Читать книгу Missions Impossible - John Waterbury - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIntroduction
My approach to what many have called the ‘crisis’ of higher education in the Middle East is to understand the public policy options available to policymakers and their political masters and why some have been adopted and others rejected or neglected. I look both backward and forward: backward mainly in the sense of understanding institutional histories and pathologies; forward mainly in the sense of understanding politically feasible (non-regime threatening) reforms, highly destabilizing reforms, and disruptive or undisruptive innovations.
The period in which I researched and wrote this book bridges the years during which many of us focused on ‘Arab exceptionalism,’ the effective resistance of nearly all Arab regimes to any significant liberalization or democratization, the shorter period of the Arab uprisings of 2011–2012, and then what might be called the restoration of unmitigated authoritarianism everywhere but in Tunisia. In terms of public policy, a transition to greater accountability, direct lobbying for policy outcomes, and competition for public support of certain policies was aborted. There is accountability in authoritarian regimes, but it has its own logic and is very difficult for the outsider to observe.
Policy Innovation
The hypothetical I wish to explore is not so hypothetical. It in fact describes where I sit or stand. I am an outside observer who was once a marginal player in a regional and national system that had lost its sense of mission and defined goals. I am an advocate for change, but what kind of change? Is it what Clayton Christensen (Christensen et al., 2008) calls sustaining or supportive innovation that helps the existing system to survive, if not prosper? Or is it disruptive innovation that emerges outside the system and makes the status quo increasingly unviable?
If I enter into the logic of sustaining innovation, then my aim will be to persuade policymakers and university administrators that there are measures which can be taken that would measurably improve outcomes (I beg the question, what outcomes?) without destroying careers or so upsetting the distribution of resources that vested interests would bring any change to a halt. Most important, I cannot propose anything that would threaten the political stability of the regime. It does not matter if the threat is real or merely perceived. Obviously, this kind of change is incremental and reversible.
If I enter into the logic of disruptive innovation, then policymakers and administrators are merely obstacles to be got round (or under as Christensen suggests), not partners in change. My allies will be entrepreneurs who want to bring the disruptive innovation to market. According to Christensen this is always a market that is ill-defined or untested. It is a market in which existing educational institutions do not or cannot compete. As an outsider I need to find the entrepreneurs and the ‘product,’ or the entrepreneurs need to find me to develop the product, or perhaps they can ignore me altogether. Whatever my role, existing institutions are under threat and may not survive in their current form. Change that eliminates players is not reversible. That is why it is disruptive.
The nature of this study is to promote supportive innovation. I recognize the possibility that current systems are beyond repair or may not be able to serve their basic purposes given the structure of existing markets. But it is hard to imagine a scenario in which I go to policymakers and espouse change that would undermine existing structures with all their mature patronage and power relations in exchange for something that by its disruptive nature is unpredictable and destabilizing.
Is this the formula for having it both ways? What might this look like in universities? Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, and General Electric have managed to survive the last few decades by creating new, smaller, autonomous disruptive business units and shutting down or selling off mature ones that had reached the end of their sustaining-technology trajectories. Universities, I argue, can and do see disruptive innovations coming down the track, but in the environment of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region they may face daunting hurdles in taking measures to meet or preempt them.
I will have several occasions, beginning now, to warn the reader of a trap which I would like to avoid but into which I am sure I have fallen. Let us say we have an observed policy outcome—for example, the introduction of tuition fees in public universities. This is our dependent variable. Then we surmise that the main beneficiaries are the ministries of education and finance, which collect the fees, and wealthier parents who can afford to pay them, while the great majority of the less privileged are ‘screwed.’ We may then conclude that the ministries and the wealthy engineered the new policy. Because we outsiders cannot directly observe the policymaking process (legislatures, the press, and formal lobbies are marginal actors in autocratic systems), the conclusion may be logical but simply wrong.1
Real situations about which I speculate in this study involve, among others, the informal sector and brain drain. In a number of Arab countries, the informal sector may account for 30–40 percent in value of all economic activity. This activity is beyond the fiscal reach of the state that foregoes tax revenues. At the same time many Arab states suffer from low national savings as compared to national investment levels. The gap between savings and investment is closed through increasingly unsustainable levels of borrowing. I surmise that the politicians and policymakers see the informal sector as the lesser of evils. It does not require state resources to function, it creates jobs, and it is adaptable and innovative, so let it be. That is not an unreasonable conclusion, but I have no direct evidence to sustain it.
Many Arab countries suffer high rates of brain drain whereby students in their higher education systems, in whom they have made large investments, take their skills to other economies. Why would this happen? Because politicians and policymakers see brain drain as exporting those most likely to challenge autocratic rule. In addition, the exportees remit earnings that help sustain the local economy. This again is a surmise, and except for some anecdotal evidence from Lebanon, I cannot cite documented decisions.
