Images of Development Egyptian Engineers in Search of Industry

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Images of Development

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018 with funding from The Arcadia Fund

https://archive.org/details/imagesofdevelopmOOclem

Clement Henry Moore

Images of Development Egyptian Engineers in Search of Industry

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

© 1980 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in VIP Times Roman by Graphic Composition Inc. and printed and bound by The Alpine Press Inc. in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Moore, Clement Henry. Images of development. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Engineers—Egypt. 2. Industry and state— Egypt. I. Title. TA157.M59 338.962 80-17478 ISBN 0-262-13161-7

This book is dedicated to Jehanne and Ryder, who were born with it, and Kristin, who bore with it most of the way.

€844420

Contents

Preface viii Note on Transliteration

xi

1 The Practice of Theoretical Modernization Nasser and the Development Syndrome

1

Engineering as an Academic Import Substitute Professionalization Stratification

3

10

13

The Rationalization of Statecraft

I

1

16

ENGINEERS AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT 2 The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession The Foundations of Professional Identity

23

The Rise of Professional Organizations Professionalism among Engineers

27

36

3 Selected Affinities with Nasserism

42

The Inflated Prestige of Engineering

42

Nasser’s Corporatist Practices Sultanic Socialism

47

54

4 The Politics of Technical Education The Politics of Degree Inflation

62

66

Toward an Anomic Division of Labor

73

5 The Politics of Research and Development The Politics of Science

84

86

Science Satrapies and Networks Technological Dependence

II

21

92

97

ENGINEERS AND SOCIAL CHANGE

6 The Reproduction of a Bourgeoisie? In Search of a Bourgeoisie The Structure of Opportunity

109

110 117

The Political Economy of Sultanic Socialism The New Lumpenbourgeoisie

120

126

7 Sexual Equality amid Professional Impoverishment The Women’s Class Origins

132

Adaptation to the Profession

133

131

Contents

Vll

Patterns of Discrimination

135

Women and Professionalization

139

III ENGINEERS AND POLITICAL ORDER 8 The Politics of Technical Consultation Nile Control and Spillover

147

149

Authoritarian Politics and Professional Authority

9 Patrons and Technocrats

166

The Recruitment of Technocrats Technocrats in Power

156

170

178

10 Bureaucrats, Experts, and Political Organization The Role Conflict of Engineer-Bureaucrats

192

In Further Search of Forms of Association

196

189

Professional Commitment, Clientelism, and Political Change

Conclusion

205

Methodological Appendix Notes 217 Index 245

211

201

Preface

Whatever light this limited study may shed on Egyptian politics is de¬ rived from the reflections and confidences that technocrats, retired or still active in their country’s political life, were willing to share with me. Apart from Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil and a few of his engi¬ neer colleagues who are cited in the text, they shall remain anony¬ mous. Most of them spoke freely in the context of my study, though the educated public’s memories of the Nasserist period were suffi¬ ciently vivid to impose caution and circumspection in normal private as well as public discourse. I conducted my fieldwork during the two years prior to the October War of 1973, before Anwar Sadat’s partial efforts to liberalize Nasser’s system could allay some of the suspicion surrounding political research. Indeed both the prevailing climate and the subject dictated an indirect approach to politics rather than a direct focus on the political elite, party, Parliament, or some other aspect of Egypt’s elusive political processes. At the suggestion of Morroe Berger, I selected the most politically influential profession. It offered a substantive focus, embodied in os¬ tensibly apolitical institutions yet integrated into the country’s politics. The focus proved to be fruitful because it defined an aspect of my informants’ identities that they were happy to discuss with an outsider yet which naturally extended into matters of more direct concern to the political scientist. I am principally indebted to these informants for any value my indirect approach may have. The group included sixteen ac¬ tive or retired ministers, twenty-five directors and undersecretaries of state, and many academics. I especially appreciated the help of Dr. Ahmad al-Erian, professor of materials engineering at Cairo University and secretary general of the Arab Engineers Federation, and Dr. Hadi Abu Akeel, formerly assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ain Shams University. In addition to their substantive insights about engineering education, each provided precious documentation. Dr. al-Erian made available the complete collections of the Magallat al-Muhandisin (Engineers Maga¬ zine) and the Journal of the Egyptian Society of Engineering. Dr. Akeel allowed me to use the data from his survey of Egyptian engineering gradu¬ ates and students, which is described in the methodological appendix. I am also grateful for the use in Cairo of the libraries of Al-Ahram, the American University in Cairo, the Egyptian Gazette, the Geographic So¬ ciety, the People’s Assembly, the Society of Egyptian Engineers, the So-

