On the Private in Private Higher Education, and Pedagogical Interventions in the Context of the American University of Beirut

Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier
Against the Global Right Vol 5 (1)
Ghalya Saadawi, American University of Beirut

In Lebanon, as elsewhere, the ‘turn’ to the right is the result of a systemic economic and ideological condition of state governance and private interest. The political economy has been predicated, since the end of the Cold War and the official close of the Lebanese civil wars in 1990 and well before, on an unfettered neoliberalism. This can be observed through the privatization of varied public services such as postwar urban reconstruction, postal services, telecommunications, trash management, the privatized coastal areas, and other portfolios under negotiation. With no viable leftist opposition in place, one could argue that the political and economic right has been in power ever since the 1990s, motored in discourse and in practice by the effects of economic globalization, and aggravated by urban gentrification and private real-estate speculation, an unaddressed migrant crisis, sectarian laws, outstanding public debt, and a near collapse of the public domain (See Bauman and Mouawad, 2017: 66-9; and Leenders, 2012).

In a non-European-American university context, the term “global right” may encompass different historical implications. The growth of a post-war economic class from the above conditions raises the question of how a beneficiary class reproduces the prevalent right-leaning value systems associated with private higher education and a neoliberal state. If certain European and US institutions of higher education are said to be bastions of leftist as well as liberal thought (although the two are increasingly irreconcilable), how does this play itself out in the context of private higher education in Beirut? Do we still suffer from the threat of right-wing ideology, and what form does this take? Integrated into the fabric of aspects of the Lebanese body politic, have there not always been right-wing positionalities when dealing with class, race, colonialism, Zionism, migrants, and the question of gender? A more loaded question would be: how is higher education complicit not only with the rise of the alt-right in the world, but with the unspoken givens of neoliberal politics and ideologies within the broader workings, say, of the American University of Beirut (AUB)? And how may this be confronted inside private pedagogical institutions themselves?  

In “Critical Pedagogy as a Practice of Cognitive Mapping”, my colleague Angela Harutyunyan argues that the current market dynamics governing the university’s pedgagical politics, which have transformed AUB from a site of antagonism and class struggle to one that aims to enhance consumer satisfaction providing existing structures with labor power, present the third wave of U.S. educational infrastructure expansion and its global exportation: 

Here are several characteristics shared by American universities outside the U.S. which both signal the ongoing transformations within the U.S. educational structure but also present these processes in an intensified form: a governing structure that is administratively heavy and top-down; introduction of tuition fees; implementation of tools and technologies for assessment borrowed from the business world such as Program Learning Outcomes, periodic program and faculty reviews assessed via “impact factors”; standardization of the language of assessment across disciplines; prioritization of so-called money-making vocational trainings at the expense of the arts and humanities, and the incorporation of humanistic disciplines as pragmatic self-help tools in these vocational training programs – ethics for engineers, for instance, or art history for business entrepreneurs […] (Harutyunyan, 2017).

Although combatting these structural and global predicaments will require forms of organization that supercede individual teaching practices, within the Fine Arts and Art History department of the AUB where I am adjunct lecturer, I attempt to reorient the coverage of modern and contemporary art history and theory to both explicitly and implicitly address some of these issues. This is anchored in an emphasis on critical theory, and a materially and historically-grounded reading of material, whether through the theory we invoke, the close reading of artworks, or real-life, everyday examples. As others have reiterated, transforming the alienation at the core of academic bureaucracy and ideology can partly begin with teaching philosophy and curricula, one founded on returning capitalist superstructure to the diagnosis. 

Since 2011, I have offered the courses “Art Now”, “Euro-American Art since 1945”, “Contemporary Art and Theory”, “Theories of Modern Art”, and “Introduction to Art after the Lebanese Wars”. The latter is one perspective on visual art and documentary practices between the 1992 and 2006, carefully selected and embedded within the context of post-Cold War political changes and neoliberal discourses on privatization, state distribution of power, consumerism, and so on. It covers theories of political modernism and ideology critique; social documentary debates over the course of the 20^th century and how they may have impacted the Lebanese artists we investigate; concluding with critiques of the infrastructures and ideologies of contemporary art within globalization as they relate to form, dissemination and reception. Temporal contiguity between the past of the pre-civil wars, the civil wars, and post-war in our readings and discussions allows students to place themselves in a trajectory that creates historical subjects of them. Subjects who can read the question ‘what is art?’ as part of a long-standing social struggle that engulfs Lebanon in broader questions of modernity and capitalism. I ensure that select screenings and artworks are integrated in such a way as to empower students with a vocabulary to read the work at hand, moving away from a thematic or an illustrative approach towards an an analytic and structural one where students come to understand art and readings around them as historically determined. 

We occasionally begin the term by thinking about the university itself, the courses students take, and what to expect from the course’s pedagogical approach and ambitions. It is a stark reminder with each new wave of students that their core curriculum has frequently not introduced them to key texts, and that a simple understanding of the structures they are embedded is wanting. For instance, many have not heard of or read, say, Marx, structuralist and post-structuralist debates, waves of feminist literature, postcolonial theory, or significant 20^th century thought in art and beyond. Some long-term objectives inlcude enabling students to unthink accepted worldviews with which they come to the classroom. They are thus taught to develop their own sets of critical inquiries and theoretical frameworks through the texts we explore, argumentative writing assignments, and group projects. 