Similarly, one may try to identify the driver(s) of significant policy change. Leave aside the crucial issue of how we define significant, we may hypothesize that only crisis situations will bring about real policy change. That is, political leaders will have to deal with cumulative and profound damage to polities or economies, failing which the regime itself may be threatened. Again, the observer may argue backward from what s/he identifies as significant change to an explanation that assumes crisis. This is no more satisfying than the first gambit.2 I posit that meaningful reform may be underway in the higher education sector in a number of Arab countries. I then try to establish what might have happened to push autocrats to sponsor change they might otherwise avoid. My answer is a crisis in youth employment with, as 2011 showed, existential threats for regime survival. I am not comfortable with this reverse engineering, but, faute de mieux, I have to go with what I can see.
Crisis
While the perception of educational crisis is widespread in the Arab world, and in the Middle East, different observers have different metrics in mind. From inside, the most severe critiques have come in the various Arab Human Development Reports, especially that of 2003 on “Building a Knowledge Society.” From outside, the World Bank’s 2008 study, The Road Not Traveled, has had significant regional impact. Occasionally heads of state weigh in. King Mohammed VI of Morocco, in a speech from the throne in August 2013, referred to parts of Morocco’s universities as “factories of the unemployed.”
The dimensions of the crisis are quite predictable and will concern us throughout the coming pages. In the broadest sense there has been a massive pedagogical failure. Jordan’s former Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher (2014) singles out the prevalence of rote learning and the uncritical acceptance of the text, which yield obedience to power as well as intolerance (see also Cammack et al., 2017). The victims are pluralism, critical thinking, analytic thinking, embracing diversity, and demanding accountability of those in power.
The Arab world in relative terms does invest heavily in the educational sector (see Chapters 1 and 8). The crisis is more one of money poorly spent, with grossly inadequate returns to the investment. The region has made great progress in the numbers enrolled in higher education but has done poorly in terms of graduation rates and employment. Were public tertiary education not basically free, the low private returns to it might lead prospective students to shun it altogether.
The crisis has built over several decades. The end of colonial control, after the Second World War, ushered in an era of egalitarianism and populism. Colonial authorities were rightly regarded as having thwarted or discouraged tertiary education. Such education was regarded by colonized societies as critical to their own liberation and authentic independence. Making education available to all was proclaimed a right and not a privilege (let alone a personal investment in the future). Professedly socialist countries, such as Egypt, and more market-oriented countries, such as Jordan or Morocco, all implemented fairly populist educational policies.
Moreover, newly independent societies needed skilled personnel to staff new public bureaucracies designed to meet the neglected needs of poor populations. Nowhere were the needs more pressing than in the educational sector itself. Lebanese University, for example, grew out of Lebanon’s normal school and was designed to provide high school teachers to the nation’s burgeoning public lycée system.
Tertiary education was and is characterized by a ‘trilemma’ involving three variables: quantity, quality, and cost (see Chapter 8). Only two of the three can be achieved, while a third is always sacrificed. Quantity coupled with low cost will sacrifice quality. High cost and quality will sacrifice quantity. Quantity and quality will come at the expense of affordability (Kapur, 2011).
In the 1970s the trilemma was on the loose in the MENA like an angry beast. Rapid population growth meant that the entire educational system was swamped with new entrants while universities saw their enrollments rise several-fold. Some countries, like Egypt and Syria, implicitly or explicitly, guaranteed public sector jobs for all university graduates. New universities were established at a dizzying pace, and badly prepared and poorly paid faculty were recruited to teach (see Chapters 1 and 9). Little wonder that in many instances they turned to private lessons and group tutoring to supplement their incomes.
Before long, public bureaucracies were saturated and civil service hiring stalled. In the 1990s, Algeria, for instance, eliminated half a million public sector jobs. Egypt, as I write, is trying to reduce its civil service from six to four million (Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, 2018), with those furloughed probably migrating to the informal sector, which, in general, has become a sponge for overqualified university graduates. The more fortunate have emigrated abroad. This economic reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s corresponded to the first boom in petroleum prices (as a result of the 1973–74 Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) embargo on oil sales to the US). The surge in oil prices led to a spurt of investment in infrastructure and services in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Libya, which in turn created thousands of jobs for educated and unskilled Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Yemenis, and Sudanese. When the oil bust inevitably came, the oil-poor suffered as much economically as the oil-rich. Demand for labor contracted and remittance flows fell off.
The oil-poor, people-rich countries grappled with structural adjustment programs, frequently guided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other creditors, to bring fiscal balance to public finances. Economies that had been dominated by state investment and centralized planning had to invent a new model. It was not, in most instances, pretty. The private sector, both domestic and foreign, was given incentives to invest and to buy up privatized state assets, including factories, banks, insurance companies, and transportation facilities. The domestic private sector was invited to invest in higher education, establishing in many instances for-profit universities. Many students of the region decried an era of ‘crony capitalism’ and ‘neoliberal’ economics (see Diwan et al., 2019). ‘The Washington Consensus’ became a dirty phrase.
