Universities: The Meeting of West and Near East

• Share

Next to Coca-Cola, probably the most notable U.S. presence in the Middle East is a Lebanese university founded by an American Presbyterian minister. Last week, on a hilltop overlooking the Mediterranean, the American University of Beirut began its centennial year by inaugurating Samuel Kirkwood, a former Harvard medical professor and public health commissioner of Massachusetts, as its new president. Later, Harvard's President Nathan Pusey and President Emeritus James Conant will join the year-long celebration as A.U.B. moves ahead on what Kirkwood sees as its main mission: "To provide a Western education without alienating the student from his Middle Eastern environment."

On the 70-acre campus, with its mixture of Moorish sandstone and modern concrete buildings, Arab thobes mix with Indian saris and African robes. Although 59 nations, stretching from China to the U.S., are represented, 75% of A.U.B.'s 3,245 students and two-thirds of its 628 teachers are Arabs, and any attempts at pro-U.S. or Christian indoctrination are forbidden. This follows the dictum of A.U.B.'s founder, Missionary Daniel Bliss, that "a man, white, black, or yellow, Christian, Jew, Mohammedan or heathen may enter . . . and go out believing in one God, or many Gods, or no God."

Escorted Coeds. By blending Bliss's spiritual impartiality with American academic know-how, A.U.B. has become the most influential educational institution in the Middle East. It was the first Arab university to offer coed classes, although some women until the '30s wore veils and were escorted to class by male relatives. A.U.B. operated the first (1905), and still the best, teaching hospital in the Moslem world, introduced X-ray equipment in 1899, and open-heart surgery in 1959. The most visible evidence of its impact, however, has been the quality of its graduates. When the founding conference of the United Nations met in San Francisco in 1945, among the Arab representatives were 19 A.U.B. graduates. Today its alumni include the U.N. Ambassadors from Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, as well as Sudan President Ismail el Azhari and Jordan Premier Wasfi Tal.

Situated at the crossroads of Occident and Orient, frequently buffeted by the cross winds of Arab nationalism and Moslem dogmatism, A.U.B. has from its beginning been torn by controversy. As early as 1882, 43 years before the Scopes trial in the U.S., A.U.B. Professor Edwin R. Lewis endorsed Darwin's evolution theories in a commencement speech and was forced to resign in the ensuing furor. Striking students clashed with police in 1952, when A.U.B. banned pro-Arab politicking on campus, then disbanded the student government. Last spring the ultrasensitive government of Lebanon, serving a population half Moslem and half Christian, ordered an A.U.B. teacher expelled from the country for assigning students readings from St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles, which contains criticisms of Mohammed's theology.