Mohamed El Raai/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Khaled Dawoud, journalist, political operative, and adjunct professor at the American University in Cairo, speaks at a press conference in 2018.
The undergrads had done their homework. It was three weeks into the fall semester at the American University in Cairo (AUC), and adjunct professor Khaled Dawoud had asked his Mass Media Writing students to come prepared for a quiz on the day’s events. “The classroom will be like a newsroom in a newspaper,” he had written in the syllabus, “and I’m the editor-in-chief.” The deputy editor of the long-running newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly and spokesperson of a liberal political party, Dawoud has been a regular commentator in American outlets as well as an interpreter of U.S. politics to Arab audiences. But on that late-September day, Dawoud was absent and his students were growing agitated. They were tapping on their phones, something the professor forbade during class. The teaching assistant wasn’t sure why Dawoud was late. He never turned up to his 8:30 a.m. or his 10 a.m.
The students had made it to class on time, despite Cairo being heavily patrolled as authorities impeded budding protests against President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. They were shocked to learn that Dawoud was among the 3,635 Egyptians arrested in the September crackdown. He would spend the rest of the semester at Tora, Egypt’s notorious lockup known as Scorpion Prison, sleeping on the floor, sharing a cell with two others, and reading only occasional copies of the official state-run newspapers. Egypt’s National Security prosecutor would bring charges against Dawoud of “disseminating fake news,” “participating in a banned group,” and “misusing social media.” Dawoud’s lawyer, Mohamed Eissa, told me, “There is no proof of any of these charges till now.” The case highlights the challenges of teaching liberal arts, let alone journalism, in a country that bars free expression.
“The question is,” said Lisa Anderson, who served as the American University in Cairo’s president from 2011 to 2015, “do you want to use AUC to help in matters of academic freedom in Egypt and the region, or is AUC exceptional?”
In many ways, AUC is exceptional, a U.S.-style college with a long local history and a legacy of bold scholarship and influential alumni, from columnists Thomas L. Friedman and Nicholas Kristof (who received Arabic diplomas), to Egyptian ministers and senior officials. At the same time, AUC is contending with the very trends that are testing universities worldwide, notably a corporate culture of education and the pressure to produce students with “hard skills” rather than the more intangible qualities of the humanities. This has occurred alongside the dismantling of faculty governance and the erosion of tenure lines and thus of academic freedom (it’s tough to be outspoken if your job is term-limited).
Yet an American education is a commodity sought by international students and an important indicator in many careers. It’s no surprise then that myriad brand-name schools have opened up satellite branches in wealthy enclaves in the Persian Gulf, East Asia, and elsewhere, where freedoms are not as guaranteed as in their home institutions. Predictably, tensions between the culture of critical inquiry and dissent at higher-education outlets and suppression by despotic rulers have broken into the open, threatening the durability of these satellite campuses and the reputation of the institutions placing them around the world.
AUC also faces difficulties unique to Egypt. The pressure to expand and compete with the STEM labs of NYU Abu Dhabi and Georgetown University in Qatar is one reason that AUC left its quaint, century-old campus in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2009 for a $400 million suburban estate out in the Cairo desert; USAID provided funding. Since the move, Egypt has endured a clampdown on political rights after former General Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi overthrew Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, in the summer of 2013. For researchers and pupils, the risks are ever-evolving, and I experienced them from 2012 to 2017 as an editor at the university’s policy journal, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs.
Certain freedoms are only protected within the armored gates of the university. The perception of AUCians being upper-crust, out of touch with much of the country, is a common punch line, one that auteur Ahmed Abdallah foregrounds in his 2019 film Ext. Night, where the protagonist is often derided on the street as an AUC guy. But state repression nonetheless plagues the elites who study and teach there. Political scientist Emad Shahin, now a fellow at Georgetown, fled the country in 2015 when he faced a death sentence. Amr Hamzawy, also a political scientist who was elected to the Egyptian parliament in 2011, was forced to escape, too. That two distinguished faculty members were blacklisted by the government shows that the attack on free inquiry is causing a significant brain drain.
