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Higher Education in Afghanistan on the Mend
With the Taliban ousted from power, Afghanistan’s new leaders are turning their attention to rebuilding the country’s devastated infrastructure, including its system of higher education. Even before the Taliban took control in 1995, Afghan universities were gutted by years of war and repression. Many faculty members, along with others, fled the country when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. At Kabul University in Afghanistan’s capital city, buildings, books, and equipment were looted and destroyed during subsequent military struggles, and women were banned from the university, both as students and as teachers, when the Taliban assumed power.
The situation is now changing—women have been readmitted to the university, a minister for higher education has been appointed, and international efforts to rebuild and resupply the university are under way. The repatriation of educated exiles is key to Afghanistan’s rebuilding effort, according to many observers, including Hekmat Karzai, coordinator of the Return of Qualified Afghans (RQA) program. No one is tracking the total numbers of Afghans returning to the country, but thousands have applied to do so through the RQA, which matches up Afghan professionals with jobs, including government and faculty positions, in Afghanistan. Many have spent decades living abroad and are willing to sacrifice stability and middle-class lifestyles for uncertain futures by returning to the country of their birth.
Not all repatriates have actively sought an opportunity to return. Sharif Faez, the country’s new minister of higher education, reportedly learned of his appointment from a relative who heard it announced on the BBC; when an official job offer later arrived, Faez, a former lecturer at Kabul University who had been in the United States for twenty years, accepted it with some reluctance. "I have to pay a mortgage. My son is still in college," he told the Boston Globe, adding that upon arriving in Afghanistan and meeting with Kabul University’s remaining faculty, he quickly realized that promoting democracy, eliminating fanaticism, and improving learning conditions for women would have to take a back seat to basic concerns like finding a way to feed faculty members who had not been paid in five months.
Several international and American organizations are assisting the rebuilding efforts. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has asked journalists around the world for donations of books and other training materials to help restock the library at Kabul University’s journalism school, and the Asia Foundation, an organization that works on economic and education issues in Asia, will send about 25,000 books to Kabul University in the spring and summer.
Faculty members at Purdue University will also help. Purdue faculty have long-standing ties to Kabul University, having helped to build its engineering program in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Zarjon Baha, an engineering professor at Purdue who was the dean of engineering at Kabul University before the Soviet invasion.
In February education minister Faez signed an agreement that permits Purdue to seek funding from federal and international agencies on behalf of Kabul University and to create a long-term plan for the institution. According to a Purdue spokesperson, the plan will focus on three subjects—agriculture, engineering, and technology—and on four areas—rebuilding campus facilities; developing curriculum; creating training programs in the United States for Kabul University faculty, many of whom have only bachelor’s degrees; and designing extension programs to enable Afghan faculty to train people throughout Afghanistan in agriculture and engineering.
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