The Tragic Encounter: US Policies and America's Educational Ideals

By Calvin W. Schwabe

My own private grief for what has been happening to Lebanon is a potpourri of emotions I cannot easily separate. I grieve for a ruggedly beautiful land horribly scarred by war; for a diverse and creative people who are suffering terribly; for the American University of Beirut, a unique institution where my career began over 30 years ago, but which now struggles simply to survive; for wonderful ideas now stillborn; for close friends, some dead.

To grieve for a "foreign" land is a feeling too abstract to communicate to those who do not know it. To me, however, Lebanon will always be a very special place. For one thing, it is a place where Jesus once walked, and where I walked too. It is also the birthplace of my children and where I helped them take their own first steps.

The Fruition of a Beautiful Dream

To grieve for a great institution to which one devoted years of effort, loyalty and love is more tangible, more susceptible to another's understanding, to empathy. But the American University of Beirut has been more than just a great institution. It was the fruition of a beautiful new idea, a very beautiful American dream. Even today, one need but mention a connection with "AUB" in almost any town from Morocco to Pakistan, from the southern Sudan to Greece, to acquire local friends. It's happened to me many times. But whether AUB survives Lebanon's current tragedy in any form is now a question. That it will never again be the same is certain. And that is America's loss, at least as much as it is Lebanon's.

To understand why is to know what AUB has meant to many people and what has been done there. For instance, more of its sons and daughters were to sign the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in 1945 than those of any other university in the world.

Why had so many of those leaders, of diverse nationalities and religions, studied in an institution founded by Americans in another far-off land? Because AUB represented a new and positive way for very different peoples to relate to one another. Because, truly, it represented a new departure from much of humanity's past. When Daniel Bliss, its original president, laid the cornerstone for the American University of Beirut's first permanent building, that Presbyterian educator from New England stated it in this manner: "This college is for all conditions and classes of men without regard to color, nationality, race or religion. A man white, black, or yellow; Christian, Jew, Mohammedan, or heathen, may enter and enjoy all the advantages of this institution for three, four, or eight years; and go out believing in one God, in many gods, or in no god. But it will be impossible for anyone to continue with us long without knowing what we believe to be the truth and our reason for that belief. "AUB taught knowledge and it taught reason—but it also taught ideals. It offered friendship and professed hope.

Founded 125 years ago, in 1866, as the Syrian Protestant College, the American University of Beirut was to become perhaps the most successful experiment ever attempted in international education. It surely was one of America's greatest successes of any kind in another land.

In the words of Fouad Ajami, writing in the June 1984 issue of Harper's ("America and the Arab World: The End of the Affair"), "Americans [had] come to the Arab world with things that tantalize: knowledge, values, goods, ways of life. " And they transmitted this knowledge—and these values—so successfully to their initial students that, already in his 1872 report to AUB's Board, President Bliss could write: "When we consider the condition of women in the East and the general ignorance of all classes, it is also a significant fact that young men should be found to select for discussion [in the college] and, in the presence of Christians, Mohammedans, Jews and Druzes, maintain the affirmative of the questions 'Should woman be eligible equally with man, to any and all the employments and offices of life?' and 'Ought governments to make primary education compulsory?...

Heady ideas

Serving up such heady ideas to eager, idea hungry people, AUB's influence spread and it prospered to the extent that, by 1896, its President's Report could note how AUB's students then came from as far afield as "Greece, Turkey-in-Europe, Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Greek Islands, Cyprus, Syria and Egypt." In 1902, of its then 615 students, 252 were Greek Orthodox, 153 Protestant, 45 Muslim, 35 Greek Catholic, 32 Armenian Orthodox, 30 Jewish, 24 Maronite, 19 Coptic, 13 Roman Catholic, 9 Druze and 3 Armenian Catholic.

AUB's impact was a profound one in every way, but in no way more than political. Commenting in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom upon the rise then of modern Arab nationalism, T. E. Lawrence noted that it had been "fortified and made pointed by the new American ideas in education; ideas which when released in the old high Oriental atmosphere, made an explosive mixture. The American school, teaching by the method of inquiry, encouraged scientific detachment and free exchange of views. Quite without intention they taught revolution." Or, as Arab historian George Antonius wrote in 1938 in his book The Arab Awakening, "The story of the Arab national move ment opens in Syria in 1847, with the foundation in Beirut of a modest literary society under American patronage." These "patrons" were soon to become AUB's first professors, and they brought with them other ideas and ideals equally profound.

I have never been more proud of anything American than I've been of the American University of Beirut. Nor have I ever taken part in anything more personally rewarding. Yet when I mention "AUB" today to most Americans, I am met with blank stares. That is one reason why, when I grieve for Lebanon, I grieve for America too.

