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Preface:

Brainstorming Arab Higher Education

Higher education in the Middle East in general, and in the Arab world in particular, is not understudied but, as the references for this monograph show, a lot of the empirical work has been carried out by the international donor community, specialized United Nations and regional organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Regional governments have undertaken periodic strategic plans, but how seriously they are taken is a matter of debate. The reference section of this book is also testimony to a burgeoning literature on education that is generated by scholars in the region.

My interest in this subject was nourished by my decade as president of the American University of Beirut (1998–2008), when I had to wrestle not only with the challenges of providing high-quality education in a relatively low-income region but also with those of being a player of sorts in the regional arena of higher education more generally. After the American University of Beirut (AUB) I was for a year advisor to the Government of Abu Dhabi on higher education (2011–2012). In that capacity I carried out an extensive survey of institutions of higher learning in the United Arab Emirates. To the best of my knowledge that survey was never released. I mention this merely to indicate that while I will pay little attention to higher education in the oil-rich countries of the Arab world, I am not unfamiliar with it.

In my academic career, I have been a student of politics and public policy in the Middle East since the early 1960s. I have also been part of some notable universities: Columbia, Michigan, Aix-Marseilles III, Princeton, AUB, and New York University Abu Dhabi. Like many of my colleagues I lived in the academic environment without studying it. My fieldwork in several countries inevitably led me to local universities, but I went to them in search of expertise. I never studied them in their own right, which, in retrospect, seems embarrassingly short-sighted.

A premise of this study, so widely held that I doubt it would arouse any dissent, is that Arab higher education has been and remains in a state of structural crisis. This has been documented at fairly high altitude since 2002 in various Arab Human Development Reports, especially those of 2003 on “Building a Knowledge Society” and 2009 on “Toward Productive Intercommunication for Knowledge.” Surveying all levels of education, the World Bank study of 2008, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa, is equally critical. Finally, the most focused study, although gentler in its critique, is Munir Bashshur’s 2004 Higher Education in the Arab States.

As I shall examine in what follows, there may be nothing peculiarly ‘Arab’ about this crisis. I suspect that many developing countries that committed themselves to democratizing higher education find themselves in similar situations. Indeed, it came as something of a surprise to me that there are no problems in higher education unique to the Middle East and North Africa region or even to developing countries. The problems Arab universities face and the pathologies with which they grapple differ in degree but not in kind from those in other countries. Let me mention just a few here:

•Crises in public financing of higher education, as real for the United States (US) or the United Kingdom (UK) as for Egypt or Morocco.

•The erosion of the academic profession or what I call the myth of the full-time professor. Adjuncts in the US have become the indispensable cogs of higher education just as the nominally ‘full-time’ professor in the Arab world has had to seek employment outside academia to make ends meet.

•The tendency for universities to reinforce class privilege rather than overcome it is ubiquitous.

•Dropout rates are a universal problem. Argentina has been a world leader in this respect.

However, to the extent that these problems have their roots in the political institutions of the region, there may be something peculiarly Arab about the problem.

There are two broad levels that require examination. The first is national ‘strategy’ and goals, in the current instance, in the higher education sector. Strategies evolve, so we need to know where the sector has been in order to understand priorities for the future. The second level involves governance structures, including how leadership is selected and performance monitored (accountability), and the incentives that both principals and agents have to achieve any particular set of goals. Obviously, a big part of the governance picture is finances and resources. An equally big part is the effective degree of autonomy the institution enjoys.

It is safe to say that the ‘crisis’ has been created at both levels—national strategy and institutional governance—and to address it will require changes at both levels. Much of the policy literature mentioned above and to which we shall return is prescriptive. It says more about what should be done than how to do it, given the political context.

One way to understand what is possible is to select cases of successful reform, islands of excellence, or at least cases in which palpable progress is being made. For example, Cadi Ayyad University (CAU) in Morocco or Suez Canal University in Egypt may have been able to make progress where their older and more illustrious sisters, like Mohammed V University or Cairo University seem mired in inertial practices. The problem here is that outside the private sector there may be very few such success stories.

