Iraqis seek help here for their battered academia By Marcella Bombardieri, Boston Globe Staff | July 1, 2005 CAMBRIDGE -- Iraq's deputy minister of higher education moved slowly through the Harvard Museum of Natural History, transfixed by the gemstones and mineral formations on display. Beriwan M. Khailany said the exhibits reminded her of the bygone riches of Iraqi education. ''When I graduated in the mid-'70s we had these in our labs," said Khailany, a geologist by training, as she pointed to a dazzling green chunk of malachite. ''But now, with the looting, our students will never have a chance to see them." Khailany and 10 officials and professors from the University of Baghdad, a 48-year-old institution in the heart of Iraq's violence-plagued capital, are in town this week, seeking support from Harvard, Boston University, and MIT to rebuild their battered school, restock their labs with modern equipment, and update their curriculums to include emerging fields like nanotechnology and biotechnology. In the face of grave challenges posed by the continuing violence in Iraq, members of the group are focused on restoring their university's reputation and helping to lift up their homeland. ''If you are reforming higher education, you are reforming the whole society," Khailany told Urbain DeWinter, BU's associate provost for international programs. ''Our students are from all around the country, and they will bring what they learn to their families." At home, Iraqi academics are targets for assassination, with at least 50 having been killed in the last two years. Their campus buildings, books, and lab equipment have been looted and burned. A recent United Nations report said that 84 percent of higher education's physical infrastructure had been severely damaged. Even today, electricity runs only half the time at the University of Baghdad. The Iraqis arrived frustrated with the United States and American universities for having failed in the last two years to offer much support to Iraqi universities. At a Harvard forum attended by about 90 people Monday, the University of Baghdad's president, Mosa Aziz al-Mosawe, said that Britain, France, Australia, and Iran had all been more forthcoming with assistance than the United States. The group couldn't get visas to come to the United States for a year and a half after being invited by Richard Wilson, an emeritus physics professor at Harvard. Visas came through only because the US Army arranged a visit to West Point, where the group will spend most of July after a few days in Washington, D.C. Even when institutions like the World Bank have promised help, follow-through has been rare, the academics said, partly because of the security situation in Iraq. The main goal of their visit was to make connections with local academics. Still, everywhere they went this week, the Iraqis made energetic pitches for direct support. At BU, provost David Campbell said he might be able to find some money in his budget to help support a planned conference in Baghdad for Iraqi expatriate academics to advise their counterparts who stayed behind. Officials seemed open to Mosawe's request to find some room on campus for professors on sabbatical or for doctoral students who need lab equipment not available in Baghdad, and they agreed to develop a written plan for how BU can help the Iraqis. At Harvard, where the group met with president Lawrence H. Summers, two faculty members warned the visitors not to expect special treatment for their graduate students. ''I'm being very frank," geology professor Heinrich Holland told two of the Iraqis. ''The students coming from Iraq must be first rate. I would be very surprised if University of Baghdad students were admitted who didn't demonstrate that they could compete with the rest of our students. Otherwise it's a terrible situation for everybody." Holland said later that he was optimistic he could arrange for some Iraqi geology professors to visit Harvard on sabbatical. ''So many people, including me, think we've done an awful lot of damage over there," Holland said. ''We need to help them get back on their feet." Members of the Iraqi delegation were also eager to learn about OpenCourseWare, an MIT initiative that makes course materials available on the Web free of charge. A local Iraqi-American businessman has offered to buy the University of Baghdad a server to download the initiative's files, so that faculty and students could use them without relying on their slow and unreliable Internet connection. The Iraqis also asked for lab equipment the schools no longer needed, but they emphasized that curriculum advice and learning opportunities for their students are more important than donations. For 20 years under Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi intellectuals were not allowed to study or attend conferences abroad or subscribe to international journals. And because English was banned from science and engineering classes, few in the current generation of Iraqi students possess the English skills necessary to study in the United States. Many of the academics were reluctant to talk about the dangers they face at home, but Shakir Mustafa, an Iraqi-American professor of Arabic and Irish studies at BU, said the visitors told him that some of them occasionally sleep in their offices to avoid the dangers of traveling home. A University of Baghdad pharmacy student who was active in a Shi'ite political party was gunned down in May, just hours after he had argued with a member of the staff of the pharmacy school dean, who is a Sunni. The killing sparked a riot, classes were canceled, and the dean reportedly fled the country. ''They are taking tremendous risks out of a sense of public responsibility," Mustafa said. ''To kill a chair or a dean gets an extra bang. It's a resilient society; that's what comes through. These people are not just going to lie down and accept things." The Iraqis preferred to talk about what Khailany -- who, as a Kurd, never could have held a high government position under Hussein's regime -- called the ''bright side." Exams went off this year without a hitch. University salaries have just doubled, from $500 a month to $1,000 for a full professor, they said. And they take heart in a poster that has been popping up all over campus with an adage about keeping conflict out of the university: ''When politics comes in the door, science escapes out the window." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company