Leaders of American Universities in the Middle East Bring Their Message to the U.S.

In meetings with government leaders, they ask to be part of the region's development

"The American public is seeing nothing but bad-news stories coming out of the Middle East," said David D. Arnold, president of the American University in Cairo, who met with editors of The Chronicle along with Winfred L. Thompson, chancellor of the American University of Sharjah; John Waterbury, president of the American University of Beirut; and Joseph G. Jabbra, president of Lebanese American University.

"But there are some good-news stories out there," Mr. Arnold continued. "There are some success stories, and these four institutions represent the best aspects of American education, society, and culture. And in many ways, they're the best possible face this country could be putting forward in the region."

To get the word out, the four met with State Department officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, higher-education associations, think tanks, universities, foundations, and various news-media outlets.

The quartet said that people are often surprised to learn there are universities in the Middle East that are coeducational, teach in English, and have, or are in the process of getting, U.S. accreditation. The oldest institution of the four, the American University of Beirut, was founded in 1866. The youngest, the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, was established in 1997. All are small, between 4,000 and 7,000 students each, and have a strong liberal-arts focus.

Following are further excerpts from the conversation:

Q. Tell us why you're here.

Mr. Waterbury: We all in our various ways had a pretty rough summer. It certainly forces you to take some stock of what we are doing, and I think there was a sense among us that somehow the mission that we have been successfully carrying out over many, many decades was being lost in the furor, particularly for those of us who live in Lebanon.

Mr. Jabbra: Our institutions are free, well established, and very well respected in the entire region. We are talking about 320 years of service to the entire region. We graduated 100,000 students who, in a way, have shaped a lot of what is happening in that part of the world. We wanted that to be made clear to our supporters in the United States, to the American people, and make sure that they feel that these institutions are outposts there. Perhaps this is the best investment that all of us can make in that part of the world, in order to make sure that it changes and it changes for the better.

Q. How has the war in Iraq and the fighting in Lebanon affected attitudes in the region toward your campuses and on the campuses themselves?

Mr. Arnold: There is a level of anti-American sentiment in the region that is certainly at a much higher level than historically has been the case. Having said that, these universities are regarded almost as being indigenous institutions by the people in these countries as much as they are seen as being an American institution. People regard them as their universities, not something that is being transplanted or introduced in any way. So we are American institutions, but we have very strong, deep roots in the societies that we serve.

Mr. Jabbra: Our students come from a variety of backgrounds, from a of variety political stripes, of religious stripes. They still come to study together, to sit at the same table and discuss things together. When people ask what is the value of having these institutions there, well, that is precisely it.

Q. Do you feel the U.S. government has neglected you?

Mr. Jabbra: Well, I'm not sure whether the government intentionally is doing that. However, when, for example, you say, "Well, I want to dedicate a billion dollars for reconstruction in Lebanon," these two institutions [in Lebanon] have not really been thought about and focused on as a major force to reckon with. But we are working very, very hard as a collective group, as individual presidents, to remind both Congress and the bureaucracy that, hey, do not forget about these institutions because in the long run, they are going to really make a difference when the chips are down.

Q. Are you asking for something specific from the State Department and others?

Mr. Waterbury: We had a talk with Assistant Secretary of State Dina Powell this afternoon, and we talked about very specific things like language training, student exchanges, tapping into some of the high-school kids that the State Department is bringing to the United States, who then might be prospective students for our institutions.

But we will be urging the State Department and the executive branch and Congress to think more about U.S. involvement in higher education, particularly helping to build the research infrastructure in the Middle East, which is quite shabby. The United States can begin to repair some of the damage that has taken place in the past years by focusing on something that everybody, I think, can salute and say, "Yes, this is good." We would like to be a part of that effort, but I do not see it as one that is a dollars-and-cents issue for us.

Q. Are there things that your institutions are doing to help educate Americans as well?

Mr. Thompson: Certainly, through the exchange programs of students coming to our campuses; that is probably the primary way. But, at least in our case, also 40 to 50 percent of our faculty members are U.S. citizens who, in most cases, have not lived and worked in the Arab world before. The numbers are small, but they come there, and they will see that whatever the differences there are, for most practical purposes, people there are the same as people here. They want education, health care for their kids, economic security; they want to be left alone most of the time; they like to go for picnics on the beach, and that it is not so different after all.

Mr. Arnold: There is a crucial role for each of these institutions in terms of building area expertise in the United States on and about the Middle East. If you look at the panels of the Middle East Studies Association, our institutions are extremely well represented in terms of scholarship on the region. We have a university press that brings out 75 to 100 titles each year, including a significant program on the translation of Arabic literature and of contemporary Arabic literature into English, and making that available to Western audiences.

We are very encouraged by the efforts that are now under way to increase support for language study in Arabic, to encourage more Americans to have significant study-abroad experiences through the proposals and recommendations from the Lincoln commission and other similar efforts.

Because we are fully accredited, American students can come and take courses at our universities that will be given full credit by their home institutions and be consistent with the quality of instruction and academic standards that they would be accustomed to at any other U.S. institution of higher education.

