When Violence Comes To Campus

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The climate of fear has settled over Iraq's universities at a time when the country needs them most. Iraq's higher education system is slowly being rebuilt, with the aim of training the country's best and brightest to reconstruct a society shattered by tyranny, sanctions and war. But violence has jeopardized those hopes. Academics have become a favored target for terrorist groups aiming to destabilize Iraq and for kidnapping gangs looking for soft targets. A recent nationwide U.N. study says 48 academics have been assassinated. Taher al-Bakaa, who was Iraq's Minister for Higher Education under former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, puts the number at 66. Just last week a deputy dean at Baghdad's Mustansiriya University was killed along with three bodyguards, and a Basra University professor of agriculture was kidnapped and killed. Scores of teachers have been kidnapped for ransom, and many more have received death threats simply for doing their jobs. Many top professors have quit and fled the country. As a result, only 28% of those now teaching have a Ph.D., according to the U.N. study; several colleges have been forced to suspend postgraduate courses and reduce the number accepted for undergraduate study. "Who would want to teach here?" says al-Bakaa. "It takes a brave man, a patriot, to teach in this country."

The job has been made even more perilous by the venom directed at faculty members by students themselves. Across the country, Shi'ite students have demanded the ouster of Sunni teachers, especially those who were senior members of the Baath Party during Saddam's rule. Many professors protest that they were forced to join the party, but some students suspect they remain loyal to Saddam and favor like-minded pupils. "There are still professors here who openly praise the previous regime and encourage [Sunni] students to sing songs about Saddam," says Haider, a Shi'ite pharmacy student at the University of Baghdad. "Such people should be driven out of the universities." Attitudes like that don't make for happy classrooms. "Students openly disrespect some professors, shout at them and insult them," says University of Baghdad President Mosa Aziz al-Mosawe. "Many of my professors tell me their students are getting out of control."

The unruliness is being fueled by militant religious political groups, many of which oppose secular education and what they perceive as Western cultural influences. In March, extremist Shi'ite followers of the radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr beat up several hundred engineering students in the southern city of Basra. Their offense: attending a picnic at which both sexes were present. Female students have been harassed for "inappropriate" clothing; a majority now wear the hijab, or head scarf, to school—a sharp contrast to the prewar period when Islamic dress was rarely seen on campus. "We see it as our duty to advise female students to wear the hijab," says Abdel Kader Ibrahim, 23, an anthropology student at the University of Baghdad and leader of a student committee backed by the Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerical group. "Saddam suppressed the voice of religion on campus, and our job is to revive it."