Higher Education in Iraq

Under Saddam's regime, every element of Iraqi society declined sharply. Few institutions were more neglected than its university system, which essentially ceased to function in any modern sense two decades ago. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education ($), John Agresto, the Coalition Provisional Authority's senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and president emeritus of St. John's College, Santa Fe, N.M., says that the spirit is willing, but it needs Western help:

"Nothing here is easy. The 1980s and '90s broke the physical and intellectual back of higher education in Iraq. I recently visited the laboratory of the Veterinary College at Baghdad University. There, in one room, were all their vials and bottles neatly lined up on shelves. And each container was empty. One bottle had perhaps a tablespoon of a brown, sludgy residue at the bottom. The blue label on the side read 'expires June 1980.'"

"The university libraries may have been the sections of academe that suffered most under Saddam Hussein. On their shelves are few books published after the early '80s. Most journal subscriptions ended around then, or even earlier. The library at Tikrit University's College of Law has spacious rooms and enough shelving for thousands of books. Unfortunately, it contains probably fewer than 80 volumes. Many of them are merely copies of copies of old texts, xeroxed pages stitched together."

Yet the desire to improve is widespread, Agresto reports, and Iraqis want most to reconnect to the outside world, from which they were shut off by Saddam's xenophobic henchmen. Western professors are needed to teach Iraqi scholars and graduate students some of what they've missed over the years. Equipment is hopelessly dated, libraries are bare, and resources scarce. Some American universities are already stepping forward, and many more are needed, as Agresto writes:

"In the north, under the protection of the no-fly zone, Sulaimani University has long been a partner of East Tennessee State University. Already this year nearly 20 universities or university departments from the United States have provided help: developing departments of public health, participating in the modernization of law colleges' curricula, building up departments of archaeology and environmental science, and training faculty members in computer science and administrators in academic management."

A key part of the reconstruction of Iraqi society will be played by its reemerging intellectual class. American academics who wish to see a stable and free Iraq need to step forward now, early in the process, to ensure that our universities export our best ideas. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if instead we sent them a shipload of postcolonial theory and deconstruction. America and the Coalition didn't spill blood to rid Iraq if its Baathist ideologues only to replace them with Western nihilists.