A conference in Tunisia has explored new opportunities and threats for universities in countries transformed by the recent Arab Spring. The event was organised by the Scholars at Risk Network and the Center for Dialogues, both based in New York University, and  convened on February 21-22 at the University of Manouba’s faculty of letters, arts and humanities.

The venue was chosen in part to express solidarity with an institution routinely targeted by Islamist militants. The dean of the faculty, Habib Kazdaghli, is due for trial for allegedly assaulting two veiled students who came into his office — a prosecution that Scholars at Risk has suggested “lacks merit’’.

Beyond that, said Scholars at Risk executive director Robert Quinn, the conference was designed to “look to the future and see what can be done in new constitutions to support academic freedom’’ and to consider “what higher education institutions can do to contribute to society’’, for example by acting as “a bridge between different sectors, rather than an ivory tower or oasis’’.

The event, The University and the Nation: Safeguarding Higher Education in Tunisia and Beyond, brought together speakers across North Africa, France, Turkey and the US, although debate focused on the three countries where regime change offered particular challenges.

The new Egyptian constitution protects institutional autonomy but not academic freedom, while the draft Tunisian constitution does the opposite, with Article 30 stating that “academic freedom and freedom of scientific research shall be guaranteed’’ and that “the state shall furnish all means necessary for the advancement of academic work and scientific research’’. Libya has not yet reached the drafting stage for a post-Gaddafi era constitution.

Jonathan Fanton, chair of the Scholars at Risk Network and former NYU president, made the case for universities’ crucial role in democratic and economic development. “Democratic habits must be learned, which means they must be taught. To consider how important this is, consider that bigotry, intolerance and violence may also be learned and taught. No one is born hating anyone else. That is something we learn when the educational process is perverted and people are taught not how to think but what to think — not to seek knowledge but to accept whatever they are told,” said Fanton.

Tunisia-born Mustapha Tlili, director of the Center for Dialogues, warned of “distressing signs of (a) theocratic ‘curtain’ slowly descending on the countries of the so-called Arab Spring — countries which had briefly experienced hope through their insurrections against secular dictatorships’’.

Yet Mohamed Jaoua, professor of mathematics at the University of Nice-Sophia-Antipolis in France, looked forward to the creation of a “Euro-Mediterranean space’’ in which to share knowledge, as “the greatest contribution that science could bring to consolidating democracy in the countries of the south now undergoing change’’.

The Tunisian intellectual diaspora in France, he added, had played a major role in the revolution and the transitional government that led to the country’s first democratic elections. Such “scientific diasporas of the South’’ would remain crucial in bringing democratic values back to their native lands.

(Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education)