a whole year to search for a president, but in the Arab world a university president is appointed in one day and sometimes even less,” Mr. Billeh says. “That’s part of the overall governance. If these things would change, everything else would change.”
As in many developing countries, the pedagogy of science teaching in most of the Arab world is outdated and archaic, and the morale of the teaching staff is low.
“There has been an exponential growth in the numbers of students, and staff ratios haven’t kept up,” says Isam Naqib, a nuclear physicist and consultant to the United Nations on higher education in the Arab world.
“When I was a student studying in Syria in the 1950s, we had great faculty who had been trained in France. Salaries of professors were elite then. Now the teaching loads are high and the salaries are so low that professors have to find outside work to survive. And if you go into any science lab at the University of Damascus today you’ll find equipment that hasn’t been updated since the 1960s.”
Some faculty members who have been teaching for decades say the students they are now receiving are less mature and studious than those in the past, suggesting that the quality of elementary and secondary education has also declined.
“Somehow we have failed to connect with students’ brains to encourage them to think and use information intelligently,” Mr. Owais says. “What I fear is that students are memorizing every word in the science books, and those who get the highest grades are going into the most difficult specializations in the university.”
Some Hope
There are some successes in the region. The American University of Beirut, which was founded in 1866, has a long and prosperous history of teaching and research. Its medical school is the region’s best, it has produced scores of top Arab scientists and mathematicians, and it invests heavily in labs and equipment. As a private university with a legacy of generous benefactors and an annual tuition of more than $10,000, it is in a better position financially than its poor state-financed cousins.
Mr. BouJaoude, director of the Science and Mathematics Education Center at the university, says it is not easy to replicate the university’s success. “AUB’s reputation means we get to choose from great students who know foreign languages,” he says. “We have good faculty because promotion is based on research, a great library with a lot of journals, well-equipped labs, Internet access for everyone, and the opportunity for students to do research.”
Mr. el-Baz and a number of prominent Arab scientists are pinning their hopes on the new Arab Science Foundation, which is based in the gulf emirate of Sharjah. Sharjah’s prince has adopted the fund-raising campaign and is personally soliciting money for the endowment.
The foundation, which was created in 2002, is still forming its board. But it hopes to raise $150-million by 2005 and grant a minimum of $10-million to Arab scientists to conduct research every year.
“In Egypt alone we have thousands of Ph.D. holders capable of doing research, trained to do research, and they have near nothing in scientific research support funds,” Mr. el-Baz says.
In the meantime, Mr. Bouri, the postdoctoral fellow, continues his research projects at the National Institutes of Health, knowing he is too highly educated to ever return to Damascus. “There is absolutely no place in Syria I could do the kind of research I am doing now,” he says. “Research doesn’t exist at all in academic institutions.”
A thousand years ago in Baghdad or Damascus, Mr. Bouri would probably have been treated as a great scholar, given access to the most comprehensive libraries of the time, and provided with lavish endowments to think, create, and discover among a vast coterie of polymaths.
“When I think of Ibn Sina in the 10th century it provokes great frustration, especially for those of us who are conscious of our history,” he says. “It pains me to think of where we were and where we are now.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 50, Issue 26, Page A36