« April 2007 | Main | June 2007 »
May 28, 2007
Critical Education
For the past three months, the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad has been under high alert due to a group of renegade clerics at the largest mosque in the city. Maulana Ghazi, the imam of the mosque (known as Lal Masjid) has been leading a squad of vigilante students from the mosque's madrassah to close "sinful" commercial businesses such as video shops. The government responded by surrounding the mosque's compound with military troops and police. Some plain-clothes police were held hostage by the mosque clerics last week, leading to intense negotiations to resolve the mounting crisis. Despite the release on May 24 of policemen abducted by the Lal Masjid cadres, anxiety about the situation in Islamabad continues. The government is clearly in the most uncomfortable position in dealing with the problem, which requires, among other things, a look at “absolutist” educational institutions and their rejection of critical reasoning.
Perhaps the starkest example of such an educational institution was the “University of Dawah [evangelism] and Jihad” set up in the mid-eighties in Peshawar by Professor Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf. The founder of this “university” which produced acrimonious alumni such as Ramzi Yousef and whose aim it was, and remains, to quash critical reasoning has been one of the top warlords during the Afghan war and later the civil war. Since 2001 he has been vying for supremacy within the Karzai government. To call this institution a “university” is particularly unfortunate.
This is not peculiar to a particular country or religion. Institutions that stifle critical reasoning and thrive on agenda-driven education can be found at many places.
In the United States, one of the leading lights of the evangelical movement with absolutist views about Christian supremacy, Reverend Jerry Falwell, died last week. His well-known Liberty University produced a legion of activists, many of whom have found employment in prominent government positions. Falwell was as much valorised by his disciples and with as much fervour as Maulana Ghazi of Lal Masjid is by his minions. While the tone of his messages was more measured, he clearly stirred militancy in his own way.
Consider that only a few days after his passing, a young student from Liberty was arrested with a cache of bombs. Authorities in Virginia indicated that Mark David Uhl intended to use the bombs to “stop protesters from disrupting Falwell’s funeral”.
It should be noted here that like Christianity, Islam is a strongly evangelical religion (unlike Judaism). Even the more enlightened institutions of higher learning such as the Islamic University of Islamabad, which offer courses on global trade and environmental law, have a “Da’wah Academy”. This should, itself, not be a cause for concern, since Islam ordains that there must be “no compulsion in religion”. However, problem arises when other competitive forces of evangelism are stifled in countries like Saudi Arabia, leading to an autocracy of proselytisers who claim monopoly over communication.
Similar to other social movements, religious motivation has often been linked to violence as well as building peace. Like any powerful human phenomenon, religion can be used to either end and has tremendous potential to instil pugnacity as well as cooperation. Similarly, we can find ways of harmonising the best of Eastern and Western traditions, if absolutism is avoided. There are some remarkable stories to be told of graduates of Islamic schools that have been able to bridge their education with Western traditions.
Consider the case of Bakhtiar Effendy, who started his formal schooling in the Pesantren Pabelan in central Java, Indonesia, in the early 1960s. While at that Islamic boarding school, he received an American Field Service scholarship and attended Columbia Falls High School in Montana. Subsequently, he returned to Jakarta for his college degree and then went back to the States for his doctorate at Ohio State University. Following his doctoral degree, Dr. Effendi returned to his homeland and joined the faculty of the Islamic State University in Jakarta. Such meandering interactions between East and West, while rare, are possible between educational traditions and deserve more careful study and analysis.
The use of educational institutions for political ends is a well-established tradition across cultures and societies. Exemplified recently by anti-war activism at universities in the West as well as the rise of Marxist movements in schools in South America or the Ayatollah ascendancy at Tehran University, institutions of learning are often places of revolution. Ideas invigorate young minds to action but Alexander Pope’s prescient observation of “a little learning being a dangerous thing” is just as true today. While the independence of educational institutions must be maintained, some level of quality assurance and critical reasoning is also essential to ensure that captive audiences of students are not manipulated.
The Lal Masjid case clearly shows us the need for instituting a peace-building curriculum in all educational institutions across Pakistan. We shall explore the efficacy of such a curriculum in this space subsequently. Until then, let us reflect on the words of Robert Frost:
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence”.
Saleem H Ali is associate dean of graduate education at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and a senior fellow at the United Nations mandated University for Peace. He can be reached at saleem@alum.mit.edu
Posted by Saleem Ali at 01:37 PM | TrackBack
May 11, 2007
Degrees of Fortune
By Saleem H. Ali
American academia was shocked by the resignation of MIT’s dean of admissions Marilee Jones on April 26 for pretending to have degrees which she did not actually receive. As an alumnus of MIT, I feel obliged to consider this incident further since it raises fundamental questions about contemporary meritocracy.
Ms Jones was a celebrated university administrator at one of the world’s leading centres of higher learning, and an accomplished author and orator. Clearly she had the merit for her job but not the official credentials she had claimed. What is also remarkable about this story is that her entry-level position as an administrator in the admissions office in 1979 did not require a college degree. She rose through the ranks of administration, based on performance, to get the top job in the admissions office over a period of 28 years. As she admitted in her statement of resignation:
“I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since.”
As one of her colleagues at MIT, Les Perelman eloquently stated in a subsequent interview: ‘It’s like a Thomas Hardy tragedy, because she did so much good, but something she did long ago came back and trumped it.”
The only silver lining to this cloud is the revealing evidence that career paths now are possible from clerical positions in administration to top management. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard also evidenced this prospect since she started off as a secretary in the company. Though, in her case, she did get two Masters degrees along the way — ironically, one from MIT — where she now serves on the board of trustees.
The glass ceiling in corporate America and academia alike is clearly being broken as more women and minorities enter such top jobs. Employers are also beginning to look at a much larger range of degree-granting institutions for hiring and promotion. Marilee Jones had claimed degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Union College in Albany and apparently had no trouble completing with applicants from the Ivy League
In many cases, the premium which parents and students alike were willing to pay for a degree from an elite school is turning out to be a questionable investment as well at the undergraduate level. A study published by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in September 2006 concluded that while elite universities clearly had a competitive edge in terms of salary success in the 1970s, their influence has gradually declined and was not statistically significant after the 1990s.
The main causal factor the authors present is “the reduced importance of physical access to productive research colleagues”. This devolution of networks can largely be credited to the Internet and web access. With such empirical insights, what are we to make of a complete degree per se, which ended up being Ms Jone’s nemesis? Might we consider other metrics of performance such as standardised exams, following an assemblage of courses and apprenticeships, similar to the way bar exams are considered by some states such as Vermont? Universities would still play a role in such training but the model would be more malleable and less degree-oriented than what we are used to.
Successful entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates are often widely celebrated as being university dropouts and reaching their billions without a degree while others slave away at meeting credits, distribution requirements and GPA thresholds. This year, Gates is a commencement speaker at Harvard, from where he dropped out after two years. Universities are also quite willing to shamelessly lavish awards and honorary degrees on successful alumni regardless of their past academic performance or whether they even got a degree in the first place.
The case of CNN founder Ted Turner and Brown University is emblematic of this tendency. Turner was suspended twice and ultimately expelled from the university in 1960 for violating dorm policies and other disciplinary infractions. He nevertheless received an honorary baccalaureate as well as an honorary doctorate from the Ivy League school in 1993.
Degrees must be framed with temporal and experiential context and not just as ceremonial benchmarks. If they are to be given some absolutist value, then we must show some consistency across the board with our evaluation and commendation of these testaments to educational triumphs and tribulations.
