Baylor team assesses needs for educational aid in Iraq_90803

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Posted: 9/5/03

Baylor team assesses needs for educational aid in Iraq

By Judy Long

Baylor University

WACO–A Baylor University team hopes to help Iraqis chart a new course for higher education.

Three Baylor professors and an alumnus recently returned from a nine-day assessment trip to two Iraqi universities.

Bill Mitchell, director of Baylor's Center for International Education, Bill Baker, Arabic language professor, and Mark Long, director of Baylor's Middle East studies program; were accompanied by Dick Hurst, a medical doctor and Baylor graduate from Tyler.

Baylor professor Mark Long poses with some of the Kurdish people the team visited in Iraq.

They traveled to northern Iraq in response to a request from the president of Dohuk University. Baylor and Dohuk signed an exchange agreement in 1996, but no activity followed during Saddam Hussein's years in power.

Mitchell, Baker and Long all are retired U.S. Air Force officers. With Hurst they made the five-hour drive to Dohuk from Diyarbakir, Turkey, through remote areas of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, crossing through the Habur Gate checkpoint. The professors have a command of a variety of the region's languages, including Turkish, Arabic and Hebrew.

A robust city of 250,000, Dohuk lies in the Kurdish sector of Iraq and claims Dohuk University, a school of 3,000 predominantly Kurdish undergraduate and graduate students. The school organized initially with medical and agricultural faculties in the 1960s, then expanded to liberal arts.

The Baylor team conducted needs assessments for Dohuk and Mosul universities and made initial contact with the presidents of Salahaddin University in Irbil and Sulaimani University in Sulaimani, a city named for King Solomon.

At each of the universities, the team met professors, often American-trained, who were limited by a lack of books, journals and other educational materials.

Baylor is looking at how it can make a humanitarian educational contribution to the reconstruction effort in Iraq, Mitchell said. “The higher education system was essentially destroyed by events preceding and following the war. Saddam allowed it to become politicized and corrupt, then campuses were physically destroyed by vandalism after the war by the Iraqi criminal element.

The group at a checkpoint entering Kurdistan.

“They need support in curriculum development and facilities, equipment, library support, infrastructural support–virtually every area,” he added.

One telling sign of dictatorial rule could be seen in the university's libraries, which the team noted were smaller than many educated Americans keep in their homes.

“If Texans just took duplicate books off their shelves and sent them to Iraqi schools, it would be a wealth to the institutions,” said Baker, who grew up as the son of Baptist missionaries to northern Israel.

“Any help we could give them would be welcomed and greatly appreciated,” he noted. “We have so much, and they have so little.”

Officials at Dohuk were proud to claim being the first Iraqi university to have an exchange agreement with a U.S. university.

Of the universities the team visited, Mosul University, 50 miles southeast of Dohuk, suffered the most from vandalism attacks. During the unrest, vandals looted and set fire to the school's computer lab, a tactic Long said was used to destroy records of Saddam's supporters. The university owned more than 4,000 computers before the war, but because of looting, they lost all but 500, including everything in the computer center. Fewer than 25 home computers donated by professors now comprise the computer lab.

The professors talked with the lab's director, who told them he watched 25 years of his life perish the night looters set fire to the computer center.

“For the Baylor team, the trip was both heartbreaking and energizing,” Long said. “The devastation and poverty broke our hearts. But we found the resilience of the Iraqi people and their desire to partner with Baylor University in helping rebuild higher education in the country to be extraordinarily encouraging.”

The group saw active Christian churches throughout the region meeting with missionaries supported by Texas Baptists. In one village, an impromptu outdoor worship service evolved as Kurdish villagers gathered around the team and began to pray and sing.

When they returned to the U.S., the team met with key administrators at Baylor to discuss ways to help Iraqi schools.

The needs are so extensive the first task for Baylor is to prioritize them, Mitchell said. “We are working with the administration to determine what should be addressed first, and we are communicating with the various deans and department heads to determine exactly what kind of support we can offer in various academic areas.”

“There is, unquestionably, a difficult road ahead, but I am confident Baylor and other American universities will be part of a remarkable transformation in Iraq,” Long said.

Baylor will have a chance to get the word out to other American universities about Iraq's educational needs this fall. On Sept. 23 and 24, Mitchell will report to the Mid-America Universities International Conference, an annual meeting of directors of international education and coordinators of international programs, to be held at Baylor this year.

He also will report to the Consortium for Global Education, an association of private colleges and universities, in Abilene Sept. 25-26.

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