There is solid empirical evidence that authoritarian redistributive social contracts sapped structural adjustment programs of their impact. Eric Rougier (2016), for example, constructed a score by multiplying the extent of redistribution in MENA countries by the degree of authoritarianism. He found that the MENA scores were twice those of any other region in the world. Ersatz neoliberal reforms did little to foster broad-based private sector development or sophistication in exports. What many have dubbed ‘crony capitalism’ left authoritarian regimes with high youth unemployment and, outside the informal sector, anemic private enterprises unable to absorb much labor at any skill level.
Rougier (2016) and Ragui Assaad and Caroline Krafft (2016a) in fact see reform of the private sector and reform of the training/educational sector as key to economic transformation. The agenda is designed to accommodate the authoritarian structures as much as possible, not to overthrow them.
Structural adjustment did not significantly alter the fundaments of autocratic controls of institutions of higher learning (IHLs). Universities were and are rightly perceived to be under the thumb of political authorities who meddle constantly in curricula, appointments, and promotions. Some use university employment as part of their patronage networks. Despite founding documents and charters that emphasize university autonomy, real autonomy is rare, if nonexistent (see Chapter 5).
Tertiary education fails in its two greatest duties toward society (and it is society, in that taxpayers pay for it): the formation of citizens who uphold the political order and the training of skilled participants in the nation’s economy. One hears constantly about the mismatch between the skill sets of graduates and the needs of the job market (see Chapter 6). Some see the problem as one of universities mired in pedagogy designed to train public bureaucrats, while others see it as the result of private sectors oriented toward low skills and quick profits.
Universities have failed in their mission to produce new knowledge and carry out cutting-edge research. Key linkages are broken or have never existed. Universities do not interact with their own private sectors in terms of research and development (R&D) (see Chapter 7), and they do not directly serve the strategic goals of their governments. Governments may prefer to keep their research agendas within friendly and easily controlled public research centers, isolated from national universities. The private sector in the MENA has seldom entered high-tech areas of production. The tourism sector, for example, does not provide the same R&D opportunities as do information and communications technology (ICT) or biomedical research.
Arab universities interact among themselves very little. The fracturing of the Arab world is reflected in the lack of professional and research interaction. Many universities sign memoranda of understanding with sister institutions, but they seldom involve joint research or exchange of faculty or students. The same can be said of regional disciplinary associations. The organizations that normally set professional standards and apply ethical guidelines are at best atrophied, at worst totally absent.
Virtually regardless of the political orientation of particular regimes—from ‘conservative’ monarchies and emirates to populist republics—K–12 (kindergarten through twelfth grade) education and, increasingly, higher education have been touted as avenues of socioeconomic mobility. Yet everywhere class bias has come in through the back door and sometimes the front door. If we look at the region as a whole, on average about 30 percent of the age cohort eighteen to twenty-two is enrolled in tertiary education, the great bulk of it public (see Chapter 1). There is a distinct bias toward middle- and upper-income students in that share, yet society as a whole pays for the education. The well-off invest more heavily in private lessons, send their children to the best high schools, and frequently send them abroad for university education. A major facet of the crisis is, therefore, the absence of social equity (UNESCO, 2009, especially the chapter on “Main Challenges”).
There are rare exceptions to the general gloom. Hana El-Ghali and her co-authors surveyed ninety institutions of higher learning and came away with some optimistic conclusions: “It is evident from an examination of the individual institutional survey results that these institutions clearly understood the needs of their societies in addition to their own specific institutional needs and that they were in the process of developing appropriate responses” (El-Ghali et al., 2010: 52).
Similarly, public opinion polls do not reflect a sense of crisis. Poll questions are very general, not specifying level of education, but by and large the scanty polling data we have indicate a public that ranges from indifferent to supportive of their educational systems (see next section). Quality of education does not appear to be a hot-button issue, at least in relative terms.
Attitudes
Those professionals closest to the education sector, including third-party experts and reformers, tend to be the most critical. They are most likely to write about declining standards, institutional atrophy, outdated pedagogy, and so forth. The actual consumers—Arab publics, parents, students—are far more charitable but hardly forgiving.
For instance, in their survey of nine thousand young Arabs in nine countries or populations, Jörg Gertel and Ralf Hexel (2018) found that trust in education systems was high, ranging from 64 percent to 90 percent, depending on the population. Other surveys reflect less positive assessments (Bollag, 2020).
Satisfaction is clearly limited. Nowhere does a majority of consumers express satisfaction with the system, and tellingly less than a third are happy with the relevance of skills learned.
By contrast, there is much more consistent concern for employment and job creation. The Arab Barometer (2014) shows that this concern dwarfs all others.
Figure I.1 Levels of Satisfaction with Aspects of Education: Students and Parents
Source: Dubai School of Government, 2013: 5
Table I.1 Arab Barometer Survey: What Are the Most Important Challenges Your Country is Facing Today?
Assaad and Krafft (2016b) asked graduates how appropriate their studies were to their current work. Jordanian institutions performed the best, with only 16 percent of graduates saying that their education was either somewhat inappropriate or totally inappropriate. In Egypt, 34 percent of graduates deem their education totally inappropriate to the work they are currently doing, compared to 30 percent in Tunisia. The sum of those stating their education is either somewhat or totally inappropriate is 50 percent in Tunisia, as compared to 44 percent in Egypt.
