Violence, underfunding threaten Iraq's universities

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http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5773963&cKey=1115810443000

AMMAN (Reuters) - Iraq's once-reputable university system risks sliding into chaos due to a lack of investment and violence against academics, the author of a new study on the system said on Wednesday.

Jairam Reddy, the head of the U.N. International Leadership Institute, said Iraq needed to urgently set up a commission representative of all population groups to decide on how universities should be managed in the post-Saddam Hussein era.

"Understandably, the focus now is on security, but one of the key elements for reconstruction is higher level skills. Iraqi universities 20 years ago were some of the best, and there is a reservoir of culture and history to be tapped," he told Reuters in an interview.

Iraq has 20 universities and 47 technical colleges that have educated many of the Arab's world's leading professionals and remain a source of secular thought, even after the Baath party took power in 1968 and imposed doctrinaire thinking on the system.