Preface

IX

ciety for Legislation, Statistics, and Political Economy, and the Syndicate of the Engineering Professions. Magda Bishey, Ali Darwish, and my for¬ mer students at the American University in Cairo, Shahira Tarraf, Hoda Zaki, and especially Mervat Hatem, provided invaluable research assis¬ tance. At the University of Michigan Edgar Taylor did much of the survey data processing and analysis, while Susan Gibson completed the task and pro¬ cessed some of the other data used in chapter 5. My colleague, Lutz Erbring, read through an earlier version of chapter 10, offered cogent criti¬ cism, and helped me streamline the multivariate analyses; however, he should not be held responsible for any methodological shortcomings in the final version. Other colleagues who were especially helpful include Bob Axelrod, A1 Meyer, Roy Pierce, Serge Taylor, and Jack Walker, all of whom read and commented on the manuscript. The most informed criticism came from John Waterbury, whose re¬ search has paralleled mine in Egypt as in the Maghreb a decade earlier. Robert Springborg has also shared research notes and encouraged me with his reactions to earlier drafts of most of the chapters. Kirk Beattie and Steven Whiting assisted me intelligently in the final editing and indexing. I am also grateful to Ernest Gellner, Trevor Gordon-Somers, Guy Hermet, Albert Hourani, Heino Kopietz, Remy Leveau, Robert Mabro, Roger Owen, Amal Rassam, Philippe Schmitter, Ceres Wissa-Wassef, and Wil¬ liam Zartman for discussions that helped to crystallize some of my inter¬ pretations of the Egyptian materials. Especially instructive and convivial was a summer at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1974. Grants from the American Research Center in Egypt made it possible for me to take leave of the American University in Cairo and devote full time to fieldwork in 1972-1973 and then to revisit Egypt in 1977. Awards from the Social Science Reserach Council and the Earhart Foundations, supplemented by a University of Michigan Rackham Faculty Fellowship, enabled me to analyze data and begin writing in the summer of 1975. The book took shape the following spring and summer in Paris, where the Centre d’Etudes des Relations Internationales of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques presented an ideal environment. A Fulbright lec¬ tureship to Algeria during the ensuing academic year provided greatly appreciated time to complete most of the first draft. At the University of Michigan, in addition to the Rackham grant I re¬ ceived research and secretarial assistance from the Center for Near Eastern

Preface

X

and North African Studies and the Center for Research on Economic De¬ velopment. Typing and retyping were collective enterprises, but special thanks are due to Carole Wolkan, who did much of it, and to Kathleen Wilson and Jayne Owen, who coordinated the staffs of the two centers, respectively, and enabled me to meet my deadlines. Jane McCormick pa¬ tiently revised and completed the graphic displays.

I

Note on Transliteration

The American National Standard System for the Romanization of Ar¬ abic was used in the transliteration. For Arabic names, all diacritics have been omitted as well as the 'ayin and hamza. Technical terms have been transliterated phonetically with all diacritics included. Widely known names are transliterated as they are found in the Western press. Authors’ names and titles are retained as printed. Place names have not been trans¬ literated.

Images of Development

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization The Free Officers who seized power on July 23, 1952, had no blueprint for modernizing Egyptian society; if Nasser is to be believed, they had no inten¬ tion even of ruling it.1 Yet they undertook agrarian reform within six weeks of the coup and took decisive steps before the end of the year to build the High Dam and set up a base in heavy industry.2 By 1954 Egypt was set on a course that other third-world revolutions would join: capital-intensive indus¬ trialization from above, guided by a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime.3 It is not the purpose of this book to describe this course once more but rather to underline its curious convergence with theories of modernization that were once fashionable among American scholars of the third world and to criticize the theories in light of the Egyptian experience.4 Nasser and the Development Syndrome In retrospect the political design of corporatism, socialism, and statism which crystallized in Egypt by the 1960s can be seen to correspond to the “devel¬ opment syndrome" of differentiation-equality-capacity posited, with minor variations, by numerous students of political modernization.5 By differentia¬ tion here is meant “the process of progressive separation and specialization of roles" that is supposed to happen in societies as they grow more modern.6 In abstract functionalist vocabulary the concept is notoriously ambiguous, but concretely it denotes the rise of a professional division of labor thought by Emile Durkheim to characterize modern industrial society. In his De la division du travail social Durkheim was projecting a harmonious, function¬ alist view of industrial society in response to Marxian visions of class con¬ flict. The professions constituted a principal corporate pillar of the organi¬ cally ordered society, reflecting growing complexity and specialization yet facilitating greater integration. In this context differentiation thus denotes a multiplicity of self-defining professional “corporations," spontaneously gen¬ erating further subdivisions integrated by virtue of their proximity to one another.7 Despite Durkheim’s (not altogether unquestionable) liberal creden¬ tials, his vision of such a society slips easily into a corporatist model that an authoritarian regime may impose.8 Such a model became part of Egypt’s de¬ velopment syndrome and a focal point for political activity among universityeducated elites, organized into professional syndicates. The second element of the syndrome, the equality that is supposed to be¬ come more prevalent as a society becomes more modern, is even more elu¬ sive than the apparently antithetical concept of differentiation. Common cit-