Palestine provides a more detailed snapshot. The student assessments of various aspects of the tertiary course of study are strongly positive across all categories.
Elizabeth Buckner mentions that while people writing on the Middle East have said that young, unemployed men are the most vulnerable and dissatisfied in the region, her study in Syria shows that it is “specifically the educated unemployed that are the most discontent” (2013: 15, emphasis in original). In Chapter 4 we shall examine the evidence for the link between unemployment and political activism in the MENA.
Figure I.2 National Study of Undergraduate Teaching in Palestine, Presented at An-Najah University, Nablus, July 23–24, 2009
Source: Cristillo, Jamal, and Said, 2009
Buckner goes on to pinpoint student grievances in Syria. Based on her 2010 survey, student dissatisfaction is due to government’s sorting of educational trajectories in public universities based on results gained in baccalauréat exams. The state determines which career a person is to have based on grades alone, but no longer offers guarantees of employment after graduation as it did in years prior. According to Buckner, “the decoupling of the public university system from public sector employment means that higher education no longer promises the security it once did” (2013: 7). Young people believe they need to gain a higher education degree to make money but also that one must have money or family connections in order to find work after graduation. What is also frustrating to students in Syria is that for those who cannot afford private higher education, the state determines what they will study and hence what careers they can pursue based on their official examination results. This system also seems to be in place in Iran, whereby official examination results determine which universities and degrees students can pursue.
In Saudi Arabia, students who are able to choose, go to private universities, as they feel public universities lack practical training that links their degrees to work.
In another snapshot, a World Bank survey (Chauffour, 2017: 9) of Moroccans shows the high saliency of education (at all levels) among the major concerns of the country’s citizens, far outstripping governance and fighting corruption, for example.
In 2016, five years after the Arab uprisings, a survey of some nine thousand young Arabs between the ages of sixteen and thirty was undertaken in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian territories, among Syrian refugees, and Yemen (Gertel and Hexel, 2018). One thousand subjects were interviewed in each group, overweighting perhaps the unusual cases of Yemenis and Syrian refugees. Important countries were left out: Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Tunisia. It is not clear how their inclusion would have affected the study’s results. The eight samples covered all socioeconomic strata and levels of education.
The entire region to varying degrees had been subjected to violence, civil war, political repression, economic restructuring, and stagnant or negative economic growth. Despite that, sampled youth were surprisingly positive about their current situations and the future. Only 50 percent of the most vulnerable populations—the Yemenis and Syrian refugees—felt insecure. When asked what they most trusted, family topped the chart by a good bit, followed by the military and education. Of the total sample, 42 percent expressed confidence in education. Two-thirds expressed guarded optimism about the future, and that proportion held steady across socioeconomic strata.
Legacies
As I shaped my own approach to the educational crisis, I was informed by research I carried out over two decades ago on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Turkey. In that work I had expected that the different cultures and colonial histories of the four countries would significantly impact the way the public sector performed in each. The four countries had vastly different religions: Islam, Catholicism, Hinduism, and sometimes official laicité, as in Turkey or Mexico. They also had different colonial histories, from Spanish and British to none (again, Turkey), and different ethnic compositions and political institutions, from Indian democracy, to Mexico’s single-party sexenio (a single six-year term for the president of the republic), to Egypt’s rulers for life.
In fact, it turned out that all these factors were swamped by the legal and policy regimes in which SOEs functioned: the nature of principals (owners) and agents (those who execute the owners’ will), the relationship between principals and agents, the way in which missions were assigned to SOEs, and how managers read their incentive structures. Despite the great cultural, religious, and political-institutional disparities among the four, their SOEs shared many performance criteria and outcomes (Waterbury, 1993).
Having learned that lesson, I expected the same with respect to universities, above all in that I was focusing heavily on universities in Arab society and a few other neighboring predominantly Islamic countries (Turkey, Iran, Pakistan). I am not sure if I confirmed that hypothesis. Part of the problem lies in identifying significant performance criteria. Just as SOEs are burdened by multiple objectives—employment generation, regional development, strategic objectives, surplus or profit generation—so too are public universities asked to do a lot, including form citizens, train leaders, meet workplace demand, generate high-quality research, train new professors, and meet national strategic needs.3 In both the SOE and university contexts, multiple objectives work at cross purposes. In both, outcomes have been distinctly suboptimal, although it is interesting to note that local commentary is much readier to evoke crisis and failure with respect to education than with respect to public enterprise. The educational enterprise plays a role in the daily lives of Middle Easterners that cannot be matched by SOEs.
There are historical legacies that count in comparing institutions of higher learning in the MENA, but I am not sure for how much. Private institutions prevail in Palestine and Lebanon, the French colonial legacy in North Africa has protected the overwhelming place of public universities, the British were skeptical that Egypt needed universities, while the French in Syria wanted the University of Damascus to be a beacon for the rest of the Arab world. Lebanon, meanwhile, did not have a public university until the 1950s (see Chapter 2).
