A fresh wind sweeps over the AUB - Michael Young - The Daily Star

 The inauguration this week of Fadlo Khuri as president of the American University of Beirut may have opened a window of fresh air to help clear the oppressive atmosphere that had characterized the institution in recent years.

Khuri has many ambitions, and AUB, like Lebanon, has a way of killing ambition. However, if his inaugural speech was an indicator, the new president comes with determination and a sense of purpose. It would be easy to dismiss the ideals he expressed as the empty talk of a newcomer. However, the only way to revitalize the university is to improve its moral temperament, which Khuri quite plainly seeks to do.

I won’t claim to be objective. An AUB graduate myself, I’m also an old friend of Khuri. Yet his taking over the presidency was not just another star to place on his resume. Khuri had a prestigious and lucrative job as professor of hematology and medical oncology at Emory University in Atlanta, where he also served as deputy director of the Winship Cancer Institute. To give all that up and come back to a troubled country and an institution in need of reform required commitment.

To raise morale, Khuri has already made three important changes, as outlined by associate provost Nadia al-Sheikh. He has reinstated tenure, a major incentive for faculty members; he has appointed a task force to improve conditions for women at the university; and he has approved a new template for faculty contracts, alleviating concerns about job security and benefits.

However, in giving more to the faculty, Khuri and the administration will also be in a position to demand more in return. This provides a mechanism for academic improvement, but it also means that Khuri, though he didn’t mention it in his speech, has created an opening to get rid of dead weight. This is never easy in a place such as Lebanon, but if benchmarks are in place justifying it, the task is facilitated.

Though the AUB community will be looking for how Khuri manages the university, his ambitions are to move beyond that. Khuri’s worry is that the AUB has grown isolated from its environment, increasingly inaccessible to most Lebanese, a high castle with increasingly less relevance for the country.

A centerpiece of his inaugural speech was addressing such concerns. “Globally, higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable for most people, worsening social cohesion and increasing economic disparity,” Khuri observed. “All this puts us in danger of becoming less intellectually elite than economically elite.” The danger, he warned, was that the AUB would fall into complacency, even arrogance. “This institution must earn the right to be the first choice for undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate education in the communities and societies it serves,” Khuri pointed out.

Khuri’s proposals to help the underprivileged still require some work. He intends, among other things, to pilot a national service and teaching model to ensure debt forgiveness in exchange for asking graduates to teach in public and private schools and completely defray their loans for tuition. It’s an innovative idea, but the struggle will be in persuading students to interrupt their start in professional life by taking time off to teach, particularly in Lebanon’s damaged public-school system.

Khuri would also like to expand internship opportunities for students to facilitate their entry into the workforce, another valuable idea. If AUB can persuade the private sector to hire interns and collaborate with the university to gain new recruits, this would be a significant achievement. The difficulty, however, is the mindset in the private sector, where professional advancement is often impossible. The real test will be whether the AUB can persuade companies to use its graduates in profitable ways, facilitating their promotion, and therefore the companies’ health.

This is hardly to shoot down Khuri’s ideas, but to point out that in his desire to improve AUB’s dealings with Lebanese society, he will have to face on a daily basis the shortcomings in the society. However, Khuri is absolutely correct in taking up the challenge. With AUB the largest private-sector employer in Lebanon and having an influential alumni community to call upon, the university can leverage its considerable power to bring about change. That Khuri recognizes this is essential.

The new president also showed that he was sensitive to AUB’s regional role in arguing that it would have a task to play in postwar Syrian reconstruction. “[W]hen it emerges from its terrible civil war, [Syria] will need to be restored: its cities rebuilt, its civil society repaired, its children educated, its people given medical treatment. AUB is the best-equipped institution in the region to provide the complex, multidisciplinary expertise needed to be of real help,” he said.

Khuri covered much more territory in his far-ranging speech. However, of particular personal interest was his aspiration to partner with “Ras Beirut and Ain al-Mreisseh economically and environmentally [to] help transform this part of Beirut and ultimately restore its affordability.”

This seemed to echo the proposals of Omar Blaik, an urban developer who has concentrated on better integrating universities into their environments to improve them and drive development. Blaik had recommended this for AUB, and Khuri’s picking up on it showed he was thinking imaginatively.

In fact Khuri’s inaugural speech was of interest primarily because it revealed the president’s thinking. New ideas generate energy, a collective desire to make things work. This is not to disparage the president’s predecessors, but as someone viewed by the university community as “one of us,” Khuri enjoys an advantage. And to those from his generation, who enrolled at AUB with him in the dark years of the 1980s, it is heartening to see “one of us” taking over the university. His getting it right will not only say something about us, it may make young Lebanese with an eye on the horizon think twice about leaving.

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR. He tweets @BeirutCalling.