The operating budget of the Lebanese University, Lebanon’s only public university, has reached an all-time low. On January 21st of this year, Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni submitted a draft proposal of the budget to current Caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab which includes a reduction in the university’s budget. This comes at a time when the economic crisis has taken its toll on the incomes of the population and private universities have significantly increased the cost of their tuition fees due to the Lebanese pound’s (LBP) devaluation, with other universities expected to follow suit.
Budget reductions are not new to the Lebanese University. Between the years 2018 and 2021, the public institution witnessed a 55 billion LBP reduction to its operating cost. As the economic crisis deteriorates, the slashing of the budget will inevitably lead to the inability of the university in securing the simplest needs of students, like printing paper for exams, a scenario that has previously happened during exam periods.
Amer Halwani, President of the Full-time Professors Association at the Lebanese University, declared in a press conference that “the university is not well” and warned that a failure to act on the systematic marginalization of the university would lead to its demise. According to Lebanese law, deans of the colleges may spend a maximum of three million liras a day on repairs. But as the dollar to lira exchange rate approaches all-time high levels, these funds will barely be able to cover the repairs of an electric appliance like the air conditioning units. This raises questions and concerns on the infrastructure and facilities provided at the university. How will the university be able to secure operational materials and laboratory supplies that ensure that the quality of education is not jeopardized?
Ali Najdi, a student at the Lebanese University and co-founder of the LU Secular Club shared his experience at the university with Watchdogs. “As a Political Science student here at the Hadath campus, 6 out of 7 of the classes I am currently enrolled in are being delivered through long voice notes on WhatsApp,” he said, “don’t you see how problematic and useless this is?”
“The Lebanese University, especially the Hadath campus is infamous for overcrowding students inside the classrooms,” he added. “They are squeezing in 400 students in a class that has a maximum capacity of 200. This will get much worse with the influx of students from private universities to the Lebanese university due to the dollarization of tuition.”
The blame falls upon the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education as they fail to meet the budget demands of the university. Every year, the Lebanese University submits its budget to the Ministry of Finance through the Ministry of Education, but the funds always get reallocated for other purposes. In fact, between the years 2005 and 2014, the Ministry of Finance adjusted the university’s budget with a grand total of 210 billion Lebanese pounds being allocated towards “more crucial areas within the government.” The core problem is deeply rooted within the ruling class that sets these decisions and refuses to take accountability for the university’s demise. It has been clear for several decades now that the successive governments (not to say that any of the faces changed) have no interest in providing quality public education, and have chosen to pass on the responsibility to the private sector. The ruling class is well aware of the consequences of this and are simply postponing the inevitable: total annihilation of the public education sector in Lebanon.
The situation in private universities is not faring any better in the wake of the economic crisis. In December of 2020, Member of Parliament Oussama Saad requested in a parliamentary session to submit a proposed law for universities to price tuition in liras and not hike rates by dollarizing tuition rates. The response was Speaker Nabih Berri sending the law to the bottom of the docket. To this day, the law has not been proposed which puts the education of 200,000 students registered in private universities at stake.
Currently, there are over 64 branches of the Lebanese University, all running at a budget of 365 billion liras. This budget is divided into the following: 85% of it goes to the salaries of faculty and staff, whereas the remaining 15% should cover the operational costs of the university campuses. On the other hand, the American University of Beirut (AUB), which currently runs one campus on Bliss street, has an operating budget of 738 billion liras. This may come as a surprise to some, but even with the government’s minimal intervention in private universities’ affairs, they were able to provide them with more than what they have provided to the Lebanese University. According to a report published by the Pablo Neruda Club at the Lebanese American University (LAU), private universities have directly benefited from subsidized loans through the Central Bank of Lebanon. Private Institutions such as AUB, LAU, and Université Saint Joseph (USJ) have received over 114 million dollars in subsidized loans, or at the official exchange rate, 171 billion liras. This amounts to 81% of the funds that were set aside by the Ministry of Finance for different purposes that could have been used for the advancement of the nation’s only public university. Several politicians currently sit at the Board of Trustees of these private institutions and therefore have a key say in their decision-making process as well as the decisions taken by the governmental bodies that favor them over the Lebanese University.
Faculty and staff of the Lebanese University have been criticizing the institutional problems burdening the university for years now.
“The last legitimate Board of Deans was appointed in 2014 and, ever since, every time a Dean retires, the Dean would appoint their successor without going through official procedures,” says Dr. Bassel Saleh, a professor at the Lebanese University and activist. He added that both the Full-Time Professors Association and the Part-Time Professors Association have taken matters into their own hands by calling for several strikes throughout the academic year in order to tackle numerous issues that the university has been facing, but it has not been as efficient as it should be since these associations consist of professors belonging to several political parties in Lebanon. Political parties possess the power to influence the leaders of the strike-through bribes and other incentives such as a promotion. We can also see that the promotion of anti-union rhetoric through making sure that the paperwork and overall bureaucracy to establish a union or even a simple calling of a strike consumes so much time and effort. In May 2019, the Full-Time Professors Association called for an open-ended strike against the government’s potential cuts to both their wages and the budget of Lebanon’s only public university. In order to protect their party’s superiority and maintain the status quo at the Lebanese University, several political parties lead a campaign to disrupt the protests, therefore denying the professors the right to demand a fair wage and proper working conditions.
Professors are not the only people taking action against these budgetary cuts; students have decided to join this battle too. Najdi adds that “As the Secular Club in the Lebanese University, we have launched a very successful online campaign and released several statements about the importance of these budget cuts and how it will have negative impacts at the university.”
According to Najdi, this helped raise awareness among the majority of the students at the university. The proposed budget for the current year shows that several neoliberal institutions were awarded tax cuts. These cuts, if approved, would come at the expense of the Lebanese University, despite all the university’s struggles.
“We will mobilize against these unjust actions, but first we must make sure that we know who are our allies and form a coalition of some sort to protest at the university, at the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Finance to reverse these budget cuts and ensure that the quality of education at the Lebanese University is not compromised,” Najdi added.
Solving the crisis of the public education sector without tackling the source of the problem is useless and detrimental. Public education and politics should not be intertwined. Certainly, it is an extension of our political system through the governmental budget, but it should not be used as a tool for the advancement of a political party’s status within society. Public education needs a new wall, paralleling the wall of separation between education and government and the ruling class. Reform in our educational sector should be driven by educators and researchers whose sole purpose is the advancement of the university, not by power-hungry politicians who are willing to eradicate the public education system completely, ergo putting the lives of thousands of students at risk by leaving them without an education and making it a commodity for those who can afford a private education.
Edited by Hala El Shami