Yet, as the discussion of crisis above indicates, the similarity in outcomes across the region outweighs the disparities. Outside the oil-rich countries of the GCC, no country has found a solution to the financial costs of the trilemma. Quality has been the victim. Although there has been some improvement in recent years, the only public universities to make it into the top two to three hundred in world rankings are in Saudi Arabia.4 Most public universities have been factories for bureaucrats, if not for the unemployed. For at least three decades MENA countries have tried to foster their private sectors and reduce the budgetary burdens of the public sector. The public universities produce graduates that the private sector does not want or need. The residual employer becomes the informal sector, the gray economy that is unregulated, underfinanced, and characterized by low productivity and low skills.
The political science literature on the Middle East has stressed ‘Arab exceptionalism’—the fact that the Arab world lags behind all other major regions on all measures of democratic practice. This holds despite a number of enabling variables, such as high levels of literacy, high rates of urbanization, growing middle classes, and substantial increases in per capita income over the last four decades. And as many have noted, the Arab world is plugged in, online, and social-media mad. The uprisings of 2011 offered hope that Arab exceptionalism was coming to an end, but, with the exception of Tunisia, those hopes have been dashed.
The absence of democracy in the Arab world has been attributed to the region’s Islamic legacy, the prevalence of war(s), cultural patriarchy (or, put another way, the political, social, and economic subordination of women), and the prevalence of state systems dependent on rents, above all petroleum rents and rent-seeking (inter alia, see Elbadawi and Makdisi, 2017). All of these factors are probably in play, but none is exclusive to the Arab world. Less structural are analyses that stress alliances among regime reformers and hardliners and civil society moderates and radicals (Przeworski and Limongi 1997; Chaney, Akerloff, and Blaydes 2012). Each approach has its merits and seemingly explains some of the variance, but it is hard not to conclude that we really do not have a satisfactory explanation.5
Is there parallel exceptionalism in Arab higher education or in all levels of education? It came as something of a surprise to me that what we might call the pathologies of the educational crisis in the Arab world are reflected just about everywhere in the world. The trilemma is a powerful and ubiquitous conundrum. We may briefly review some of its component parts here:
•Governance. Everywhere countries tinker with the balance between university autonomy and accountability. Are democracies better at this than autocracies? We shall see (Chapter 6).
•Sources of funding. Who pays and how much? Is education a right or an investment? The debate is universal (Chapter 8).
•Massification. A terrible term but still graphic. South Korea extends higher education to approximately 90 percent of eligible cohorts. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) averages are around 40 percent. The Arab world is not far behind. Free market systems, planned economies, autocracies, democracies, monarchies, republics are all headed in the same direction (Chapters 1 and 2).
•R&D. Globally, no one does enough, except, perhaps, Singapore, Israel, Finland, and a few others. Some countries do appear more adept than others at fostering productive interaction among universities, governments, and the private sector. The MENA region is notably weak in this domain (Chapter 7).
•Class bias. All educational systems, even the most nominally egalitarian, create back-door fixes that favor the well-to-do. Private lessons and tutoring are, in the Middle East, one of the notorious ways by which the better-off promote their offspring at the expense of the poorer sectors of society. But it is probably East Asia, led again by South Korea, where these upper-class outlays are the greatest.
•Educated youth unemployment. Until 2008 the MENA region was known for the highest rates of unemployment among educated youth and by far the highest rates of educated female youth unemployment. But with the 2008 economic collapse in more advanced economies like those of Greece, Spain, and Portugal, similarly high rates of educated youth unemployment emerged. Everywhere we hear of the mismatch between what universities produce and what the job market needs (Chapter 6).
•Dropout rates. University completion rates vary significantly across countries of the MENA but they are not exceptional. Argentina may have the worst university completion rates in the world. Reducing dropout rates could have huge implications for equity, financing tertiary education, and improving returns to investment in education. It is an area of reform that should not threaten incumbent autocrats (Chapter 8 and the Conclusion).
There are, then, differences in degree but not in kind in the pathologies of the crisis of higher education in the Middle East. Having said that, it is the case that there are no significant bright spots in the Arab landscape outside the oil-rich countries of the GCC. I will argue that the combined weight of the pathologies of higher education in the Arab world constitutes a singular challenge of unusual proportions.
I would go a step further. There is, it seems to me, one piece of the governance puzzle that does sharply distinguish the Arab university from its European and American peers. The Arab university is a particularly dangerous entity in the context of the prevailing autocracies of the Arab world. The concentration in universities of brain power, youth, energy, open debate, and daily engagement with big issues constitutes a threat for autocrats. There is, then, a direct link between the crisis in higher education and the region’s democratic deficit. This is not the case, for example, in the European democracies of the southern Mediterranean.