The disappearance of 28-year-old Giulio Regeni, an Italian graduate student and AUC visiting fellow, was particularly harrowing. He had last been seen on the fifth anniversary of the Arab Spring revolt, on January 25, 2016, en route to interview labor organizers. Days later, his brutalized body, with cigarette burns up and down, was found on a highway outside of Cairo. At the time, I was a visiting scholar in the same institute as Regeni, and—though the details were not yet fully reported—I was dismayed by the sluggishness of the university administration, and their incompetence in addressing security concerns. This callousness was captured in a tweet from the official @AUC account, remembering “Giulio Regeni, a visiting scholar at AUC, who passed away recently,” which was roundly condemned by faculty members, angry at how the administration was whitewashing the Egyptian government’s crime. (To this day, the government has yet to be held to account, and Italian authorities have asserted that Egyptian authorities tortured and murdered Regeni.) A month after his body was discovered, the interim university president at last issued a statement: “The death of Giulio will be long remembered by us and I sincerely hope that from this tragedy we, as an institution, can emerge even stronger and better.”
Had it? When I learned that Dawoud was in prison, I was determined to find out what AUC was doing to help him—and why he was incarcerated in the first place.
Francis J. Ricciardone, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Turkey, became president of the university in 2016. Though he hasn’t made any public statements about Dawoud and wasn’t immediately aware that Dawoud had been teaching two courses in the fall semester, Ricciardone assured me that he was following the case. “That’s the kind of thing where we make, let’s just say, we make quiet inquiries,” he told me. “We make quiet inquiries, and let our concerns be known, and we either get somewhere or we don’t.” He said neither he nor administration officials had attempted to visit Dawoud in prison, and declined to discuss specifics. (Dawoud’s attorney told me that the university provided the National Security prosecutor an affidavit attesting that he was a faculty member in good standing.)
Ricciardone emphasized the importance of keeping close relations with the Egyptian government, detailing a number of academic and research partnerships. It seemed to me, however, that a former ambassador could pick up the phone and express his concern to counterparts in the Egyptian government. But Ricciardone pushed back. “If you have any inclination to what the government of Egypt would consider political activism, we cannot protect you,” he said. “You just need to know that.”
Is there simply no place for a journalism department in the context of such unfettered repression?
Dawoud had offered undergrads a potential career path—and inadvertently presented the hazards of the job. A highly quotable analyst, he told The New York Times in April, as protests spread in Sudan and Algeria, “The power of the people has proved to be alive, and the desire to have a president who does not stay for life … The model we set in 2011 remains alive despite the tremendous efforts to crush and distort it.” But experts told me that the reason for his arrest was not his media hits but rather related to his participation in the Constitution Party, a liberal political grouping. The Sisi government sees any political organization as a threat.
For a time it was thought that the louder a critic’s voice was in Washington, the more protection they might have from arrest in their home country. “There’s no clear logic to who’s at risk and who’s not,” said Gasser Abdel-Razek of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and a longtime friend of Dawoud’s. “We’re all scared … No matter how high-profile or low-profile you are, it really doesn’t matter. We’re all possible prisoners in this country at the moment.”
Dawoud has been a regular contributor to the blogs of Washington think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Middle East Institute. But since he was a contributor, not a staffer of these organizations, petitioning on Dawoud’s behalf from those quarters has been lacking. And there are so many Egyptians in prison on political charges—tens of thousands according to watchdog groups—that high-level U.S. government advocacy on behalf of even a prominent and well-connected figure like Dawoud is rare.
As an undergraduate in the 1980s, Dawoud had been an editor of the Caravan, AUC’s student newspaper. In those pages, he featured opposition voices who wouldn’t appear elsewhere in the media. But this fall, the Caravan did not cover his arrest. There was only a brief statement from the dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, Nabil Fahmy, who served as interim foreign minister after the 2013 coup, in which he “expressed his deep concerns at the continued detention of colleague and adjunct professor Khaled Dawoud, and called on the authorities to work toward his release that he may resume his teaching duties and be reunited with his family as soon as possible.”
The university leadership, rather than publicly criticizing the government, has prioritized working within the confines of Sisi’s Egypt. Ricciardone described the choice as follows: “If you want to operate in a foreign country, you gotta understand what the rules are … and do the best you can within the challenging context you’re in, or don’t do it. Stay outside and write about a place from outside. I choose to be inside.” So did Dawoud, and now he’s truly on the inside.
