The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education

6. "GUERRILLA U": The Contested Nature of Authority

6 “GUERRILLA U” The Contested Nature of Authority In October 1970, Newsweek magazine christened the American University of Beirut “Guerrilla U,” offering a vivid, if inaccurate, account of AUB student politics: Politics at AUB today is tied directly to the Palestine guerrilla movement . Many students belong to one of the guerrilla groups, mainly the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] and Al Fatah, and often spend their summers and weekends in commando training camps. Some students have even been accused of stealing chemicals from university laboratories to use in making explosives. Most of the recruiting for rebel organizations takes place at a student hangout called Feisal’s Restaurant, which faces AUB’s main gate. There, students and former students sit around arguing politics endlessly over cup after cup of Turkish coffee, while guerrilla scouts quietly scrutinize the talkers in search of future leaders.1 In fact, the student movement after the 1967 war was characterized by demonstrations, strikes, and student occupations of campus buildings. Its | THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT 152 message was student empowerment as a tool for breaking the power of the establishment. “To believe is nothing/To act according to what you believe is everything”; “Any reform starts by refusal. Support this refusal.”2 These slogans appeared on posters students brandished during an eleven-day strike in January 1969; it had been called in opposition to the December 28, 1968, Israeli attack on Beirut International Airport.3 In their chronology of the events, Outlook reporters identified the Israeli attack as the catalyst for the strike, but “the frustration and anger that were expressed during the strike are feelings that have accumulated over the years, and that have been at the root of the past strike wave over AUB.”4 That strike wave had begun in March 1968 when students protested the administrative decision to not renew philosophy professor Sadiq al-c Azm’s contract; it accelerated in late spring 1968 in reaction to Lebanese and Jordanian military actions against Palestinian fedayeen groups operating in their territories. This era of student protest did not end until the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975. Distilled down to its basic elements, the political platform dominating the student protests in these years laid out the characteristics of the groups students needed to fight against, and those they felt could initiate the comprehensive changes required to dramatically improve conditions both in the Arab world and on campus. Reactionary governments such as those in Jordan, Lebanon, and the United States came to represent, along with AUB’s administration, everything the students did not want to be: lackeys of imperialism and thus obstacles to change generated from the bottom. In contrast, the students anointed the Palestinian fedayeen with all they wanted to achieve: the return of Palestine and the transformation of the Arab regimes from bottom to top. The former could only perpetuate oppression, while the latter represented freedom of action, of speech, and of political influence, all in the service of those who were disadvantaged by imperialist policies. This worldview required students to intensify the discussion about the parameters of freedom already broached by the students’ activist predecessors in the Arab nationalist era and to pose new questions about the nature of authority wielded on the AUB campus. More so than in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the student protestors demanded that the administration accept the intersection of freedom of speech, freedom of action, and educational growth as the existential element of their AUB education. The students explicitly questioned the administration’s authority to demarcate and narrow their desired experiential education. In the process, students used the same actions and vocabulary to fight both governmental and AUB “GUERRILLA U” | 153 authority simultaneously. Their desire to overthrow oppressive and imperialist governments matched their desire to participate in campus administrative decision making. Halim Barakat found in a survey of students at Lebanese universities in the early 1970s that the leftist and progressive students wanted “to change the whole network of structures and value orientations ,” with the demand that humanity be liberated from “domination, exploitation, and deprivation.”5 By so articulating their vision of the future, students described an irreparable break between the old, failed authority figures and those leading a movement of socioeconomic and political revolution both on and off campus. These actions came to fruition in 1968, when students initiated a movement to intervene in policies proposed...