The autocrats are schizophrenic when facing what they have created, hoping, on the one hand, that the university will produce the expertise needed to run the country without, on the other hand, constituting a constant source of threats and malevolent maneuvers. By the same token, the university sometimes sees itself as a vanguard, the bearer of the flame of speaking truth to power. It thereby confirms the ruler’s worst fears. Formal governance structures mean little in such an environment of mutual suspicion.
Universities everywhere are engaged in and affected by politics with a lower-case ‘p.’ The politics are those of the purse strings and accountability. They result in political ‘interference’ in the academic enterprise. In the Arab world, by contrast, we have Politics with an upper-case ‘P.’ Universities may set precedents for the system as a whole. They may act as an ‘estate,’ acquiring institutional rights, carving out zones of autonomy, and offering protection to critics that contain the seeds of systemic change. Ironically, since the colonial period, Arab universities have seldom mounted systemic challenges,6 but control-obsessed elites recognize the potential and act accordingly. Small-p educational politics are ubiquitous and healthy, as they set the bounds of accountability. Big-P politics are both exciting and dangerous for the university establishment and the regimes it serves.
It follows that real university excellence will depend more on an improved political environment than on money—that is, greater openness, decentralization, and institutional autonomy. Phrased differently, it would mean a retreat of the ‘deep state’ comprising the security and judicial apparatuses. That is a very tall order. It is easy to see that the political environment is well beyond the control of the university. To take but one example, if we were to see a public university in the Arab world granted true autonomy—the ability to recruit and promote its own faculty, set criteria for admissions, design its own curriculum, do its own financial planning—we would know that something profound had changed in the political system. Could the university itself be the source of that change? Under present circumstances, I very much doubt it.
Public Policy
Because many of the problems faced by tertiary education in the MENA are generic and not sui generis, we can learn from other countries about possible reforms. At the same time if big-P politics is unusually important in the MENA, then the reform process is likely to be unusually fraught.
The weak mechanisms of accountability that characterize the autocracies of the region might mean that leaders have unusual degrees of freedom to undertake bold initiatives and sweeping reforms. That, however, has not been the modus operandi of most autocrats. Saddam Hussein was foolishly bold in his foreign policies and paid a terrible price. More typical was the stodgy caution of Hosni Mubarak, who never saw an initiative he could love. There is, I argue, a strong bias for business as usual (BAU) in the MENA’s autocracies. BAU is different from the status quo. BAU suggests a process, how one conducts the affairs of state. The status quo refers to situations and outcomes. In the MENA BAU leads to the status quo. To change the status quo, one needs to change BAU.
If that is the case, how does policy change come about? We all know the standard advice, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Crisis may be the only catalyst to reform. Informed foresight and analysis should drive policy change (think of global warming and greenhouse gas emissions) but seldom do. As I have noted, it is generally recognized in the region (as well as outside it) that MENA higher education is in crisis. Should we expect a policy response and, if so, what kind of response?
Just about everywhere in the world, fiscal crisis or crises in public finances have triggered fairly sweeping reforms that involve privatizing public assets, trimming bloated public-personnel rosters, slashing welfare entitlements and consumer subsidies, and enacting legislation to stimulate private economic activity. As noted above, in the 1980s and 1990s, the MENA engaged in this kind of crisis response. So-called ‘social contracts’ were shredded, some public sector assets unloaded, and defense budgets curtailed. Cost-of-living riots often ensued. Autocrats had to refashion their alliance bases, giving rise in many instances to crony capitalism. In the course of those reforms the sphere of higher education was opened to private investment. Some of the new cronies were educational entrepreneurs. The point is that crisis did drive policy change, and cautious autocrats reluctantly took big political risks as a result.7
It is also the case that the structural adjustment crises at the close of the twentieth century had far-reaching international ramifications, involving foreign creditors and trade partners. To do nothing was not an option. By contrast, crises in higher education are largely contained within the countries that gave rise to them in the first place. One might plausibly argue that there is spillover, in that poor-quality higher education feeds educated youth unemployment, which in turn fosters high out-migration and perhaps Islamist radicalism. It is plausible but a stretch. I have not heard any country threatened by radical Islamists demanding reform of higher education as a result.
A second driver of policy change is the leverage exerted by the donor and nongovernmental organization (NGO) community. The economic crises increased that leverage. Multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) and bilateral agencies like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) all weighed in on the reform agenda and stimulated some action. As important, these agencies acted as conduits to the formation of ‘communities of practice’ (Haas 1992), whereby somewhat isolated and numerically small expert groups in countries undergoing reform were brought together with international expert groups that fully understood and understand best practice. Communities of practice provide validation for national pockets of expertise that often operate in a politically hostile environment. The combination of multilateral or bilateral funding and communities of practice can exert considerable pressure for reform.
