The Chronicle of Higher Education Changes in Egypt Could Strengthen Scholarly Ties With U.S. By David L. Wheeler When Jerry W. Leach arrived at the American University in Cairo five years ago, he wanted to reach outside of that elite institution to students at Egypt's public universities. He was warned by colleagues about potential violence, political reprisals, and opposition from the Muslim Brotherhood and the mukhabarat, or secret police. But when Mr. Leach, director of the university's American studies center, finally ventured out to campuses in the Nile Delta and along the Suez Canal, his experience was in sharp contrast to the negative expectations. "I've been received with a kind of enthusiasm I have never experienced in any part of the world," says Mr. Leach, a State Department and Peace Corp veteran who has led programs in 45 countries and negotiated with the representatives of 21 governments. With populist uprisings underway in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and Yemen, and autocratic regimes loosening their grip, wider opportunities for Western academics to engage with students and professors in such countries may open up. Westerners need to be reassured about their safety and security, says Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. But after that happens, he predicts there "will be more interest than ever before in North Africa and the Middle East. And it's more important than ever before." Mr. Goodman compares the situation to Eastern Europe before the collapse of communism, as the buzz of increased communication builds: "Democracy favors exchanges." The scale for potential interaction is largest in Egypt, where public universities are free, and have huge enrollments. Institutions with more than 150,000 students are not unusual, although they largely pour out graduates who become the restless unemployed youth who have fueled recent protests. Mr. Leach's experience reveals the potential for Egyptian-U.S. academic relations. Egyptian students read newspapers, watch television, and troll the Internet, but it is rare for outsiders to lecture on Egyptian campuses. When Mr. Leach arrived at Egyptian universities with his translator, hundreds of students would surround him, asking for his autograph and e-mail address. He would talk with students for two hours in a packed auditorium, then the auditorium would be emptied and a new group of students would file in. That rhythm could last for a day. But he faced many barriers before he ever got to a podium. He has made overtures to about sixteen universities. He has only spoken at four. "Universities are usually the most open of societies' institutions," he says. "Here it is exactly the opposite." To start, he had to find a faculty member on each Egyptian campus willing to help him coordinate an appearance. Egyptian professors notoriously juggle three and four jobs to make a living, and their work leaves them little free time. After Mr. Leach located a willing faculty partner, he still faced questioning by administrators: Was he planning on passing out Bibles, preaching free sex, or pushing a pro-Israel point of view? He learned that religion, sex, and politics were out as topics. Instead, he talked about marriage, family, media, cross-cultural stereotypes, and global warming. The more time Mr. Leach has spent on Egyptian campuses, the more he has become convinced that the secret police have a strong influence on academic life. In a country with a long history of having a highly centralized government, he says, the secret police control what is taught and what is not taught, who gets promoted, and when outsiders can speak. Western universities will only be able to make meaningful contact, he says, "if the secret police can be pushed out of educational affairs and just take the job of enforcing criminal law." The sorts of lectures he has given on Egyptian campuses could easily be expanded, he says, if fear of the secret police diminished. High Rejection Rate The Fulbright program in Egypt is one of the most common points of exchange with the United States, as it is in many other parts of the world. Egypt has the oldest and best-established Fulbright commission in the Arab world. Bruce A. Lohof, the program's Cairo-based executive director, says the commission's budget has grown from $875,000 in 2005 to $2.2-million last year. The Fulbright program tries to place American scholars in pockets of excellence within the Egyptian system: the agriculture department at Cairo University, Cairo's National Research Center, and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a library named after the legendary library of Alexandria. "Even though the higher-education system is woefully overstressed and woefully underfunded," says Mr. Lohof, "there are institutions that do great work, and we are trying to find them." Many U.S. students come to Egypt to study Arabic under the Fulbright program, and, in a new addition, recent U.S. university graduates have come to Egyptian universities to help teach English. That has been a mixed success, Mr. Lohof says, with some students given too much of a teaching load and some given no responsibilities at all. (Mr. Lohof has