There’s an interesting piece by Christina Asquith in the Guardian’s Education section today, on the university sector in Iraq under the Baathist dictatorship and since its overthrow:
Academics in Iraq’s beleaguered universities are seeing signs that the brain drain of the 1980s and 1990s is slowly being reversed. In recent months dozens of academics have returned from exile and are seeking to get their old jobs back. At the US-led ministry of higher education, which is staffed by expatriate academics, hundreds more have emailed from England, the US and the Netherlands to inquire about returning and to offer donations, scholarships and start partnerships. Just as lost academics were symptomatic of a universities slump under Saddam, their re-emergence offers a thread of promise for the future, particularly to colleagues struggling to piece back campuses suffering from academic repression, sanctions, looting and now terrorism.
The story of how things presently are is a mixed one, as you would expect. But one particular caution. The subhead on the piece has Asquith asking academics who stayed behind ‘how warmly they welcome their old colleagues’. This doesn’t reflect the content, merely one remark from one Iraqi academic.