Iraqi Universities Low Priority for Nation's Resurrection. (June 22, 2004)

    While The New York Times was highlighting the condemnation by US Nobel Laureates of  US President George W Bush for his science policy  The Washington Post ran an extensive article by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "An Educator Learns the Hard Way", in which he describes the fate of Iraq's universities.

The educator referred to is John Agresto the senior adviser chosen by the US administration to oversee the Iraqi Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research beginning in September last year. John Agresto, a former president of St. John's College, in Santa Fe, N.M. replaced Andrew P.N. Erdmann, a former member of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff.

On taking on the job Agresto said, "The Iraqis had one of the finest systems of higher education years ago, and it's simply a question of helping them rebuild what they once had. The physical situation of the universities in some cases is fine, I've heard, and in other cases is disastrous, so they need help rebuilding their libraries down to even basics such as getting paper, chairs, and pens -- and so many computers have been lost."

Now almost ten months have passed since Agresto landed in Bagdad and yesterday he told the Post, "I'm a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality. We can't deny there were mistakes, things that didn't work out the way we wanted; we have to be honest with ourselves." In fact Agresto was chosen because of his strong support for the Bush administration's Iraq War.

What's changed? Iraq's universities were once the pride of the Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, they were allowed to crumble and then with the defeat of the Hussein regime followed by looting and mindless destruction it was according to Agresto, "difficult to describe how bad things were," and the Post reports that "After receiving reports from each of the country's 22 universities, whose collective enrollment is more than 375,000, CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority]  number crunchers estimated that Iraq would need $US1.2 billion to 'take its rightful place in the world's intellectual, cultural, economic, and political communities.'" Agresto relayed the calculations to the CPA who were working on Bush's Iraqi aid package. He was told the Whitehouse would ask Congress for $US35 million and as for the rest -- he should look to foreign donors.

The upshot? The $US35 million requested by Bush morphed in $US8 million and, "At [a] conference in October, donor nations pledged in excess of $400 million for Iraqi universities. But none of that money has arrived in Baghdad. 'There was a lot of talk,'  Agresto said, 'but little follow-through.'"