HIGHER EDUCATION: GLOBAL ROLE AND DEVELOPMENT
1.4. Higher Education in the Arab World
1.4.1. Higher education and Development
theories discussed above to be considered in relation to a particular regional context.
1.4. Higher Education in the Arab World
In this section an analysis of ‘Arab HE’, in particular its developmental role, will be presented. Iraqi and Libyan HE should be understood within the broader context of other Arab states with which they share many important similarities in language, culture, governance, and history. This contextualisation is crucial to understanding the post-‐‑2011 region-‐‑wide transitions and conflicts referred to as the ‘Arab Spring’.
1.4.1. Higher education and Development
To begin, it should be noted that centres of learning in the Islamic world have played a leading role in the advancement of many fields of knowledge, importantly, mathematics, science, and writing (Hitti 1968, p.410; Saliba 2007). The University of Zitounah in Tunis (est. 734 C.E.), Qarawayyin in Fes (est. 859 C.E.) and Al Azhar University in Egypt (est. 970 C.E.) were all important institutions pre-‐‑dating the first established European university, the University of Bologna (est. 1088 C.E.). This is not a mere historical curiosity; rather it is an important aspect of intellectual heritage and a source of pride for modern Arab nations informing contemporary discourse on revitalising academia in the region.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contemporary Arab states were controlled by colonial rulers. While pre-‐‑colonial education existed, universities were largely an institutional import from Western countries. In some states a single colonial model was relied upon to found colleges and universities, for example, the British model was implemented (although not fully) in Sudan (Shils & Roberts 2004, p.193) with French influence predominant in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. HE emergence in other Arab states was influenced by various models. Egyptian HE was influenced by both French and British HE, and also the American liberal arts
college in establishing the American University of Beirut (Shils & Roberts 2004, p.192). Furthermore, Egypt was itself important in early development of Arab state HE, offering a ‘national university’ model, faculty members, and branch campuses of Egyptian universities for export (Herrera 2006).
Arab HE has been held to have driven political development (Jabbra & Jabbra 1984). National universities became important institutions of newly-‐‑independent Arab states (Herrera 2006). Romani (2009) states that post-‐‑colonial ‘geopolitical and nationalist dynamics’ gave ‘higher education a powerful political symbolism’. Arab nationalist states were committed to expanding HE access. In the mid-‐‑1990s Arab states spent on average 5.5% of GDP on education, higher than any other region in the developing world (Coffman 1996).
HE systems played a crucial role forming national identities and achieving political autonomy (Herrera 2006). In Iran, Iraq, and Syria HE led to political socialisation, enhanced state legitimacy, and promoted national unity. By contrast, Lebanon’s confessional system and divided politics granted education greater autonomy from political forces producing weaker social cohesion and political nationalism (Jabbra & Jabbra 1984). HE triggered political development and social change through transition from elite to mass enrolment. Nasser’s expansion of Cairo University widened enrolment to include poor and provincial students. Similarly, Syria expanded HE after the 1963 Ba’athist coup with student enrolment at Damascus University doubling in five years, widening access to rural and lower classes to over 50% and 41% respectively (Hinnebusch 2001, p.55). These examples underscore the importance of widening access to regime legitimacy.
Arab HE has been critiqued over its developmental contribution. Academic dependency critiques hold that Arab universities replicate Western universities, disregard local knowledge and values, and maintain neo-‐‑colonial dependency (see Mazawi 2005). Said (2003, p.322) writes that ‘the Arab world today is an intellectual, political and cultural satellite of the United States’. As Al-‐‑Assad (quoted in Mazawi 2005) argues, imported Western university models produced a hybrid ‘East-‐‑West’ academic model which compartmentalised Islamic knowledge in Western-‐‑style
institutions thus preventing emergence of authentic indigenous epistemology and perpetuating intellectual-‐‑dependency of Islamic societies. However, Mazawi (2005) refutes that Arab universities are transplanted institutions alien to local contexts; rather post-‐‑colonial nationalist movements transformed colonial educational legacies in a radical project of expansion and nationalisation entailing various transitions from community-‐‑based governance, Islamic, foreign, and private provision of HE to a state-‐‑dominated secular model.
