more on destruction of Iraqi university system

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

AFTER THE WAR:
Iraq's Shattered Universities
Andrew Lawler

Classes may be back in session, but Iraq's university system is
largely wrecked after a decade of sanctions and repression, followed
by war and mass looting

BAGHDAD--Najib Stipho, a chemical engineer and dean of Baghdad's
Al-Mansour University College, awoke at dawn on 9 April to the sound
of pounding on his front door. His cafeteria manager had come to warn
him that looters were threatening the 2600-student private
institution. "I told him to get as many guards as he could," recalls
Stipho, who then raced to take up battle stations with his two grown
sons as U.S. tanks and troops rolled into the city. Two days and 4000
bullets later, Stipho's band of a dozen machine-gun-toting defenders
had driven off the would-be looters. On 5 May the Christian university
became the first in Iraq to reopen its doors.  But Al-Mansour's
survival is the exception among Iraq's once-proud university system,
already weakened by more than a decade of economic sanctions, brain
drain, and political oppression. Scores of academic buildings around
the country were bombed, looted, and burned during the
U.S. invasion. Science departments were especially hard hit. Some were
targeted by U.S. troops seeking evidence of complicity in developing
weapons of mass destruction; others were plundered by mobs for their
computers and scientific equipment.

The path to recovery will be arduous. Although classes for some
200,000 students at more than 40 public universities and colleges
nominally resumed on 17 May, money is scarce, security is tenuous, and
dozens of top administrators have been fired because of ties to Saddam
Hussein's Baath Party. At the nation's premier technical institution,
Baghdad's University of Technology, looters stole even the light bulbs
before torching labs and lecture halls.

"Right now, Iraqi academics are struggling with a lack of everything,
but in the long run I think they are hopeful," says Stephen Curda, a
higher education specialist working for the Department of Defense in
Baghdad. So far, he says, the U.S. government has chipped in $270,000
to start rebuilding the technology university and allocated another
$47,000 for repairs at Baghdad University, the country's largest
higher education institution. Rebuilding expertise and morale,
however, may prove more difficult.

Mobbed
U.S. soldiers now guard the entrance to Baghdad University's
well-landscaped campus, which during a recent visit was thronged with
male and female students. Sami Al-Mudafar, a biochemist, was elected
acting president by the faculty on 17 May under the direction of
U.S. officials. But basic school necessities--from books to lab
equipment--are sorely lacking, and sporadic electricity, the threat of
street violence, and a severe gasoline shortage are keeping many
students and professors at home.

And the country's flagship university was relatively lucky. Along with
its medical school north of the city, it suffered only minor damage
and looting, including the destruction of a medical library statue of
Louis Pasteur after it was mistaken for Saddam
Hussein. Al-Mustansiriya University, founded in the 13th century, was
more seriously looted, but penitent thieves returned some of its
furniture, books, and scientific equipment to a Shiite mosque in Sadr
City, a poor neighborhood on Baghdad's outskirts.

Stipho's bold stand at Al-Mansour prevented the school's 10 science,
engineering, and computing labs and 300 computers from falling into
the hands of looters. "They were desperate to get inside," says
Stipho, adding that the looters also tried unsuccessfully to snatch
university cars and buses from a protected compound with a stolen
crane. "They came in mobs: A group of 50 would come, then would go,
and another would come."

Other, more sprawling, campuses were left undefended. At the
University of Technology, which was visited frequently before the war
by United Nations weapons inspectors, several Iraqi academics claimed
that U.S. forces actively encouraged mobs. "American troops opened the
doors, and the looters took it completely," says one student who lives
near that university, an account repeated by Mazui Kadhum, a
non-Baathist and former University of Technology professor who is now
dean of informatics at Al-Nahrain University. "U.S. tanks broke the
gate" and urged looters to enter, he says. Curda acknowledges that
U.S. tanks may have caused a large breach in the wall but says he has
not received any complaints from university officials about the
conduct of U.S. troops.

Kadhum's new institution, Al-Nahrain, formerly Saddam University, is
an elite science and engineering school of some 1100 students that
shares a campus with Baghdad University. Its generous salaries of up
to $1000 month attracted some of the country's best talent. It also
attracted the prewar attention of U.N. weapons inspectors. When
Al-Nahrain professors returned to the campus a week after U.S. troops
arrived in Baghdad, they found Marines bivouacked on the site--and the
offices of the science, engineering, and informatics deans ransacked,
along with the laser and electronics laboratories. "Motherboards with
information that may be of use were taken," he says. "But they did it
in a very unprofessional way; there was equipment that had nothing to
do with computers that they threw on the floor."