Or one could look at success in other regions altogether. One example might be the National University of Singapore (NUS) or perhaps the Indian Institutes of Technology. We shall look further on at the NUS and also at Sharif University of Technology (SUT) in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Whether one selects for success or on the basis of some other criteria, I think we may best understand basic problems by hearing the agents themselves: the rectors and chancellors, the deans and vice presidents. We may understand effective governance, incentives, and accountability best through their eyes. It is also the medium of direct interviews with which I am most comfortable and experienced.

It is always difficult to identify one’s audience. The general mission of this study is to help policymakers and third-party agents of change think about the main challenges facing higher education in the Middle East and North Africa. But that may be overambitious, and, as Lisa Anderson rightly warns, the kind of political science and policy analysis I present may not be in a format that is readily digestible:

Presenting the finished, polished, completed findings from research conducted in a political science department to policymakers today is rather like drawing a map of Europe on a blackboard: it is neither what today’s policymakers need—it takes too long to produce, it is not interactive or mobile, it precludes questions; in short, it does not reflect the requirements of the audience, any audience, today—nor is it what a true political scientist is, or should be, really good at. Our contribution—to the lives of our students as to the work of our policymakers—should be more in the way of guides or coaches. As such, we support and test, encourage and question those who are confronting the challenges of living in and governing human communities. The joy of learning is a spirit that can be reflected and replicated elsewhere—the “campuses” of Google and Microsoft come to mind—but it should be the hallmark of university life, and it should be reflected in the interaction of the denizens of universities with their communities, whether policymakers, neighborhood communities or, not least, students. (Anderson, 2012: 392)¹

As the post-independence model of publicly funded and administered higher education has faltered in the Arab world, out of expediency or surrender, the private sector, both local and international, has been allowed to enter the ‘market.’ A survey of private sector initiatives would be a worthy and complex undertaking in its own right (see Levy, forthcoming). No doubt some entrepreneurs have entered this market with the same profit expectations they might hold for investments in hotels or hospitals. Typically, the for-profit private ventures emphasize marketable skills, especially business and computer science, but they do not offer an integrated educational experience. Most enroll only a fraction of the total enrolled cohorts in any specific country. There are some exceptions, such as Islamic Azad University in Iran, which may have two million students across its many campuses. It is important to ask if this development can provide any long-term answers to dealing with the crisis or whether it will be only a short-term fix for the relatively well-off. Experiences in Latin America, for instance, suggest that private higher education offers structural solutions to the challenges facing that region. Over 50 percent of Latin American students in tertiary education are in private institutions. At the same time, the most prestigious institutions remain public.

We are joining an ongoing debate on the fundamental nature of education in society, who benefits from it, and who pays for it. One school argues that education at all levels enhances the individual earnings of its products and that they should therefore pay for it out of taxes on their enhanced incomes. In this view, education is a private good that generates an income stream (see Cooper, 2017).

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who see education as a right, the violation of which will harm society as a whole. Education is a public good that provides benefits for all of society (even to those who drop out of high school or never go to university). The benefits are the provision of actors fit to be responsible, informed citizens as well as trained participants in a dynamic workforce and a healthy economy. Given that many educational institutions enjoy tax-free status and benefit from public land, and given that taxpayers fund public higher education from which, in most societies, many adults do not benefit, the preponderant view seems to be that education is a public good (see Anomaly, 2018).²

One final observation: the giant national universities will for many decades to come take on the heavy lifting of higher education in the Arab world. They educate in the hundreds of thousands, and their graduates often swamp the civil service and public enterprise sector. They are underfinanced (except in some of the petroleum-exporting states) but, at the same time, represent huge sunk investments that cannot be written off nor easily broken up into more manageable pieces. Is there any vision for the future either at the level of the principals or at the level of the agents? Are there ‘disruptive innovations’ on the horizon that might blow the old public ships out of the water? We will engage these questions throughout the chapters that follow.

A Note on Sources

The reader will find an extensive list of references at the end of this study. I do not cite all of these references in the text, but they have all informed my analysis and may be useful to others going down similar paths.

I also conducted several interviews and email exchanges in the course of my research. These were aimed at eliciting interpretations of events and policies. None of my interlocutors forbade me from quoting or citing them, but, given that many of the observations are politically sensitive, I have chosen, in many instances, not to cite them by name.

A Note on Organization

I have written each chapter in this study with the hope that it can stand alone. That means there is some repetition from chapter to chapter. I wanted chapters that told complete stories but a book that told an integrated story. Hubris, perhaps.