The Death of Basrah U.
Professor Hamid Ahmed discusses the appalling state of his former stomping grounds, Basrah University.
This year, upon returning to Basrah and the University after thirteen years, I found that the scale of destruction was beyond my comprehension. The damage was not only structural but psychological too.
Talking with my very close friend, Professor S.D. Salman, who is now Chancellor of Basrah University, I found out that the school was in desperate need of everything. The whole internal system of operation - electricity, water, communication, air conditioning, etc. - was gone. Equipment and furniture had been looted. People had set fire to most of the buildings including the libraries in different colleges and departments of the school. The remaining books, journals and research materials were decades out of date.
[snip]
I also met the Deputy Dean of Basrah Technical Institute, Dr. Abdul Hafez Aweid, in an old rented building in the center of the city that was serving as temporary facilities. The Institute had to evacuate its main building when it was almost completely destroyed during and after the war. I remembered that when I taught there during the early 1980s it was a state-of-the-art institute; now it had become a ghostlike campus, full of burned buildings, damaged equipment, broken chairs and desks. As the others did, Dr. Aweid asked me for any kind of help to bring his Institute back to life again.
On behalf of all the people I met and promised to help, I dedicate this humble article. I ask the world to come to the aid of Iraq's desperate teachers and students who are thirsty for knowledge and who want to be brought back to their proper and deserved place in the academic circles of the world.
It's tragic to read his descriptions of the intellectual flourishing of the university in the 1970s and 80s and then to learn about its current state. It will take an enormous influx of cash and resources as well as years of work simply to restore its basic infrastructure, let alone to return it to its former vitality.
[Thanks to Charles E. Jones for forwarding the story on the Iraq Crisis mail list.]
Postscript: More from a recent article in The Daily Star:
Ravaged by sanctions, dictatorship, war, terror and vandalism, higher education in Iraq, which prior to 1990 was among the best in the region, is now in dire need of assistance. High among the items on the agenda is the training of faculty members to catch up with developments in their fields in the last 10-15 years.
Officials at the Qatar Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization which has recently donated $15 million in aid for higher education in Iraq, have estimated that the cost of bringing Iraq's colleges up to international standards will be $2 billion. This is likely to be an underestimation according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which is co-managing the foundation's grant and completing a comprehensive assessment of Iraqi higher education in cooperation with the Japanese government.
2:06:08 AM 
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