An Institution Fights for Its Life

The American University of Beirut, the most prestigious and influential American institution in the Middle East--and that includes the embassies--is fighting for its life against the Shia enemies of Western culture.

On May 7, for the first time in 122 years, the entire university went on strike--faculty, staff and students. The demand was for the release of the 11 university teachers and students who are being held by kidnapers. Though there have been 27 acts of violence against the university since 1976, including seven killings, 21 of these have happened in the past 18 months: The last straw was the kidnaping of a Lebanese Christian professor, Nabil Matar. When the kidnapers threatened to kill him, the faculty called off the strike.

It is the killing and kidnaping of American and British faculty members that has been widely publicized. But it is more significant that 13 of the last 21 attacks have involved Lebanese. This means that the campaign against the university is not just a political drive against the United States and Britain, but something much more basic: a true kultur kampf, a struggle against the Westernized, individualistic, liberal and democratic ideas and values for which the American University of Beirut has stood--the decolonization of the mind and soul of which Franz Fanon wrote.

The very large and conspicuous American presence in Iran under the shah has been completely flushed out of that country by the Islamic revolution, which is trying to do the same thing against what was an equally conspicuous American presence in Lebanon.

There is no doubt at all that the campaign against the university is of Iranian inspiration, implemented through groups of local Shia gunmen. It is well on its way to success: Instead of 150 non-Arabs--mostly Americans and Britons--on the faculty, there are now perhaps 15. They have moved onto the campus and rarely leave it. The current president, Calvin Plimpton, has been absent from Beirut for many months. There has been a similar elimination of the non-Arab regional element in the student body.

The non-Arabs have been replaced, and more than replaced, by Lebanese Shias who are now well over 60% of the students, perhaps four times as many Shias as five years ago. Since Shia students and their families do not want the university to close, why are the Shia fundamentalists attacking it? Precisely for the very reason that the university, with its wicked Western ways, is proving too attractive to Shia youth.

Indeed, the moderate Lebanese Shia organization, Amal, has come out in strong support of the university, and so have many other Lebanese parties--the Socialists, the Communists and the pro-Syrian groupings. So, too, has the Lebanese government, which says that it will install a security belt around the campus. But the faculty militants, tired of being attacked and intimidated, favor closing shop. They argue that no security belt could ever guarantee the university’s safety or its proper functioning, so it would be better for the school to be mothballed until it can reopen in an atmosphere appropriate to really free and open academic life.

The acting president, a Lebanese, and the university administration have been saying of late that the American University of Beirut is American only in name, and that in fact it is a local, national institution. This is not only inaccurate but also cowardly. So long as a full half or more of the school’s budget comes from the United States, from official and private sources (mostly the former), it remains American.

To some extent the university’s current problems are the result of its own lack of moral and political integrity over the past generation. From 1920 to about 1950, when it had great regional influence, the university was quite clear as to what it was: a private American Protestant institution that set out to develop the character as well as the intellect of its students along liberal Christian lines. Timidly, and unnecessarily, the Protestant and then even the Christian element was phased out, in sharp contrast to the Jesuits’ Universite St. Joseph in East Beirut, where they nailed their Roman Catholic flag to the staff from which it still flies. Similarly, before 1950 the presidents of the American University of Beirut spoke out loud and clear when they thought that the United States was doing wrong in the Middle East--like bringing Israel into existence. But in the turbulent decade of the 1960s the university’s political voice was muffled or fell silent, either because of unnecessary timidity or because, by accepting large numbers of U.S.-financed Asian students, it had become dependent on Washington.

Whatever the causes of the university’s current difficulties and long-term decline, its closure would be a heavy blow to cultural and intellectual freedom in the Middle East and a tremendous triumph for the turbaned obscurantists in Tehran. What is at stake goes far beyond the campus and West Beirut and Lebanon, far beyond even the Middle East.