Ideas and support to save higher education in Syria

 Education is the orphan of any war. This is particularly true in Syria, where brutal violence has spilled over onto university campuses, with tragic bombings this year at the University of Aleppo and the University of Damascus.

Students and professors have been targeted in retribution for participation in protests, forced to abandon their homes and universities in order to escape shelling, and displaced from classrooms and laboratories because continuing their work would involve too much danger. 

As higher education in Syria dies, along with many students and professors, we call upon the international community to take action because we now have a singular chance to affect the future of the Syrian national academy and a moral imperative to do so.

By working together to help Syrian students and scholars, we can create an immediate and measurable impact on the peace and prosperity of post-conflict Syria, and avoid a lost generation. 

This was the topic of a panel convened by the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund, or IIE-SRF, and the Center for Public Scholarship at the New School for Social Research in New York City, called “Syrian Higher Education in Crisis: The road forward”. 

Two Syrian scholars rescued by the IIE-SRF, Dr Amal Alachkar and Dr Moaath Al-Rajab, told chilling stories of the interrogation, detention, beatings and torture that occurred before they fled from Syria and, thanks to the IIE-SRF, found safe haven at universities in the United States. 

Many of their less fortunate colleagues have been killed or have simply disappeared. 

Loss 

Alachkar is among Syria’s foremost neuropharmacologists, doing research on neural pathways and their impact upon diseases such as breast cancer and schizophrenia. Al-Rajab is one of Syria’s most promising specialists in the emerging field of digital gesture analysis. 

The University of California, Irvine, and the New School for Social Research are greatly benefiting from the presence of the Syrian academics on the respective campuses, not only from their scholarship, but also from the attendant cross-cultural exchange and further internationalisation of their students' and colleagues' experiences.

The concomitant loss suffered by students and colleagues who remain in Syria is palpable and devastating. 

What about the future?

With the third panelist, Dr Keith Watenpaugh, director of the Human Rights Institute at University of California, Davis, the conversation turned to the future: what can we do to save higher education in Syria? Several ideas emerged. 

We must bring university education to young Syrian men and women in refugee camps.

Watenpaugh described an idea for ‘University in a Box’, which could bring two- to three-week intensive university courses that would be taught in refugee camps by professors from the United States and other countries. Syrian scholars participating in IIE’s Scholar Rescue Fund might also teach these courses.

This would afford refugee students and professors the opportunity to do productive work, reawaken students' enthusiasm for education and, perhaps most important of all, give them some hope for the future. The public diplomacy implications also are compelling. In addition, we must bring young Syrian women and men displaced from higher education to universities around the world.

IIE’s Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis asks universities to step up and do this; 13 universities provided 70 scholarships for this academic year, worth an aggregate of US$2.3 million. 

Illinois Institute of Technology Vice Provost Jerry Doyle described how his university decided to participate, committing to “leap in” and offer scholarships, even before the logistics were finalised, and working with a Syrian community group Jusoor to raise money to fund them. 

Consortium 

In the past year, the need for the higher education and donor communities in many countries to work together to address the Syrian emergency has become increasingly evident.

The Syria Consortium for Higher Education in Crisis is expanding worldwide this year, with a goal of 600 scholarships, and it includes new partners such as the Portugal-based Global Platform for Syrian Students founded by former president of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio. 

Al-Rajab described some previous education efforts that have not been successful, in part on account of having run afoul of differing administrative regulations from one country to the next and also due to difficulty raising the necessary funds.

Efforts like IIE’s Syria consortium must pay close attention to these issues, and participating universities must recognise that the desperate situation of Syrian students and scholars requires flexibility and extra support. 

Even in the midst of continuing conflict, emphasised Alachkar, we must make plans now to rebuild higher education in Syria as soon as conditions allow.

Infrastructure has been destroyed, she said, but rebuilding university facilities, classrooms and labs will be the easy part. 

What really is most needed is a reinvention of the Syrian higher education system based upon principles of equality and fairness. In the new system, academic research should proceed without corruption and students and scholars should feel free to engage in open discussion and critical thinking. 

What Syrian students and scholars need above all are the two things that IIE’s emergency programmes have provided to threatened academics since 1919: safety and freedom. Universities and funders around the world can help with both. 

For more information and to join our efforts, please see here. 

* Mark Angelson is chairman of the Institute of International Education Scholar Rescue Fund. Allan Goodman is president and CEO of the Institute of International Education.