A plan for educational reform written by teaching staff at Sudan’s oldest and largest public university, the University of Khartoum, calls for Sudan’s universities to be made independent of the central government’s control.
Along with such formal calls for reform, students and professors say they now have more academic and personal freedom on Sudanese campuses, because government loyalists no longer dominate academic administration and student unions.
The formal proposal for educational reform is part of a program for comprehensive restructuring in Sudan published by the University of Khartoum Teaching Staff Initiative, a group of academics that formed in December 2018, in the first days of the popular movement in Sudan that led to the removal of the government of Omar al-Bashir.
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The policy proposals published by the group cover a wide range of issues, including economic reform; energy and mining; infrastructure (encompassing water, irrigation, roads, construction and information technology); encouraging outside investment; and education, including higher education.
“These are proposals for short-term and long-term solutions, to help the transitional government identify and deal with urgent problems,” said Akram Elkhalifa, who is dean of the faculty of architecture at the University of Khartoum and one of about 650 participants in the teaching staff initiative.
This is good news, and I hope real progress is made in establishing effective independence for Sudan’s universities and for the system of higher education itself.
That said, I recall all too well the initial optimism experienced in Egypt after February 2011 when, for a brief moment, the grip of Egypt’s security apparatus on universities was reduced and the election of deans and presidents by their university peers was re-introduced. This moment was, alas, short-lived.