So, yes, while we are very committed and focused on our role in terms of preparing and educating the future leaders for the Arab world, we also see as a crucial element of what we do, preparing and educating informed citizens and leaders in the United States, so that we avoid the kind of divide that seems to have hurt relations in the past.

Q. What have you noticed happening with higher education in the region?

Mr. Waterbury: We have seen a real explosion in private higher education in the Middle East, certainly in the last 10 years. Some of it is for profit, some of it is not, but it is booming. And of course, a very simple lesson from that is that there are huge pent-up demands for higher education.

I assume my colleagues have been rather disturbed by some of the institutions that have come along and established themselves. Often, they will pop "American" somewhere in their title because it sells, which is already an indication of the reputation of American higher education, but it is for profit. It is often groups of business people in Jordan or in Saudi Arabia, even in Syria. They could be doing hotels or restaurants, but they say, "Gee, there is all this demand out there, so why do we not do a university?" And you talk to them, and you say: "This is like talking to a manager in a Marriott. What is this? What are they doing?"

Let me give you my punch line: I do not buy the clash-of-civilizations, Sam Huntington argument, but we obviously have a big kind of struggle going on. Certainly, some of it is East-West, some of it is Muslim/non-Muslim, but a lot of it is inside the Muslim community itself, or you might say moderate forces are struggling with far more radical forces to kind of define what is Islam in the 21st century.

And when I put what we see happening in higher education into that kind of a framework, I'm not altogether unhappy with these businessmen. I do not like the fact that they want to make money and distribute profits to their co-investors, but basically they want to offer a decent educational product. It certainly will very rarely reflect the kind of radical or extremist views that worry us.

Q. What about countries like Qatar that are putting a lot of money into higher education?

Mr. Waterbury: Is it going to be a successful model? It is really far too early to tell, but this is an extraordinary undertaking that is going on in Qatar, and now other countries in the Gulf are sort of climbing on the bandwagon themselves.

But in general, we are seeing an explosion in higher education, outside the traditional framework of public education, where I think most governments have kind of thrown in the towel and said, "We cannot afford it. We do not know how to fund it. The quality has been shot. It is probably not even worth repairing."

So Cairo University becomes a holding operation. The University of Damascus, what have they got, 70,000 students?

Mr. Arnold: Cairo University has 250,000.

Mr. Thompson: The resources are not there. The expertise is not there in many instances; the governments, however well intentioned, often simply do not know what to do to set up an educational system that would meet the kind of demand that we are responding to, frankly.

Mr. Arnold: Our institutions stand out for two reasons: One is that in every single case, we represent the gold standard in terms of university education in our respective countries. And second, we have a strong commitment to a liberal-arts education, which is different from what is being thought about and talked about at a large number of these new universities. They are looking at IT, computers, engineering, business, but they are not building new liberal-arts colleges for the most part.

Mr. Jabbra: One of the major problems really is quality assurance. Sooner or later, they are going to come to the realization that unless they have that quality assurance, they are not going to be able to compete, and their graduates are not going to be able to compete in the marketplace.

Mr. Thompson: If we were giving advice to those mushrooming institutions, it's that it is not possible to return large amounts of profit to the shareholders and build good institutions quickly. The other three institutions developed over a history of many generations. Our institution developed very quickly, but the ruler put hundreds of millions of dollars into it, which he will never see again. And we simply never will return any value on that investment, except through what we do.

Q. Do you get calls from foreign universities interested in setting up programs or campuses in the region?

Mr. Thompson: Every day to every other day. Some are serious and genuinely interested in what our experience has been and are trying to look and determine whether or not it is realistic, practical, and valuable for them to undertake such an effort. And others come because they want to see what we are doing so that they can copy it. I could not tell you how much of my time I spend showing visitors around our campus.

Mr. Waterbury: We have had plenty of feelers about doing branch operations, and so far our trustees have not particularly liked that idea.

Mr. Arnold: We have had similar kinds of requests. We are in the process of building this small, new $400-million campus, so I'm not eager to build another campus anywhere else until I get this one done and paid for. But we are seeing more and more serious, major U.S. universities looking at the Middle East as the place where their students are interested in coming, where they are asking themselves the question, "Should we have a presence here, and if so, what form should that take?"

Mr. Thompson: When these institutions come in, they are going to have the same issues that we do, and the most serious of those may be recruitment of faculty members. We attempt to recruit faculty members mostly trained in North America and to some degree in the UK and the EU, and I do not think any of those other institutions will find that an easier task than it is for us.

Q. Did you lose faculty after the fighting in Lebanon last summer?

Mr. Waterbury: AUB had very minor losses. We have about 600 full-time-equivalent faculty members, and I think maybe five did not turn up for the fall semester. I'm a little worried about this summer, quite frankly. We got through a war, and then we have been in a political stalemate inside Lebanon for months, with little eruptions here and there, which have really worried people deeply. I have felt a number of our younger faculty members with children, in particular, saying, "Is this where I want to be?"

Mr. Jabbra: Our experience has been the same, where we did not lose anybody. They came back, and they really said that we made a career here and that is where we are going to stay.

Mr. Arnold: The faculties of these institutions are not at these institutions because they could not get a job elsewhere. They are committed to teaching; they are committed to making a difference; they are committed to their scholarship. They are extremely talented teachers and dedicated faculty members.