The Legacy of AUB

For, in Lebanon's complex tragedy, Americans have lost far more than most realize. At the end of World War I, when Ottoman Turkey surrendered to the Allies, President Wilson insisted that an Inter-Allied Commission ascertain on the spot the aspirations of the peoples of the Arab parts of that empire. But France and Britain demurred, so the US alone sent an investigating team, the so-called King-Crane Commission, to "greater Syria." They found a people led to believe they would be granted post-war independence and, not only overwhelmingly desiring it, prepared to assume it. In substantial part, that was the legacy of AUB.

Being realists, many Arabs foresaw correctly that Britain and France would thwart their ambition for immediate independence. If an outside power was to be selected to rule over them, 60.5 percent of the Arab citizens , petitions to the King-Crane Commission asked that that mandatory power be the United States, compared to 14.5 percent who favored France, and 3.5 who preferred Great Britain. The Arabs trusted America because we Americans were not strangers to them.

The Arab relationship with America began to suffer a severe strain in the late 1940s, however, with our government's consistent championing of the rights of Palestinian Jews over those of Palestinian Arabs. At the same time, in the words of Arab-American scholar Fouad Ajami, "the status quo, consumerism, anti-communism ... [became] what America now preached [increasingly] to the Arab world. This new American Gospel spawned what the Egyptian writer Lewis Awad ... called Arab 'schizophrenia toward America. 'There was the memory of a 'good America,' and a strong addiction to American things. But there was also, and for the first time, a political grievance against America. America in the 1950s and early 1960s showed little of its more generous face to the Middle East. " There were now other voices being heard from America than AUB's.

Israeli-Palestinian strife, and the clear bias evident in America's official role in the Middle East, had within a decade helped stimulate the eruption in Lebanon, in 1958, of a political blemish long evident just below its surface calm. But Lebanon's 1958 civil war was still potentially manageable, and it all might have been resolved then, had America truly mediated this dispute with all the residual moral suasion still at its disposal. Instead, our government chose to intervene militarily against the aggrieved Lebanese majority, and thus preserve by force that country's unfair political status quo.

This eroding of widely held views of American fairness by what most Lebanese and other Arabs then, perceived as a position reversal and their abandonment by America, convinced more and more Lebanese that the similar aspirations for self-determination and national identity of their Palestinian brothers were henceforth to be subordinated by American policy.

Historians may someday pinpoint the end of AUB's great American experiment in international understanding and goodwill as those days in 1983 (on until midnight night after night) when the United States battleship New Jersey rode at anchor just off Lebanon's coast, indiscriminately lobbing immense shells from its antiquated 16-inch guns into one lovely village after another in the mountains behind Beirut and AUB's campus. Friends wrote then that not even the height of Israeli bombings had generated so much terror as did the New Jersey's guns, which shook Beirut buildings like an earthquake. Village after beautiful village was reduced to rubble. If one man's throwing of a bomb into a crowd is terrorism, what should we call such acts as these?

At the moment the New Jersey's shells were obliterating the lovely mountain villages of his people, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt's own child was in the United States for emergency medical treatment. Six of Lebanese Shi'i leader Nabih Berri's children live in Detroit. These are not men who hate what America is supposed to stand for, or mistrust its people.

Shortly after those sad events, on January 18, 1984, our dear friend of almost three decades, AUB President Malcom Kerr, was murdered in the very building at whose cornerstone-laying his predecessor well over 100 years before had made his great American speech of hope for all men.

As my wife and I tried to telephone Malcolm's wife and children in Beirut, I also tried unsuccessfully to erase from my mind my former pride as an 18-year-old, right after the end of World War II, in seeing that same battleship New Jersey sail into Tokyo Bay as a symbol of victory over fascism. Those juxtaposed thoughts of the symbolism then and now of the New Jersey are an almost unbearable reminder to me of what America was, and what I know my America still is and what it may be fast becoming. Writing about the motive of Malcolm Kerr's murderers, and in describing the hopes, ideals, and standards of judgment and behavior we Americans once so nobly and boldly offered to the Arabs—and for which we received their true affection in return Fouad Ajami could but lament, "The Arabs have reached for those things ... [and] The encounter has ended in tragedy."

For those of us who proudly participated in this encounter at AUB and dozens of American institutions throughout the Middle East, it is also an American tragedy. In facing its enormity, I can but cry out in lamentation, "Where, O God, is our Wailing Wall?"

Between 1956 and 1964 Calvin Schwabe founded and chaired the joint Department of Tropical Health of the School of Medicine and the School of Public Health of the American University of Beirut. Currently he is professor of epidemiology at the School of Veterinary Medicine of the University of CA at Davis and at the School of Medicine, University of CA at San Francisco.