Iraqi Universities Struggle to Rebuild the "House of Knowledge"

Academe, Sep/Oct 2004 by Gray, Mary

On the other hand, people were wary about once again being under the central control of Baghdad, understandable in light of past history. Kurdish had been introduced as the language of instruction in the KRG area (with provisions for instruction in native languages for the Turkamen and Assyrian minorities). How this issue would be handled under a central ministry of education was not clear. Actually, in its zeal to provide for minority rights, the KRG may have gone too far. In community interviews I conducted for the project that brought me to Iraq for a second time, 1 learned that Assyrian parents and teachers really did not want all instruction in the primary and secondary system in their areas to be in Syriac. They preferred that the language of instruction in their schools revert to Arabic-a more useful means of communication outside of their homeland-with Assyrian language and culture as a separate area of study for their children.

Although progress had been made in many fields over the two years between my trips-computers had been introduced, for example, albeit with limited Internet access-little had changed in the three universities of the North. Some Kurdish scientists and scholars, however, had returned from exile to help in institution building. There was no war damage to speak of, but there was a great need for local infrastructure and international communication and exchange.

Difficult Reconstruction

In the rest of Iraq things were not so rosy, although some places had fared better than others. In the ninth through the eleventh centuries, Baghdad attracted scholars from Asia, Europe, and North Africa, particularly to the great House of Knowledge (Bayt al-Hikmat), a center of learning that combined the functions of a library and an academy. There the scholars preserved and created knowledge while Europe suffered through the Dark Ages.

In the mid-twentieth century, Iraqi universities were the best in the region. But for the last two or three decades before the fall of Saddam, education, once a great glory of Iraq, was largely neglected. A series of wars, corruption, isolation, and the exile or death of those who dissented from the policies and actions of the regime devastated the human and financial resources that supported all levels of education.

Apart from a handful of favored institutions, universities were hit particularly hard. Buildings and facilities suffered from lack of maintenance, hardly any Western books or journals had been acquired for years, and pay for most faculty was extremely low. Equipment, especially information technology, was scarce. The ability of faculty to advance their careers or gain support for research and travel depended largely on their loyalty to the regime or traditional alliances.

Many faculty members-and, to a lesser extent, students-reacted to the war with enthusiasm for the ouster of Saddam's regime, hoping that it would end the isolation, privation, and oppression they had endured. The facilities of many universities suffered war damage. The looting of books, equipment, and furniture was widespread; at some universities, nothing usable remained. Demonstrating remarkable resilience, however, most universities were functioning within weeks of April 9, 2003, the date the United States declared an "end" to the war. Enthusiasm was high; the single most often heard sentiment was the desire for communication with the rest of the world, particularly through faculty and student exchanges.