moved to fix the problems.) Like Mr. Leach, Mr. Lohof often feels the weight of the Egyptian government's hand. Before an American scholar or student can go to Egypt under the Fulbright program, it has to get a clearance from Egypt's higher-education ministry. Mr. Lohof knows the ministry consults other "elements of the government" before issuing the clearances. Mr. Lohof has carefully tracked the clearances: For the current academic year, Egyptian authorities rejected 19 percent of applicants, while the year before the percentage of denials was in the "high forties." He has never found a pattern in the rejections. "Virtually every hunch I have developed about why people are not getting clearances has turned out to be untrue," he says. Once scholars arrive, they generally understand that they must conduct their research with some cultural and political sensitivity, but Mr. Lohof is not aware of a scholarly project during his tenure that was not completed for political reasons. The Fulbright program is designed to reach only a tiny fraction of Egypt's population of 80 million. "We're not a developmental assistance program," wrote Mr. Lohof in an e-mail. Instead, the program's mission is mutual academic exchange with Egypt's academic elite. The program would need twice the funding it has even to do that admittedly modest job well, Mr. Lohof wrote. Following the Money Just as academic exchanges could be fueled by more democracy, so could journalism. But few strong programs for training journalists exist in Egypt, or the region at large. "You can count them on one hand," says Lawrence Pintak, an ex-CBS Middle East correspondent and former head of the journalism training center at the American University in Cairo. A book by Mr. Pintak,The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil, made a timely appearance last month. AUC's center had the first graduate program in the region, and there are also journalism programs run by Northwestern University in Qatar, the Jordan Media Institute, and Birzeit University. Awareness of the need for strong Arab journalism, highlighted by coverage of the recent protests, has opened up opportunities for Western universities, but the potential pitfalls are enormous. At the American University in Cairo, Mr. Pintak, who is now dean of Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, had the luxury of teaching the best students from the region in English. But the majority of Arabic journalists will be working in Arabic, and need to be taught in Arabic. "You quickly run into the brick wall of who is going to do that," he says. Unlike the United States, which has an oversupply of award-winning out-of-work journalists, good Arab journalists are busy filling the needs of satellite television and other popular regional journalism outlets. A survey by Mr. Pintak of journalists in the Arab world found they had a strong appetite for training, realizing that at times their own lack of professionalism led to inaccuracy and sensationalism. Even if U.S. universities could not provide direct instruction, they could create partnerships with Arab institutions, suggests Mr. Pintak, developing curriculum and training faculty members. Such investments, of course, either in journalism programs or other areas of teaching and research, may not come to pass. "The problem is, quite frankly, that U.S. universities go where the money is," says Theodore H. Kattouf, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and the United Arab Emirates who is now the president of Amideast, an education and training organization that works in the Middle East and North Africa. Mr. Kattouf notes that oil-rich Abu Dhabi is a popular destination for visits by U.S. academics, and he points to the rarity of partnerships such as the one between Bard College and Al-Quds University, which have created an honors college in an East Jerusalem neighborhood. Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, is skeptical that academic exchange with Egypt can be expanded. At the highest level, such as at the American University in Cairo or in the Fulbright program, such exchanges work, he says. But the poor quality of Egyptian universities would make most academic exchanges useless, regardless of whether academic freedom is expanded or not. A lack of resources and the undertraining of overworked faculty members cripples most institutions: "That is the crisis in universities," Mr. Alterman says, "not someone telling them what they can't say." He says that American professors speak "a different intellectual language" than Egyptian professors, noting that in the United States his own son was required to write a "persuasive essay" in second grade, and that such an approach carries through into college. "That is not what education looks like in the Arab world," he adds. While there is a wide range in Egyptian higher education, he believes that most students simply buy a professors' books and repeat the professor's arguments. "If you put American professors in that environment," he says. "It's not going to do much." SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 Skype:sandra.phoenix1 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.