Focus on rebuilding universities in north

“If you want to change this country for the better”, Dr Kemal Khoshnaw, president of Sulaymaniyah University, told IRIN, "you have to start with the educational system.” It’s an attitude common among Iraq’s teaching staff. Despite all the international talk of democracy-building, though, there’s much less evidence of it inside the country. Immediately after their arrival in Baghdad last April, Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) officials responsible for overseeing Iraq’s neglected and looted schools and universities immediately set about calculating how much money was needed to create viable new centres of learning. INTERNATIONAL FUNDING With over 375,000 students in the country’s 22 universities, they reached the conclusion that an investment of US $1.2 billion would be a useful start. Yet, of the $18.6 billion reconstruction package approved by the US Congress in 2003, only $8 million was set aside for higher education. It wasn’t just the US administration that failed to follow up words with deeds. International donors at the Madrid conference last October pledged $400 million for Iraqi universities. By the end of June this year, not a cent of that money had arrived in Baghdad. In the absence of a concerted international interest in Iraq’s higher education system, administrators like Khoshnaw have had to fall back on piecemeal improvements. LOCAL SOLUTIONS Professors from East Tennessee State University are helping update the medical curriculum used in the three universities in the Kurdish-controlled north - Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk, and Salahuddin university in Arbil. Sulaimaniyah university’s vice-chancellor, British-trained psychiatrist Nazar Mohammed Amin, is working to create a science PhD exchange programme with Nottingham University in the UK. Again in Sulaymaniyah, two British specialists in teaching English as a foreign language have been asked to head panels set up to renovate the English language curriculum for schools and universities. “The will is there”, said Jessica Gollop, one of the two specialists. “But the lack of organised outside help gives the efforts to change a rather random feel - there is no long-term strategy.” She is not alone in thinking that more could be done. A philosophy teacher at Salahuddin university in Arbil, Ferhad Pirbal, believes that part of the problem lies in the mentalities of older administrators. INTERNATIONALISING THE CURICULLUM “For almost all their working lives, these people were forced to work with systems imposed on them by outsiders”, he said. “They have been slow to realise that not all outside involvement is as negative as Saddam Hussein’s.” “In the last years of the former Iraqi regime, this country was entirely closed to the world”, he added. “The economic opening-up we have seen since the war must be followed by the education sector.” For him, that means replacing the history textbooks that give pride of place to Arab nationalist ideas with a broader view:“What was the French Revolution? What is the history of parliamentary democracy? Who were Newton and Einstein?” he asked. For Khoshnaw, it means setting up what he calls “an American university” in Sulaymaniyah. In part, the aim would be to create a place capable of giving a good quality education to future elites, as similar institutions have done in Lebanon and Turkey. But he also believes there is a political advantage to be had. “In the west, academics are loyal to the truth, not to their parties”, he said. “Why shouldn’t the same thing be true here?” The brainchild of Dana Qashani, a businessman who also teaches architecture at Sulaimaniyah university, the new college is expected to cost a minimum of $25 million. Donations so far total $7 million. “I am optimistic we will get the rest of the money,” said Khoshnaw. “After all, Sulaymaniyah university was closed down in 1981 on Saddam Hussein’s orders. We opened again in 1992 thanks to the generosity of ordinary people.” COMPARISONS WITH THE CENTRE AND SOUTH Whatever problems they face, administrators in the Kurdish-controlled north have an easier job than their colleagues elsewhere in the country. Many educational institutions in central and southern Iraq faced the same fate as Baghdad’s Mustansiriya university, looted and burned on 9 April 2003. It is principally for this reason that Khoshnaw and others believe that northern Iraqi universities must be allowed to move forward at their own rate. “I see no reason why we should have to wait for others to catch up”, he said. The evidence is that Baghdad’s new Education Minister Tahir Bakaa is willing to permit a certain autonomy. At a meeting of university presidents earlier this year, he told his colleagues that deans and university presidents would be in charge of the higher education system, not the ministry. And he continues to give support to the efforts of Kurdish university presidents to set up a cooperation committee spanning Iraq’s three northern governorates. “The cooperation we have - exchange of books and, if necessary, advisors for PhD and Masters students - will ultimately be extended throughout Iraq”, said Sulaymaniyah vice-chancellor, Dr Mohammed Amin.