A film occasionally explored in class is 1974 (The Reconstitution of a Struggle) (2012), in which filmmakers Raed and Rania Rafei revisit the occupation of the AUB by various leftist groups belonging to the university’s student council. The filmmakers begin by foregrounding the demands of the student council in their near six-week strike in the spring of 1974. In one of the first sequences of the film, the students of the seventies played by present-day activists are shown discussing how the then 10% tuition increase is not merely a policy but a politics of class warfare that will enable the formation of an educated elite, which will serve the interests of the ruling classes in Lebanon and globally. This class of elite students will be inculcated into becoming ‘good,’ culturally imperialized consumers at the expense of local institutions, and as part of a global division of labor. The filmed activists, claiming explicit inspiration from May 1968, draw a direct line between investment in education, and military and economic investment, between soft and hard power, in a conversation that appears to be the older kin of 1990s anti-globalization movements, later Occupy student movements, and uncannily relevant to if not distant from the present-day.

Tactically, the filmmakers’ choice of the reenactment of ciné-verité serves precisely to underscore the extent to which certain forms of social realism – as a style and a historical symptom – are not currently possible. More importantly, the militant leftist coalitions of the 1970s, within actually existing socialism, are simply unavailable to us today (See Krauss, 1986 for a discussion about style as historical symptom and a certain form of coherence that cannot be repeated). Their choice of “reconstitution”, is thus doubly understood as proximity and as distance. During the conception of the film in 2011, a number of Arab countries (Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria) saw a wave of uprisings that were first experienced as a site of emancipatory struggle, before quickly transforming into brutal sites of repression, realpolitik, or reformist business-as-usual. They were preceded by the financial crash of 2009 and the student and activist movements of Occupy, when it appeared momentarily as though social justice could be instigated by mass revolt and class struggle once again, in the 21^st century this time.   

The demands of the 1970s resound differently, if not appear alien, in today’s globalized AUB campus. The university emphasizes identity politics (reiterating its commitment to Article IX on non-discrimination and anti-harassment, most recently in effect, for instance, through the dismissal of long-time Sociology Professor Samir Khalaf) while continuing to hike tuition to enforce structural changes through prioritizing particular professional disciplines over others to maintain financial gaps between faculty and staff and between faculties, and through an administrative discourse that emphasizes social mobility, abundance, meritocracy, fear from extremism, and the values of an American liberal education. Yet ,the structural basis of inequality as it stands in Lebanon or in AUB is absent from any discursive or practical attempt to fold AUB into global, ‘liberal education’.

One case in point is the recent debacle over Graduate Assistants who perform various tasks across Master and PhD degree-granting departments in return for tuition decrease and stipend. GA’s recently organized themselves under the banner Boldly G-AUB (including the letter G into the 150-year AUB anniversary motto, Boldly AUB) to protest the recent cuts to their remuneration and a number of their former labor rights (unpaid base hours of work, non-binding agreements instead of contracts, etc) – an ambiguous decision on the part of AUB given the website’s claim of $6.5 million granted to graduate assistantships.

Another recent case was that of Steve Salaita who was hired and shortly thereafter fired as Edward Said Chair of American Studies (2015), his position retracted by the AUB administration on the basis of said procedural irregularities. Salaita and his supporters claim it was due to his outspoken anti-Zionism, reviving the specter of US government meddling in Lebanese and university affairs in an institution that prides itself on academic freedom. 

The above, alongside the yearly colonization of the AUB campus with the stalls of the job fair, the lack of unionization for non-full time faculty, and the lack of particular curricular requirements in the humanities (not just free electives) are only some of the ways the business-as-usual of private higher education is symptomatic of a global, liberal-to-right wing illness to be found globally across a number of educational institutions.
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Works Cited

Bauman, Hannes and Jamil Mouawad. “Wayn Al-Dawla? Locating the Lebanese State in Social Theory.” Arab Studies Journal Vol. 25 No. 1, 2017: 66-9.

Don’t Panic, Organise! A Mute Magazine Paphmlet on Struggles in Education (2010). London: Open Mute Press.

Harutyunyan, Angela. “Critical Pedagogy as a Practice of Cognitive Mapping.” Talk delivered at the conference Potential Spaces: Art and Design Education in the 21st Century, ZKM Karlsruhe on February 18, 2017.

Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

Leenders, Reinoud. Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-Building in Postwar Lebanon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.

Ghalya Saadawi is an adjunct lecturer at the fine arts and art history department of the American University of Beirut (AUB), and the visual art department of the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Balamand (ALBA), and forthcoming faculty at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). She offers courses in art history and theory geared towards art majors as well as all AUB and ALBA department majors. The DAI is a postgraduate program. Regular courses Saadawi teaches in Beirut include “Art After the Lebanese Wars” (at AUB) and “War and Civil War in Lebanese Cinema Art and Thought” (ALBA) “Contemporary Art and Theory (AUB) and “Is there, can there be contemporary art?” (ALBA). The former courses cover in small part the Lebanese civil wars and their officially declared end, followed by a critique of postwar private reconstruction and the formation or disintegration of the postwar state. This is followed by a node that focuses on the 1990s-early 2000s art practices through the lens of theories and tactics of political modernism and its incumbent ideology critique, prior to the onset of global art formations and funding strategies. Another node works through the legacy of leftist struggles in Lebanon, and the documentary essay genre in particular. The two subsequent courses are critiques of the formation of the category of Contemporary Art through a range of literature, unpacking contemporaneity, globality, and art’s infrastructure.

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