The German journalistic portal Der Spiegel presents the Unispiegel section, which covers news about higher education. In Germany and the rest of the world. In this space, an article about the University of Mosul, the second largest in Iraq, drew attention at the end of August. This university has been in the news a few times here, but the one on the German site provides an overview of recent history and provides perspectives, according to local voices [1]. The Islamic State arrived in Mosul in 2014 and, after conquering the city, turned against the university. The buildings were bombed, the library was looted, its books were burned, art and music courses were closed and, finally, even medicine. The few teachers who remained active started to be paid by the Islamic State, the Physics and Chemistry laboratories had their lines of research and pedagogical projects redirected to the manufacture of weapons and ammunition. While most students were left without classes, part of the university survived in exile in the provinces of Kirkuk and Dahuk, to the north, where, respectively, 11.000 and 4.000 students began to take classes taught by 1.400 teachers: “war must not be the end of formation”, in the words of Ubai al-Diwachi, one of the university's leaders. With the Islamic State at bay, the university library is being rebuilt and teaching activities return to this city. Still on the outskirts, as the original campus remains a dangerous place.
Navigating through university website, at first glance you don't understand this whole story, but in the section “Read also" some notes reverberate the liberation of the university and the campaign to reconstitute the library's collection.
Mosul is reminiscent of Aleppo, whose university suffered attacks with dozens of deaths during the civil war. A piece of news that went around the world recently records the fear of attending campus and how students resort to distance learning [2]. O Aleppo university website, in turn, shows an official and calm image, with an exclusive tab for the Syrian Ministry of Education.
The universities of Mosul and Aleppo are not in the Times Higher Education top 1.000 universities ranking, but we should pay (very) attention to their absences in the rankings. These are not the only threatened universities in the world, but there appears to be no ranking or list for them. In the context of the global refugee crisis, there are few surveys on threatened university professors and researchers and refugees. Some data can be found in a recent article on the topic [3] from the von Humboldt Foundation, illustrated by an infographic showing the “top 5” countries" of origin of academic refugees, a list that is headed by Syria, followed by Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Ethiopia. There is a network, “Academics at Risk", which brings together more than 500 universities from 39 countries with the aim of protecting threatened researchers and promoting academic freedom. There is no Brazilian one, but it is worth remembering that here (Unicamp) we will have the Refugee Chair, exactly for “stimulate debate and the production of knowledge on the topic of refugees” [4].
The threats to academic work and freedom are not limited to the set of horrors that the news from Mosul and Aleppo brings us. Other threats exist, some very close to us. Searching from site to site to write this column, I came across the suggestions of the National Treasury Secretariat in the opinion on the fiscal recovery plan presented by the government of Rio de Janeiro. According to the Huffpost Brasil website:
"Then, they say that this suggestion can be expanded, 'even including the review of higher education provision'. Although this last excerpt does not have clear wording and does not mention UERJ directly, the context in which it is inserted allows us to affirm that the opinion in fact defends the end of public funding for the university. It would be, in the technicians’ view, a way to save additional resources.” [5]
The Rio government denied in a statement that it is considering privatizing UERJ [6]. It's another tragic chapter in a terrible, hopeless story that seems far from over. From what we see, there are several ways to dismantle universities. I remember Caetano Veloso and the paraphrase is worth: “Think about Mosul, pray for Mosul, Mosul is here, Mosul is not here.”
[3] https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/On-dangerous-paths.html
