Missions Impossible

John Waterbury

Description

• Addresses a gap in higher education scholarship.


• While there is a growing number of books that look at the financial/economic aspects of higher education, there is very little on the political context of policymaking and on the Arab region as a whole.


• Author is a world-renowned political economist and president emeritus of the American University of Beirut


• Waterbury is co-author of the classic textbook, A Political Economy of the Middle East.

Preface: Brainstorming Arab Higher Education

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

Introduction

1. Orders of Magnitude

2. The Modern Flagship Universities of the Arab World

3. Politics and the University

4. Excellence in Higher Education: Enabler and Enabled

5. Governance: Why Does It Matter?

6. Reform in Tight Places

7. Innovation and Critical Linkages

8. Feeding the Beast: Financing Tertiary Education

9. Living in the Beast: Neither Ivory nor a Tower

Conclusion. Gradual or Disruptive Change?

Glossary

Interviews

References

Index

Sujets

• Political Science
• Middle Eastern
• List of Arab universities
• John Waterbury
• World

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781649030078
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Missions Impossible
Missions Impossible
Higher Education and Policymaking in the Arab World
John Waterbury
First published in 2020 by
The American University in Cairo Press
113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt
One Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020
www.aucpress.com
Copyright 2020 by John Waterbury
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
An earlier version of Chapter 5 appeared as Governance of Arab Universities: Why Does It Matter?, in Adnan Badran, Elias Baydoun, and John Hillman, eds., Universities in Arab Countries: An Urgent Need for Change (Switzerland: Springer, 2018), 55-70. Reproduced by permission.
An earlier version of Chapter 6 appeared as Reform of Higher Education in the Arab World, in Elias Baydoun and John Hillman, eds., Major Challenges Facing Higher Education in the Arab World: Quality Assurance and Relevance (Switzerland: Springer, 2019), 133-66. Reproduced by permission.
Dar el Kutub No. 11150/19
ISBN 978 977 416 963 2
Dar el Kutub Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Waterbury, John
Missions Impossible: Higher Education and Policymaking in the Arab World / John Waterbury.-Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2020
p. cm.
ISBN 978 977 416 963 2
1. Education, Higher-Arab countries
2. Universities and Colleges-Arab countries
378
1 2 3 4 5 24 23 22 21 20
Designed by Sally Boylan
Printed in the United States of America
To Sarah, tqm
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Preface: Brainstorming Arab Higher Education
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Orders of Magnitude
2 The Modern Flagship Universities of the Arab World
3 Politics and the University
4 Excellence in Higher Education: Enabler and Enabled
5 Governance: Why Does It Matter?
6 Reform in Tight Places
7 Innovation and Critical Linkages
8 Feeding the Beast: Financing Tertiary Education
9 Living in the Beast: Neither Ivory nor a Tower
Conclusion: Gradual or Disruptive Change?
Appendix to Chapter 1
Interviews
Notes
References
Index
Figures and Tables
Figures
I.1 Levels of Satisfaction with Aspects of Education
I.2 National Study of Undergraduate Teaching in Palestine
1.1 Youth Bulge among Arab League Member States, 2016
1.2 Net Enrollment Rates for Lebanon and Jordan in Tertiary Education
1.3 Distribution of Arab Students by Level, 2008
1.4 Distribution of Arab Students by Broad Disciplinary Categories
4.1 Number of Tertiary Students per 100,000 Citizens, Arab World
6.1 Morocco: World Bank Commitments by Fiscal Year
6.2 Political Instability is Most Commonly Chosen as Top Obstacle by MENA Surveyed Firms
6.3 The Proportion of Firms Reporting an Inadequately Educated Workforce as a Severe Constraint
8.1 The Academic Ratchet
9.1 Percentage of University Presidents Who Are Women
9.2 Arab Professors: Mostly Missing from the Middle Class
Tables
I.1 Arab Barometer Survey
I.2 Policy Parameters
1.1 Higher Education Statistics in the Arab Region, 2011
1.2 Tertiary Enrollments in the MENA, 2000-2015
1.3 Gross Enrollment Ratios, MENA plus Turkey, 2005 and 2015
1.4 Tertiary GERs for Turkey
1.5 Number of Tertiary-level Graduates, 2004-2015, Select Countries
1.6 Number of Professors in Higher Education, MENA plus Turkey
1.7 Desired Employment Sector, 2012-2013
1.8 Index Numbers of Current Public Expenditures on Higher Education
1.9 Government Expenditure on Education
1.10 Military Expenditure by Country as a Percentage of GDP
1.11 Unemployment and Labor Participation Rates, 2009-2016
4.1 People with Higher Education in the MENA Hold Stronger Beliefs about the Importance of Democracy
7.1 GERD and Full-time Researchers per Million Population
7.2 Global Innovation Ranks
7.3 Quality of Business-University Relations
7.4 Nature and Impact of Innovations in Higher Education
8.1 Higher Education Outlays per Student, ca. 2005
8.2 Revenues and Expenditures, Lebanese University, 2007
