I did not come up with the headline above, but had read an article by author Jill Lepore on the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the article, Lepore talks about the disappearance of intellectuals, or what she likes to call the “intellectuals of people”, those who aim their writing at the general public.
If I ask anybody about the last time they read an academic, scientific or research paper or article, I am sure not many will come up with a quick answer. Most people have not read something like this in a very long time. So what is the reason for this?
Lepore says there are many reasons behind this, the main one being that the academic system limits professors’ activities to university and academic journals. Another reason, Lepore says, is that these academics write without expecting any financial return, and for that reason — and I am still quoting the writer — the intellectuals of people now are journalists, who write for money.
Let me point it out here that the author is talking about American universities, not Arab ones — universities that are in residential neighbourhoods, without gates, with their libraries accessible to the public, having direct contact with the society, and meeting their needs. If this is the case with American universities, what would the writer say about Arab varsities?
When I was studying at an American university in the north of the state of New York, a professor once asked students at the Faculty of Engineering to select topics they would work on. I still remember some of the options, which included contributing to designing a missile warhead in a project of the US Department of Defence. The condition for participation in this project was to be an American.
Another option was to redesign machines at a glass factory in the state which suffered from rust after dipping the glass in acid tubs.
The other options were related to solving a problem at a factory and designing a device.
The students then worked on their chosen project. At the end of the academic year, the university journal published the results of the students’ work, reporting how far they had succeeded in their projects.
Our college was not the only one that used to do this. Other colleges, including the College of Computer Science, did programmes for the federal and local governments or companies, and the same was true of the colleges of management and electronics.
Thus, the universities are a source of knowledge and solutions for the business and defence establishments, and an inseparable part of the social fabric as they contribute to the development and progress of society.
There, I realised the connection between the universities and state institutions. Universities foster young ambitious minds that help find solutions to the problems of all institutions.
These institutions find a great reserve of minds in the university; minds that think about their problems and redesign things for the better. It is an exchange of experiences, information and money that gives both sides what they need.
In Qatar, we have a large number of universities covering all fields of knowledge, but we do not see results from them; they do not make any important research for society or state institutions that ask them to do so.
We suffer from many problems that require intervention by academic institutions to solve them. These problems include traffic jams, repeated breakdown of infrastructure projects, planning of towns, neighbourhoods and roads, and demographic changes.
Using available academic resources to study problems and find solutions to them is not a luxury but an absolute necessity.
If academic minds do not contribute to developing our society, why do they exist? Are they there only to teach inapplicable theories to students?
We have to remember that most successful ideas in the world have come from the minds of university students, including those that created Microsoft and Facebook, and we use the products and services of these companies without learning about their founders.
People look for the best ways to sort out their problems, forgetting that solving problems requires an investment of minds, therefore government institutions must stop relying heavily on consulting firms or buying solutions from abroad, and begin communicating with universities to activate scientific research in them.
Doing so requires legislation to provide that universities students be engaged in finding solutions to the problems of the community. These students are an intellectual resource of the nation, which will get drained if not used.