The Reformer’s Dilemma
The conviction that higher education in the Arab world is ‘in crisis’ and that there is a pressing need to launch bold reforms is widely shared. How to go about reform, however, does not generate uniform answers, let alone consensus. The analytic challenge is how to promote reform within autocracies. This is what we might call the ‘reformer’s dilemma.’ By reformer I mean someone committed to process, transparency, accountability, and, ultimately, democracy. Some reformers will accept no compromise with autocrats and in essence postpone reforms until the political system as a whole opens up. Most reformers, however, accept the need to work with the existing autocrats. Their solution to the dilemma is, in effect, to hold their noses.
Their strategies depend on the policy area and its political salience and the resources they can mobilize. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, it is reformers in the external international financial institutions (IFIs) and NGOs who have the resources and who seek strategic allies within target countries. Together they can build communities of practice, assemble persuasive data, and use financial resources to make the political costs of reform more palatable.
NB: Reformers, if successful, mitigate crises that might otherwise bring about the collapse of regimes. The reformers may thereby rescue some truly bad actors. Revolutionaries may well say, “Let the crisis take its natural course; reform only shores up autocrats and their cronies.” I fully recognize the dilemma but find myself among the reformers.
I will situate higher education reform among other policy areas with which I am most familiar: environmental policy and management of public assets.
Table I.2 Policy Parameters
| Policy Area | Degree of Crisis | Political Saliency |
| Higher Education | Slow moving | Medium to high |
| Environment | Slow moving | low |
| Public Assets | Immediate | medium |
For some time the crisis in higher education has been in the eyes of internal and external experts but not in the eyes of the policymakers. The crisis has been identified for decades; it is slow-moving rather than explosive. But higher education, like the entire education sector, is a critical part of the social contracts prevailing in the region since the 1960s. It touches virtually every family. Its costs and quality are matters of immediate concern. I argue that elites have come to recognize the critical links among mediocre education, youth unemployment and political instability. The awareness began to take hold in the 1990s and strengthened appreciably after the uprisings of 2011.
Despite this awareness, autocrats are not prepared to empower university leaders to spearhead the reform effort because they know instinctively that such empowerment could lead to real institutional autonomy in a sector rich in brains and political motivation. The policy solution to date has been to shift the financing burden to the private sector and to implement cosmetic reforms (for example, quality assurance) with the support of the donor community. It is a cat-and-mouse game: the donor community hopes that cosmetic reform will morph into institutional reform (see Mahmood and Slimane, 2018) while the autocrats take the money and eviscerate the reform process.
We may contrast this with the other two policy areas I mentioned. Environmental policy reform is in fact an integral part of other policy areas such as water management, agricultural development, and municipal waste water treatment. Multiple policy jurisdictions make coordination very difficult. Educational reform, by comparison, is to some extent contained within the education sector, although its role in feeding the labor force makes the sector directly relevant to the economy as a whole.
Finally, the issue of managing public assets (factories, banks, transportation systems, airlines, mines) was bound up in the fiscal crises of the 1970s and 1980s. These were crises with major external repercussions involving international credit ratings, investment flows, and possible defaults on external debt. The crises developed relatively quickly, required swift and convincing responses, and, like education, went to the heart of the region’s social contracts, involving jobs, consumer subsidies, and public enterprise debt. The autocrats had no choice but to sign up for various forms of structural adjustment, often involving privatization, currency flotation, and the reduction of consumer subsidies and public employment. While some autocrats teetered (Anwar Sadat in 1977), none fell. As I write, several MENA countries are in the throes of yet another round of structural adjustment (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey),8 provoking varying levels of social protest. Civil war and international sanctions in other countries (Iran, Syria, Libya, Yemen) make structural adjustment seem almost a luxury.
Incrementalism versus Big Bang Reform
There is a great deal of ‘path dependency’ involved in higher education. The universal model is one built on costly infrastructure (classrooms, labs, administrative facilities, recreational facilities, cafeterias, libraries, dormitories, and sometimes, faculty housing) and large personnel rosters of faculty, teaching assistants, and administrative and custodial staff. Could all that infrastructure, like the abandoned steel mills of the ‘rust belt’ in the US, be left to molder or be sold for other uses (see Chapter 7 on innovation)?
The university as we know it brings together in one place (not a virtual place!) students and teachers to produce synergies that are allegedly impossible otherwise. It lets the teachers stay at the frontier of their expertise by conducting research and creating knowledge, sometimes with the help of their students.
The infrastructure of the physical place, with all its attendant costs, is needed for the university to succeed. Proximity (again not virtual) is necessary for spontaneous learning. A big part of learning is from one’s peers, not in the narrow sense of study groups but rather through broad social interactions that are occasionally unpleasant or unsettling.
Room, board, and tuition are supposed to pay for teaching and research. Over time new sources of revenue had to be found as only elite students could actually pay the full cost of their education, the infrastructure became more costly and sophisticated, and other professions lured talent away. The big but only partially disruptive innovations came in building endowments, in fundraising, and in the quest for federal funding or sponsored research funding more generally. North American universities were the leaders in these innovations.
