Professor Sattar Jawad, whom the Duke University Center for International Studies hosted as a scholar-at-risk from 2005 to 2007, discusses the ongoing campaign of anti-intellectual violence in Iraq and the devestating impact it is having on Iraq’s universities and the education of future generations in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Now a visiting fellow at the University of Mississippi Jawad taught literature and journalism in Iraq for forty years, most recently at Al-Mustansiriyah University in Baghdad. He edited the Baghdad Mirror, an English-language weekly newspaper, and Al-Siyada, an Arabic daily, and is the author of fourteen books. After his newspaper offices were bombed and his safety at the university threatened, he was offered a position within the Franklin Center, in order to escape the violence which now threatens the very future of Iraqi higher education.
More than 300 Iraqi university professors have been assassinated by sectarian militias since the U.S. invasion in 2003, said Abdul Sattar.
“The campaign to eliminate intellectuals—the people most needed to rebuild the country—continues unabated.” He added that Iraqi universities are foolishly enforcing a mandatory retirement age of 63, a policy that he said is tearing the country’s best-trained generation from academic life.
