The
Chronicle of Higher Education is currently running a job posting for both administrative and faculty positions at the University of Kurdistan Hawler in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan Federal Region of Iraq. I myself used to teach there until this past March. In my opinion, it is an unsuitable place for anyone interested in an academic career. While it claims to aspire to be a university meeting international standards in the British mold, it lacks protections and due process that such an institution needs to have.
Early this past school year, many of the faculty felt that our voices were being ignored. Senior management would hand down "orders" to "comply with," without leaving any room for discussion, such as an incomprehensible one to limit textbook orders to two titles per course. For this and other reasons, my colleagues and I began to form a faculty association, and indeed the vast majority of the faculty joined. We started the legal process of registering with the government. Early on the administration discouraged us from meeting, and later, after I, the Acting Chair, was terminated, without any reason given, the legal counsel of the university wrote an intimidating letter to faculty members, effectively frightening them away from meeting. When one of the most experienced and respected English as a Second Language teachers at the University wrote a mildly sarcastic rejoinder to the legal counsel, in which he corrected the counsel's English, he was hit with a $5 million lawsuit for libel. While in the United States such a lawsuit would be seen as frivolous, in the local context it was, in the view of many, a credible threat to the ESL teacher's safety. He exited the country in a hurry.
The experience of the faculty association is just one indication of the weak position of faculty at UKH. Being at a new university, we were necessarily saddled with many administrative tasks, but we soon learned that decisions on serious matters were made without consulting the faculty. Thus the decision to dismantle my former department (Sociology and Applied Social Science), shortly after my termination, was made by the Governing Board (like a Board of Trustees), which is so secretive that we do not know the names of the vast majority of its members, and the minutes of whose meetings have never been made public. Conversely, plans for a new Department of Natural Resources were accepted by the same body without any discussion among the faculty. Not by coincidence, natural resources is the Vice-Chancellor's own specialty. There has been discussion about accepting into this new department up to 25 Ph.D. students who are currently employed in the Ministry of Natural Resources. It is hard to imagine that such a new university, which so far has offered no natural science courses, could have sufficient "infrastructure" to support such an ambitious graduate program (much of the new academic hiring will most likely be in this area).
In general, then, the university has disempowered faculty in favor of non-academic appointees on the Governing Board. It was reported to us faculty members that we were not allowed to make any contact with the Board. The absence of any place to bring our grievances created a difficult dilemma. We learned that in his only previous administrative experience, a member of senior management had received a Vote of No-Confidence from his faculty and was subsequently demoted to a non-administrative position. In spite of having good reasons to suspect that he had withheld such important information from his job application, we had no place to report our discovery, without running the risk of immediate termination. There is no independent university ombudsman (or the equivalent) to bring complaints to.
From my own personal experience, I know how the University can humiliate and even threaten the safety of academic staff. When I was terminated, without any charges, but presumably because I took issue with the way a hiring committee had been constituted, I was ordered out of my office within hours, and out of the country within 10 days (because of the election and holidays, this was only 2 working days). During that time, I received threatening phone calls. In Iraq, such phone threats are not to be taken lightly, as evidenced by the recent murder of a young journalist in Kurdistan after receiving phone threats. Fifteen days after my termination, I was forcibly deported: at one point three armed security men came to my door (with automatic weapons cocked), and later I was escorted to the airport before I could get back my confiscated passport.
Furthermore, many of us suspect that the University of Kurdistan Hawler has not been accredited anywhere yet. Originally UKH had sought partnership with a British university (the University of Bradford) in order to secure validation, but this project fell through. When it was established, the University came under the authority of the Council of Ministers rather than the Ministry of Higher Education, and the latter alone accredits institutions of higher education in Kurdistan. As of the time of my dismissal, the relationship between the University and the Ministry of Higher Education was evolving, and it is unclear (to me and to some former colleagues of mine) what the status of accreditation with that Ministry currently is.
The University of Kurdistan Hawler was established with commendable ideals, and, for a time, it made great progress. But in the past year, it has, in my estimation, abandoned the ideals of collegiality and of serving as a source of critical thinking about the societies of Kurdistan and Iraq, and has been overtaken by a spirit of authoritarianism that should be anathema to any principled academic.
In sum, I would discourage anyone from applying for job openings at the University of Kurdistan Hawler.
For documentation of many of the points made in this post, as well as more information, please visit
http://sites.google.com/site/ukhtruth/.