HE expansion had several adverse consequences. Rapid expansion contributed to declining academic standards. The failure of HE expansion and investment to raise quality prompted Salehi-‐‑Isfahani and Dhillon (2008) to write that ‘no region in the world has invested more in education with less to show for it’. Common problems include low research capacity, large brain drain, high graduate unemployment, and weak technical education (Romani 2009). From the standpoint of human capital theory Arab HE has in general not been effective. Salehi-‐‑Isfahani and Dhillon (2008) report that regional rate-‐‑of-‐‑return studies find very low social returns due to HE’s misalignment with economic needs. Lord (2008) finds that educational outputs do not align with market needs leading to low graduate absorption and low impact on economic growth.
This gap between curricula and economic requirements is partly explained by HE’s public service training function combined with obstacles to adapting to the new structural economic context in which states no longer guarantee universal graduate employment. This dynamic was compounded by public sector retrenchment during structural adjustment and liberalisation during the 1980s and 1990s. Regionally, recent graduates prefer waiting for state jobs with life-‐‑long employment than private employment. Egypt’s public sector employs six million university graduates (Anderson 2012) with double Turkey’s proportion of graduates in the labour force, where per capita income is three times higher (Brookings 2012). In this regional context expansion led to over-‐‑supply of graduates producing rising graduate unemployment and high youth grievances.
HE formed an element of economic liberalisation strategies pursued regionally from the late 1980s as historically centralised and state-‐‑run systems opened to private and foreign providers. During 1993-‐‑2009 two-‐‑thirds of new universities in the Arab Middle East were private institutions (Romani 2009). Jordanian private HE highlights some region-‐‑wide problems; private HEIs, user-‐‑fees and parallel courses were introduced in the early 1990s. Burke and Al-‐‑Waked (1997) state that the ‘basic problem’ with private HEIs in Jordan is that they ‘were established as a “quick fix” for the mushrooming access deficit in a system without surplus money’. Quality remains low while loan-‐‑schemes established in the 2000s are criticised for widening access inequalities as the poorest are excluded from this financing option (Robertson 2008). Private universities were established rapidly in countries with no traditions of endowments or philanthropy towards HE (Al-‐‑Lamki 2010).
The American model of marketised and privatised HE has been influential in university reforms since the 1980s, in particular in the Gulf (Mazawi 2005, p.157). Over the 2000s Gulf Arab states invested large funds in public HE to produce domestic skills bases capable of managing post-‐‑oil transitions and building knowledge economies. A prominent feature of Gulf HE is the branch campus model incorporating leading foreign universities with the UAE and Qatar accounting for a high proportion of branch campuses globally (Miller-‐‑Idriss & Hanauer 2011).
Domestic politics is a major factor influencing Arab HE’s role in development. Political functions including student activism, organisation, and exchanging ideas have been limited by repression or co-‐‑opting by authoritarian governments. It is argued that severe restrictions on academic freedom posed a serious obstacle to HE’s social role. For example, the Arab Human Development Report (UNDP 2003a) portrayed poor HE quality as related primarily to low autonomy from political factors and weak facilities. However, students and faculty have been important political actors, led collective action, and provided intellectual leadership. For example, Reid (2002) shows how Cairo University was majorly affected by Egypt’s tumultuous twentieth-‐‑century political trajectory while also actively shaping
domestic politics. Many regional states share this mutually constitutive relationship with politics.
War and conflict have powerfully shaped HE in the region, however, according to Mazawi (2005, p.154) literature on Arab HE ‘remains oblivious of this context’. He explains that ‘expansion of higher education across the Arab states occurred in a period ravaged by colonialism, military conflicts, coups d’etat, civil wars, and human populations displacement’. Similarly, the Arab Knowledge Report (UNDP 2009) states:
Occupation, wars, and internal conflicts have an overwhelmingly disruptive influence on the knowledge society. Not only do they affect its mainstays, in the form of education, technology, and innovation, they also, through the economic destruction, disruption to development, suppression of freedoms, and restrictions on movement, strike at the heart of the enabling environments needed for the establishment of the knowledge society.
These reflections highlight the necessity of explaining HE’s role in Arab development as related to external and political factors of war and displacement in addition to conventional focus on internal factors including educational expenditures and enrolment patterns. Moreover, these insights connect with the issues of stability, conflict, authoritarianism, freedom, and HE which were all salient issues in the ‘Arab Spring’ and will now be explored further in the next section.