AUB Remains Closed

This message was posted on the American University of Beirut's home page yesterday evening:

The American University of Beirut will resume classes as soon as conditions permit. The University will, as of that point, make arrangements to complete the second semester and help students make up for missed work. Medical students are expected to attend to their duties throughout.

Regular full-time employees and workers at AUB are expected to attend to their duties as normally scheduled. As on previous similar occasions, any day of absence will be charged towards days of regular vacation to be deducted from the employee's earned annual leave.

The consensus among the faculty members I spoke to this afternoon is that classes are canceled not because it is presently dangerous in Hamra, Beirut, or even most other parts of the country, but because the university fears that the students themselves will engage in violence with one another if they were to return to campus. I would like to believe that that won't happen. The students here are extraordinarily politically engaged. Student elections carry the all-night fervor that, unfortunately, only college basketball or football games do on American campuses. There are regular demonstrations, sit-ins, and make-shift political art installations aimed at various injustices happening everywhere from Beirut to Gaza to the United States. It's an intense atmosphere at times, where political disagreements can escalate into ugly shouting matches, but I have never seen any violence. On student election day earlier this year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students stood crowded around West Hall all afternoon and well into the night, waiting for the Dean of Students to announce the results. Most of the student candidates ran on tickets directly funded by Lebanon's actual political parties, so there were students for hours on end literally crammed together representing Amal, Hezbollah, Future Movement, Free Patriotic Movement, Progressive Socialist Party, etc. I could hear the singing and shouting very well from my office about fifty meters away and even, later that night, from my apartment all the way down the hill. It was an intense, but festive, mood, particularly when the students representing the March 14th governing coalition parties won a majority of the seats. Fireworks lit up the sky and, as a former student of mine who was very active in one of the winning campaigns told me, the winners then proceeded to party all night long.

Last week, of course, may have changed everything. The intensity of politics has been ratcheted up to levels not seen here since the end of the Civil War. But I would like to trust my students. Not only are AUB students politically engaged, they are also extraordinarily intelligent and wise. So long as they are able to act upon their own free will, I can't see them discarding the tools of rational thinking and persuasive speech for the methods of violence. And even if one or two students let their tempers get the best of them and start fighting, I trust their peers to step in and stop things before they got out of hand. There's too much at stake and I am certain that they understand that even better than I do.

Meanwhile, from high atop its hillside fortress on the other side of town, the American Embassy sent this message to its ex-pat citizens:

Due to the lack of usual cargo handling facilities at Rafiq Hariri International Airport, the U.S. Embassy in Awkar will begin receiving necessary supplies and materials via U.S. Military helicopters.

The sole purpose for these helicopters is to ensure the continuous supply of the U.S. Embassy for operational needs.

As my wife remarked to me, upon reading this message, "what, did they run out of US Embassy letterhead or something?"

Nevertheless, it's another sunny, warm, and beautiful day in Beirut.