Rebuilding Academia Around the World

Academe, Sep/Oct 2004 by Hanley, Lawrence

Fifteen years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. Some people predicted that this event would usher in the "end of history." History has, of course, proved less than cooperative. Conflicts proliferate. Aggression accumulates. Change has become more hectic. And "transition" (which stresses an optimistic teleology) has become a global temporality. As befits one of the first truly modern institutions, higher education has become a central arena for the changes roiling societies and continents. Indeed, as this issue of Academe illustrates, if anything, colleges and universities have become even more intimate with the disruptions of our era.

The most recent conflict in the Middle East, for example, has catapulted Iraqi universities out of intellectual ossification into a world defined by everyday violence, instability, and risk. In their respective articles, Keith Watenpaugh and Mary Gray underscore the deeply precarious situation of academic life in Baghdad. They offer major assessments of higher education in post-Saddam Iraq. With heartbreaking detail, M. H. Ali andjcnan Al-Mukhtar describe the valiant efforts of Iraqi students to keep the university alive in a ruined country. As the minister of higher education of Afghanistan says in an interview with Angie Chuang, the enthusiasm and hope of students and faculty in the new Afghanistan must constantly battle the material consequences of war and conflict. In Iraq and Afghanistan, higher education has become a focus for broader ambitions and desires to escape a shattered past.

Escape can also be a personal necessity. Wendi Maloney looks back at the efforts of the Scholars at Risk network, on whose work Academe first reported several years ago. When academics around the world face threats against their lives, Scholars at Risk helps them to relocate to the United States and elsewhere. Maloney discovers that rescue narratives are more ambivalent and complicated than we might like to think.

Meanwhile, others around the globe have experienced the difficulty of slipping the weight of history. Cliff DuR and and Mike McGuire document the effects of new obstacles to Cuban-American academic and intellectual exchange; ironically, these "new" obstacles simply repeat a tired Cold War history. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to liberate Central and Eastern European countries from this same history. But, as Anthony Morgan and Natia Janashia argue in their respective articles on Macedonia and Georgia, higher education reform and modernization in both countries have made only faltering steps. Entrenched habits and structures refuse to give way to new demands and hopes.

The intention behind this issue is not to provide occasions for pessimism, self-satisfaction, or guilt trips. Rather, the hope is that these glimpses into the "hot zones" of higher education around the globe will spur more salubrious emotions-empathy, respect, solidarity.

Finally, by the time you read this issue, autumn will be upon us. And so, too, will the football season. In his article, James Earl outlines faculty-led efforts to reform the growing commercialization of college sports. Robert Appleson is also concerned with football, but mostly as a way to understand the sometimes inscrutable process of college accreditation. Both articles make for good bleacher reading.

-LAWRENCE HANLEY