<p>Anyone interested in the impact of the outbreak of violence in the Middle East on the American University of Beirut should take a look at the following linked article in Inside Higher Ed. The American University of Beirut is chartered by the State of New York and accredited by the Middle States Association. John Waterbury, formerly of Princeton University, has been president since 1998.</p>
<p>Its terrible and especially because my dad studied there. I’ve seen the place and been there and it really is a great institution which offers great education. It saddens me to think that it might have to temporarily close.</p>
<p>Superwizard, AUB is a great institution and John Waterbury should be commended for his courage and the tremendous work he is doing in Lebanon to further American liberal arts education there. AUB is considered to be among the finest institutions to study international relations and Arabic. Now, it is “hot” and for all the wrong reasons. </p>
<p>AUB students, which number many Americans, are wondering not only if they are going to have a university to go to in the fall, but if they do, whether or not to go back. One of my S’ friends who is enrolled there left the country after spring semester exams and doesn’t know what to do now.</p>
<p>This Inside Higher ed. article from July 17 gives an excellent overview of the fall out in the Middle East on the American University of Beirut as well as several other university centers in Lebanon and Israel all of which are affected by the outbreak of violence in the region.</p>
<p>Callie Lefevre, a student from Princeton University on the Arabic language study program, gives us a vibrant account of her summer experience at AUB, and the situation in Beirut, leading up to her safe evacuation from the region.</p>
<p>I think Callie sounds like a brain-washed naif. Or a sanctimonious, self-absorbed little twit. Take your pick. Reading these essays makes it clear why Beirut is the destination-of-choice for Juan Cole, when he wants to get the “real” Middle East picture.</p>
<p>Out of curiosity–and a personal history of my own in visiting the Middle East–I decided to check up on how some of the Israeli colleges/universities are faring. I wonder why we don’t have valley-girl Princeton students crying a river about their plight. I’ve never been able to visit Israel, but always wanted to. However, having an Israeli visa stamped into my passport would have made travel in Arab countries impossible, at a time in which my family needed to do so.<br>
<a href=“http://www.technion.ac.il/[/url]”>http://www.technion.ac.il/</a>
<p>Wow Driver, strong reaction to a 20 year old. Callie Lefevre is a young girl who wrote beautifully of her experience. My daughter’s political opinions often differ from mine and I don’t think of her as brainwashed or a self-absorbed little twit. She is young. Agree with her or not, Ms. Lefevre’s piece is worth reading.</p>
<p>That was a little harsh, I apologize. I’m bothered that the kids at AUB seem to be getting one side of the story. They deserve better. You’re right though, EE, my reflexive comments were over the top. And I’m always the first to defend the conservative kids on CC who get castigated by their elders for being young twits. Mea culpa.</p>
<p>Driver: I have known Callie LeFevre for years. She is a friend, although not a super-close one, of my child’s. No one, but no one, who has met her would describe her as a “brain-washed naif”, a “self-absorbed twit”, or a “valley girl”. She is very smart, judicious, caring, outgoing, serious; she has enormous respect both from her peers and from the adults in her community (which, by the way, includes plenty of people with strong ties to Israel). You can’t wish away her experiences and perspective.</p>
<p>By the way, I know the State Department used to issue double passports to people who wanted to travel both to Israel and to countries in the Arab world. I also thought that the Israelis would, on request, eschew stamping a passport and issue some other visa documentation. I don’t know if any of that still happens post-9/11, but I know plenty of people who have travelled in Israel and Arab countries (but not necessarily Syria, Iran, or Saudi Arabia) in the past few years.</p>
<p>Having already rendered my apologia for firing both barrels at Ms. Lefevre earlier, I’ll now continue with my original intended theme. She writes well. She should flesh out her experience in the Middle East before extrapolating her college trips to Beirut into a major thesis on the region’s conflicts and US foreign policy. I’ve not been to the Middle East personally since the Carter era–when I wasn’t much older than her–but you could definitely not get into those three countries you mentioned (where I did go–particularly Saudi) back in those days, if you had an Israeli stamp in your passport. Perhaps Iran prior to the embassy crisis–but Iran is not, nor was it then, an Arab country, btw, but the point remains. People who needed to travel freely throughout the Middle East and parts of Northern Africa didn’t have Israeli visas stamped in their passports.</p>
<p>I realize that you had apologized. I didn’t mean to pile on, only to indicate, on the basis of my personal experience, that your characterization was not only premature, but substantively wrong. As for fleshing out her Middle East experience, I read tons of pontification on the region’s conflicts by people who have not spent as much time in a country other than Israel, living with residents, as Callie has. And I know for a fact that she talks on a regular basis to people who have spent meaningful time in Israel – some (not all) of whom would even tend to agree with her.</p>
<p>Yes, of course, it was wrong to include Iran in the “Arab country” parenthetical. Sorry, Iranians! (The parenthetical as first drafted referred only to Saudi Arabia, but then I added Syria and Iran because I figured the issue probably existed there, too, and forgot that I had said “Arab”. My point was both to acknowledge that a serious issue exists, and to indicate that there are ways to deal with it other than boycotting Israel.)</p>
I’m going to demur on part of that point. Her on-the-scene reporting was well done. It was her conclusions that made her sound like a naif and a valley girl.</p>
<p>In light of the above comments, I re-read Ms. LeFevre’s article and still come away with a sense of deep appreciation not just of her ability to capture on paper the riveting details of sound, smell and even taste connected to her truncated stay in Beirut but of her incredibly fine articulation of just what this experience meant to her on a very personal level. In an opinion piece that plays on the namby-pamby theme of “what I did on my summer vacation” from a rising sophomore who went to Beirut with the lofty purpose to skip 2nd year Arabic, I hardly expect a thesis on U.S. politics or the situation in the Middle East, and I sincerely doubt that that is what this piece pretends to offer its readers. The only thing that Ms. LeFevre might be rightfully accused of is a maudlin ending to an otherwise well-written account of her experiences.</p>
<p>I also doubt that most people give short shrift to the plight of all students and faculty at all the other universities caught in the current crisis whether they be in Lebanon or Israel. As far as AUB is concerned, there are numerous reasons why so much attention is focused on how the events unfolding at present affect this university in particular.</p>
<p>Inside Higher ed. piece comparing and contrasting the plight of the universities caught in the Middle East crisis to the impact of Katrina in the higher ed. in the States. AUB is given particular attention because it is a U.S. chartered university.</p>
<p>NYTimes article on the American University of Beirut and the challenge to presevere. There are currently about 7,200 students currently enrolled at AUB.</p>
<p>Concordia University and the University of Montreal are re-opening closed admissions processes to fast-track qualified Canadian and foreign students who might not have a place to study come the fall. “Some other universities, including McGill in Montreal, are trying to defer admission for students having difficulty getting to Canada for the start of classes next month.” </p>