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An American university for Iraq but in
Kurdistan
3.1.2007
By Edward Wong |
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January 3, 2007
SULAIMANIYAH, Kurdistan Region (Iraq), -- It
would be an ambitious project even in a Middle
Eastern country not embroiled in war: build an
American-style university where classes are taught
in English, teachers come from around the world and
graduates compete for lucrative jobs in fields like
business and computer science.
Yet some of the leading lights of Iraq's political
and intellectual classes are doing exactly that,
even as the bloodshed widens.
Their planned American University of Iraq is modeled
after the famous private universities in Cairo and
Beirut.
The project's managers have a board of trustees; a
business plan recently completed by McKinsey &
Company, an international consulting firm; three
candidates for university president; and $25
million, much of it in pledges from the American
government and Kurdish sources. To fulfill their
dream, they need much more: $200 million to $250
million over 15 years, said Azzam Alwash, the
board's executive secretary. |
Azzam Alwash, right, executive secretary of the
board of trustees of the planned American University
of Iraq, with developers in Sulaimaniyah city.
Photo: NY Times |
But if it does become a reality, the university will
not be built in Baghdad, which for centuries was a
beacon of learning in the Arab world.
Instead, it is slated for what is the most non-Iraqi
part of Iraq. The site is on a windswept hilltop
along the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, the eastern
capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, 150 miles north of
Baghdad and far from the car bombs and death squads
that are tearing apart the Arab regions of Iraq.
Because of its relative safety so far, Kurdistan can
more easily attract aid and reconstruction money.
With doctors, engineers, businesspeople, academics
and students among the hundreds of thousands fleeing
to neighboring countries or the West, the university
raises hopes of stanching the country's enormous
brain drain and pushing Iraq forward. "You really
need to develop the political elite of the future,
the educated elite of the future," said Barham
Salih, the project's Kurdish founder, a deputy prime
minister who received a doctorate in
statistics and computer modeling from Liverpool
University in Britain, and whose daughter attends
Princeton. "The focus is also to stimulate reform in
the Iraqi education system."
However, some Arab education officials in Baghdad,
the capital, have argued that the university should
be built there, not in a part of Iraq where
secessionist ambitions are well known.
Baghdad first achieved fame for its schools and
scholars during the Abbasid caliphate, which reached
its height in the eighth century. Even in the 20th
century, before the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and
international economic sanctions of the 1990s,
students from the region flocked to Baghdad.
But because of security threats, many universities
in Baghdad have been closed since October. Up to 150
employees from the Ministry of Higher Education were
abducted by men in commando uniforms in
mid-November. Jihadist groups have threatened to
kill students on campuses.
So intellectuals like Kanan Makiya, the prominent
former exile and writer who strongly advocated for
the American invasion, say they plan to move their
research projects to the American University. Makiya
founded the Iraq Memory Foundation, an organization
based in the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad that is
documenting Saddam Hussein's atrocities.
"The problem is nobody can thrive in Baghdad
anymore," said Makiya, who teaches Middle Eastern
studies at Brandeis University and sits on the new
university's board of trustees. "The north is much
more stable, growing, prosperous."
"There is a sadness that we're being driven out of
Baghdad," he added.
The university's planners plan to make Makiya's
documentary project the core of the humanities
department. Alwash, an environmental scientist, has
said he will use the university as a base for his
research project, which is about rejuvenating the
southern marshlands.
Other prominent intellectual and political figures,
many of whom supported the American invasion, are on
the board. They include Fouad Ajami, a professor of
Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins, and John
Agresto, an education adviser in the Coalition
Provisional Authority who, as he ended his tenure
there in 2004, told a reporter he was "a
neoconservative who's been mugged by reality."
The planners have sketched a rough schedule.
Construction would start in the spring, and the
first 15 to 30 students could begin a six-month
intensive English course, to be taught in rented
space here in Sulaimaniyah, before they start a
two-year master's program in business
administration. The first class to earn bachelor's
degrees would start in fall 2008; the program would
take five years, with the first devoted to the study
of English, Alwash said.
Although the university has regional aspirations
like its counterparts in Cairo and Beirut, the first
undergraduate class would be mostly Iraqis, Alwash
said, and a majority probably Kurds.
In the university's first five years, degree
programs would focus on subjects that the board
judges to be crucial to Iraq's development:
business, petroleum engineering and computer
science, for example. "This has to have immediate
practical consequences for the economy of Iraq and
the politics of Iraq," Salih, the founder, said.
After five years, the university may add humanities
degree programs.
"We want them to study the ideas of Locke, the ideas
and writings of Paine and Madison," Alwash, the
executive secretary, said. "We want them to
understand what democracy is — not only majority
rule, but also the rights of minorities. They should
be well rounded."
Projected undergraduate enrollment is 1,000 students
by 2011 and 5,000 by 2021. The numbers are small
compared with enrollment at Baghdad University, the
country's flagship public university, which has
70,000 students. Sulaimaniya University here has
about 12,000 students.
In total, about 475,000 Iraqis are pursuing
college-level degrees across the country, in 21
public universities or colleges, 18 private ones and
about 40 technical institutes, according to the
American Embassy.
Tuition at American University would be $8,500 to
$10,000 a year, Alwash said. That places the
university beyond the reach of the average
middle-class Iraqi family. But Salih said the school
planned to give loans and scholarships.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador and an
alumnus of the university in Beirut, has promised
that American agencies will give the school $10.5
million, possibly the largest donation by the United
States to any single education project in Iraq, if
American officials approve the business plan.
Khalilzad, a native Afghan, helped found the
American University of Kabul after the American
military ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in
2001.
Some Kurds fear that the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan, the governing party of eastern Kurdistan
led by Talabani and Salih, could end up diverting
money from the university for its own purposes.
Among many Kurds, the main Kurdish parties have a
reputation for corruption and authoritarian rule.
"I hope this will not just be party propaganda,
because we need a real academic center for this
society," said Asos Hardi, the editor in chief of a
weekly newspaper here. "Having a Western-style
university in Iraq would help strengthen education
here and across the country."
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