Kadhum believes that the damage was done by the invading forces rather
than looters, citing as evidence dusty prints of U.S. military boots
left in the labs and offices and an unscathed office of the political
science dean. "The Marines entered every place that the inspectors
went to; they knew where they were going," he adds. A U.S. Defense
Department official in Baghdad declined to comment on the allegation.

Kadhum does not deny that university professors did consulting work
for a host of ministries--including the defense and military industry
ministries. But he insists that the university did not host any
weapons work. "They had their own laboratories, their own techniques,
their own setup" through the Ministry of Military Industry, he
says. "It was a country of its own, directly linked to the president."

Rocketed science
Another school hit hard by the war is Al-Kufa University, south of
Baghdad, which was visited as recently as 18 January by
U.N. inspectors. "There was fighting, bombs, explosions, looters, and
burnings," says Nabil Al-Rowi, an electrical engineer who until last
month was president of the university, which has three campuses, nine
colleges, and 10,000 students.

The trouble began 26 March, says Al-Rowi, when U.S. Marines reached
Kufa, site of one of the three campuses. Staff members left after the
Marines "broke in the doors and were searching for computers" in the
areas visited by U.N. inspectors, he says. Looters caused additional
damage in the first weeks of April after the Marines left, he says. A
rocket attack on 3 April severely damaged the central administration
building in Najaf, which he says was located next to the chief
Baathist commander of the region. Three days later the medicine,
pharmacy, and education departments were looted. "The microbiology,
physiology, and health physics labs were burned, completely
destroyed," he says. Looters also made off with some 100 ancient
manuscripts, including some pre-Islamic documents of the Nestorian
Church. After rejoining his family in Baghdad, Al-Rowi was fired from
his job because of his membership in the Baath Party.

Other institutions experienced varying amounts of damage. Eyewitnesses
say Mosul University in the north suffered broken windows and trashed
administrative areas, whereas Basra University is mostly
gutted. Nasiriya University in the south was bombed because it had
antiaircraft guns on campus, says psychology professor Fadhil Kzar.

Although construction crews can repair the physical damage, Iraq's
battered campuses have other needs that will be harder to
fill. Importing science textbooks and a vast array of scientific
equipment was illegal under U.N. sanctions imposed after the first
Gulf War, and contact with the outside world was discouraged and often
punished by the Saddam regime. Many of the country's scientific and
technical elite fled abroad. Al-Rowi estimates that 1400 of 5400
people holding scientific and technical doctoral degrees emigrated
between 1991 and 1998. At Al-Nahrain's engineering college, for
example, Kadhum says that 18 of 45 professors left. This flight had a
profound effect on the quality of education throughout the country;
Iraqi students and faculty members talked privately of a system driven
by bribes and party loyalty rather than educational standards.

U.S. officials are promising a clean sweep to put the universities on
firmer footing. Andrew Erdmann, the U.S. Department of State official
in charge of higher education and science in Iraq, warned Baghdad
University faculty members last month that academics associated with
human-rights violations and weapons of mass destruction research would
be purged and that high-ranking Baath Party members would not be
allowed to hold the top tier of academic positions. Curda says party
members not involved in nefarious activities can apply for an
exemption, and many have done so. "Our goal is to bring back as many
experienced administrators as we can," he says, once they pass the
necessary background checks.

Many Iraqis say party membership was essential for climbing the
academic ladder. "Most university professors and staff are members of
the Baath Party," says Mohammad Al-Awsi, Al-Nahrain's recently fired
engineering dean and a party member since 1968. Even non-Baathists
worry that the policy will undermine Iraq's already fragile technical
and scientific foundation. "This will exclude good people," says Abbas
Abdul-Kader, president of the Iraqi Commission for Computers and
Informatics and a non-Baathist.

For the moment, university administrators say their priorities are
security, reliable electricity, and operating funds. U.S. officials
began paying some salaries last week, and Erdmann visited Persian Gulf
states to drum up reconstruction money from wealthy emirs. The
Department of State will fund a $20 million to $30 million program to
establish partnerships between U.S. and Iraqi universities, according
to a department memo.

Erdmann calls the overall reintegration effort "a huge challenge." But
Curda says many university officials appear to welcome the
U.S. presence: "They are excited to be free to travel, to contact
overseas colleagues again, and to have basic academic freedom." Adds
Al-Awsi, who studied engineering at the University of Sheffield, U.K.:
"We're not against the United States. We're trying to create good
universities and set high standards for our students." All sides agree
that this goal won't be achieved without large doses of outside help
and domestic tranquility.

Volume 300, Number 5625, Issue of 6 Jun 2003, pp. 1490-1491.
Copyright © 2003 by The American Association for the Advancement of
Science. All rights reserved.