"In a modern economy you need highly trained people with specialist skills Education feeds into the economy and into industry. There are very broad benefits." To help reconstruct Iraq, the Government is looking to revitalise Iraq's universities.There is a lot to be done. Even before the invasion, the bombings and the lootings, higher education in Iraq was in a miserable state. The most profound problems and the ones the UK is doing most to address date back more than 20 years.As an academic in Iraq in the Eighties, Professor Nazar Amin of Sulaimani University witnessed the growing politicisation of the universities. "Saddam was scared that academics, as open-minded people, would oppose his regime," he says. "He knew that if there was a generation of students who grew up against Ba'athist ideas they would present a danger to his existence and the party in the future."So Ba'athist students were recruited as informants, academics and students were forced to join the militia, and critics of the regime were imprisoned or dismissed from the universities.
The result was a rigidly centralised academic structure where political loyalty rather than academic achievement was the route to success.Worse was to come. Following the Gulf War, Iraqi academics were cut off from the outside world by the embargo and government censorship. "After 1991 the process of degeneration really started," says Professor Amin. "Almost no one was able to leave Iraq and we were not welcome in Western countries.
There was very strong censorship, and no access to international journals. All science became local research." With no new equipment, and the only access to international journals through sporadic smuggling, the academic community stagnated.The British Council's aim is to try and help break this isolation. "We're working to reconnect Iraq with the international educational community," says Jordan. It has set up four "learning resource centres" in Baghdad and Basra, with internet access to international journals.Security worries make doing anything more in Iraq itself almost impossible, so most of the work is being done back in the UK. An increasing number of postgraduate students are being brought over on scholarships, including 13 directly funded by the British Council, and academics are being offered research sabbaticals in the UK.As well as reintegrating Iraqi academics in this way, some universities are also organising and often paying for training courses for academic administrators on how to adopt British management practices and how to move away from the stranglehold of the centralised system.Twenty six universities came together last year to form the British Universities Iraq Consortium (BUIC) to manage cooperation between universities in Britain and Iraq.