In recent decades there has been explicit focus on the economic role of universities, especially in urban settings. One of the best documented is that of the University of Pennsylvania in what was once a blighted, violent, and drug-ridden neighborhood (Rodin, 2007), but just about any university could tell a similar tale. Rust belt cities such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland have been rescued by ‘meds and eds’: illustrious universities and associated medical centers such as the Cleveland Clinic.
Universities drive up property values, generate high demand for supplies and capital projects, and through students and faculty sustain robust rental markets as well as retail markets in restaurants, entertainment, and home goods. It is the physical, bricks-and-mortar university that does all of this, not its virtual competitor. Those in retirement love to live near these hubs of intellectual and cultural life. I know.
There are those who nonetheless foresee disruptive innovations in all levels of education that will destroy the old model just as surely as Asian steel killed Pittsburgh or digital technology maimed Kodak. Clayton Christensen has been the foremost (albeit contested: Lepore, 2014) analyst of disruptive innovation (Christensen, 1997; Christensen, Johnson, and Horn, 2008; Weise and Christensen, 2014; DeMillo, 2015). The basic proposition is that successful, well-established firms (or universities) do not see threats to their business model or value proposition until it is too late, until a new firm with a radically different model can deliver a similar although perhaps inferior product at much lower cost. The upstart may find a market that the established firm does not target, but once in the door the upstart goes after the established firm’s customers. The irony that Christensen stresses is that the established firm may successfully engage in incremental improvements that lull it into a false sense of security. For Christensen my predilection for incrementalism will at best postpone the inevitable. My purpose here is not to explore the evidence for Christensen’s conclusions (see Chapters 6 and 7 and the Conclusion), but I do recognize that what he proposes is well within the realm of possibility. If online education offers a disruptive business model (minimal infrastructure, maximum student–teacher ratios), it is unlikely that the public sector universities of the MENA will be the lead authors of it.
Suggesting that public education is similar to the markets for ICT or steel is simply in error. Public education is a public good, available to all, consumed by law in the first twelve years or so, and a quasi-state monopoly. The taxpayer foots a large part of the bill. Private providers of disruptive innovation will want to sell their innovation. Many customers of the existing paradigm cannot afford to switch. The only way for the disruptive innovation to become generalized is for the dominant system to buy it so that the taxpayer continues to foot the bill.
Finally, in Christensen’s paradigm, incumbents have no real incentive to adopt the disruptive innovation until it is too late. Change will be driven from outside the BAU model, not from within. If that is the case the only policy lesson to be learned is how the incumbents deal with the debacle. But that may not be the case (as I shall explore in Chapter 7).
What if tertiary education had only one objective, similar to the firm’s profit-and-loss bottom line? Let us imagine that the metrics are to achieve a graduation rate of 85 percent, to find appropriate employment for 80 percent of graduates within two years of graduation, and for those employed graduates to pay off the costs of their education within ten years of being employed. Programs would be assessed and ranked according to their success in meeting those three goals. Resources would flow according to relative performance.
All academic and non-academic staff would be hired and promoted with those three metrics in mind. Training for advanced work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines might look much as it does today. For those teaching in such fields, research would be a valuable asset. Otherwise, academic research would be virtually irrelevant, probably reserved to non-university specialized research units with full-time research personnel. They already exist throughout the MENA.
This model would not be driven primarily by technological change, although online learning would surely play a big part in it. It would be driven by a very different value proposition than the bricks-and-mortar model of today. It would deal with mass education (quantity), at a reasonable cost, and offer restricted quality. It would sacrifice the quality of life associated with some campuses, the training of citizens, the networking among classmates, and the extracurricular experiences that characterize ‘good’ universities. Anyone who has visited some of the behemoth public universities of the Arab world will know that those aspects of quality have long disappeared.
Is the Big Bang upon Us?
There is a real-world and profoundly disturbing natural experiment playing out before us. Since 2011 four Arab states have ‘failed.’ Their governments no longer monopolize the use of force, no longer fully control their territories, and therefore no longer make truly national policies. Those states are Syria, Iraq,* Yemen, and Libya. We could add to the list Lebanon, which, at the time of writing, is governed by two authorities, the official government of Lebanon and Hezbollah, which enjoys a preponderance of force. In the first four countries the destruction of physical infrastructure, including universities, has been extensive, and one university, Mosul in Iraq, was run by ISIS from June 2014 for three years. It was retaken in January 2017.9
One has to hope that these failed states will somehow be reinvented, and I use that term advisedly. They will have to reinvent themselves politically or they will shatter. That process may give them the opportunity to generate new models of higher education. At a minimum, it may be possible to convince their future leadership to establish some pilot projects that are out of the BAU box.
I am skeptical that we will see radical departures anywhere (Siira and Hill, 2016). Some kind of coalition of armed factions, still smoldering with unresolved grievances from the era of violence, will be in shaky control of the new policy arenas. Their first instinct may be to reestablish the deep state, not to foster zones of educational autonomy. Still, the possibility for new experiments in these damaged societies is there. They stand in sharp contrast to the undeniable costs of BAU.
_______________
*Since the collapse of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in early 2019, Iraq has regained control of most of its territory.