9.1 Average Presidential Tenure, Select Universities, 2018
A1.1 Projected Population in the Age Group 18-24 in Arab Countries
A1.2a Projected GERs for Egypt and Jordan
A1.2b Projected GERs for Lebanon and Morocco
A1.2c Projected GERs for Syria
A1.3 Estimated College-going Population under Assumption I
A1.4 Estimated College-going Population under Assumption II
A1.5 Estimated College-going Population under Assumption III
A1.6 Consolidated Table of Three Sets of Assumptions Concerning Increase in GERs
Preface: Brainstorming Arab Higher Education
H igher education in the Middle East in general, and in the Arab world in particular, is not understudied but, as the references for this monograph show, a lot of the empirical work has been carried out by the international donor community, specialized United Nations and regional organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Regional governments have undertaken periodic strategic plans, but how seriously they are taken is a matter of debate. The reference section of this book is also testimony to a burgeoning literature on education that is generated by scholars in the region.
My interest in this subject was nourished by my decade as president of the American University of Beirut (1998-2008), when I had to wrestle not only with the challenges of providing high-quality education in a relatively low-income region but also with those of being a player of sorts in the regional arena of higher education more generally. After the American University of Beirut (AUB) I was for a year advisor to the Government of Abu Dhabi on higher education (2011-2012). In that capacity I carried out an extensive survey of institutions of higher learning in the United Arab Emirates. To the best of my knowledge that survey was never released. I mention this merely to indicate that while I will pay little attention to higher education in the oil-rich countries of the Arab world, I am not unfamiliar with it.
In my academic career, I have been a student of politics and public policy in the Middle East since the early 1960s. I have also been part of some notable universities: Columbia, Michigan, Aix-Marseilles III, Princeton, AUB, and New York University Abu Dhabi. Like many of my colleagues I lived in the academic environment without studying it. My fieldwork in several countries inevitably led me to local universities, but I went to them in search of expertise. I never studied them in their own right, which, in retrospect, seems embarrassingly short-sighted.
A premise of this study, so widely held that I doubt it would arouse any dissent, is that Arab higher education has been and remains in a state of structural crisis. This has been documented at fairly high altitude since 2002 in various Arab Human Development Reports , especially those of 2003 on Building a Knowledge Society and 2009 on Toward Productive Intercommunication for Knowledge. Surveying all levels of education, the World Bank study of 2008, The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa , is equally critical. Finally, the most focused study, although gentler in its critique, is Munir Bashshur s 2004 Higher Education in the Arab States .
As I shall examine in what follows, there may be nothing peculiarly Arab about this crisis. I suspect that many developing countries that committed themselves to democratizing higher education find themselves in similar situations. Indeed, it came as something of a surprise to me that there are no problems in higher education unique to the Middle East and North Africa region or even to developing countries. The problems Arab universities face and the pathologies with which they grapple differ in degree but not in kind from those in other countries. Let me mention just a few here:
Crises in public financing of higher education, as real for the United States (US) or the United Kingdom (UK) as for Egypt or Morocco.
The erosion of the academic profession or what I call the myth of the full-time professor. Adjuncts in the US have become the indispensable cogs of higher education just as the nominally full-time professor in the Arab world has had to seek employment outside academia to make ends meet.
The tendency for universities to reinforce class privilege rather than overcome it is ubiquitous.
Dropout rates are a universal problem. Argentina has been a world leader in this respect.
However, to the extent that these problems have their roots in the political institutions of the region, there may be something peculiarly Arab about the problem.
There are two broad levels that require examination. The first is national strategy and goals, in the current instance, in the higher education sector. Strategies evolve, so we need to know where the sector has been in order to understand priorities for the future. The second level involves governance structures, including how leadership is selected and performance monitored (accountability), and the incentives that both principals and agents have to achieve any particular set of goals. Obviously, a big part of the governance picture is finances and resources. An equally big part is the effective degree of autonomy the institution enjoys.
It is safe to say that the crisis has been created at bot