2

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

izenship, equality before the law, equitable income distribution, and a classless or at least highly fluid society are some aspects of equality men¬ tioned by modernization theorists, but the essential one seems to be an “equality of initial opportunity” guaranteed by citizenship, achievement norms, and a system of universal education.9 Most Marxists would consider such equality a mere fig leaf covering an emergent bourgeois domination that inevitably accompanies and distorts modernization. Nasser’s socialism, how¬ ever, may be better understood as a series of preemptive moves against cate¬ gories of potential political adversaries, limiting their property and curtailing their privileges to weaken them, than as a Marxian stratagem for building a classless society. On the positive side, his regime’s egalitarian thrust was aimed primarily at furthering an equality of initial opportunity. The third element, capacity, cannot be defined simply but what develop¬ ment theorists usually have in mind are some of the changes introduced by modem bureaucracy, as depicted by Max Weber, such as an enhanced scope of government, its greater effectiveness, and greater rationality in decision making. Alternatively, a creative capacity generating power and control over bureaucracies is sometimes emphasized.10 Nasser stove on all these counts to enhance capacity, as reflected in his concerns for administrative revolution and the right man in the right position, a frequent reliance on technocrats to run his ministries, and continual efforts to build up an official mother political organization. For better or worse, Egyptian bureaucracy never measured up to Max Weber’s Prussian ideal, nor did the July Revolution ever spawn a real vanguard party. Independently, however, of the effectiveness and formal or substantive rationality of the Egyptian state machinery, Nasser’s trajectory entailed rationalization, in the sense of extending the scope of government over virtually all economic, social, and cultural as well as political activities that seemed amenable to control. In this respect his bureaucratic-authoritarian regime differed from those imposed earlier, as in prewar Eastern Europe or Latin America, as well as those fending off more differentiated, mobilized societies, whether in fascist Italy or contemporary Chile. After a fashion, then, he practiced the theoretical modernization signified by the development syndrome. Corporatism, a socialism of sorts, and statism nurtured by technocrats matured in the 1960s, and these features politically reflected the abstract sociological themes of Durkheim and Weber assimilated by a school of development theorists in response to Marx. Yet the curious intellectual affinity between this American school and Nasserism (as well as a number of other bureaucratic-authoritarian experiments in the third world)

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

3

did not rest primarily on a shared ideology of anti-Marxism but rather on a heuristic need to separate modernization from industrialization." In situations of delayed industrialization there are, by definition, relatively few modern industrial means of production worth studying or transforming. But modern¬ ization may proceed independently of industrialization when it is defined as the creation of specialized roles characteristic of industrial societies. The principal mechanism of modernization then becomes education, and the so¬ cialization of a broad-based elite takes precedence over the socialization of the means of production. The new roles, indeed, may substitute for produc¬ tive processes. In the tradition of Durkheim, educated elites may then be viewed as profes¬ sionals elaborating a new division of labor through specialization and func¬ tional differentiation, moving society from a mechanically to an organically integrated order. Society may continue to modernize independently of indus¬ trialization as long as professionals proliferate, quantitatively and qualita¬ tively, emulating the professional consciousness of their colleagues in indus¬ trial societies. So also in a Weberian perspective they may be viewed as having special technical and organizational skills to contribute to a blossom¬ ing bureaucracy, a new state order. And in response to Marx they may be seen as a free-floating intelligentsia, possibly imbued with an ideal interest in industrialization but tied neither to traditional strata nor to a modem entrepre¬ neurial bourgeoisie.12 On this view education will have liberated them from traditional social connections, yet there will be little bourgeoisie to join, given the small size of the industrial base. A burgeoning new middle class of university graduates will, contrary to Marx, suggest increasing social mobil¬ ity and equality as long as education is open to everybody.13

Engineering as an Academic Import Substitute Nasser’s Egypt offers a peculiarly fertile field for testing these assumptions as well as for illustrating the practice of theoretical modernization. Few coun¬ tries have educated higher proportions of their populations for such little in¬ dustrialization. Already in the 1820s and 1830s Muhammad Ali was attempt¬ ing to build up a modem industrial infrastructure and to train Egyptians to occupy the roles corresponding to it. For reasons beyond the khedive’s con¬ trol the industrial effort failed, but the trained Egyptians returned from Eu¬ rope to replace the foreign staff of the technical schools that he had launched. If import-substituting industries amounted to little in the nineteenth cen-

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

4

tury, academic import substitution acquired a momentum of its own much earlier than in most other third world countries. Cairo’s engineering and med¬ ical schools, for instance, have almost continuous histories, despite numer¬ ous reorganizations, dating back to the Muhammad Ali period.14 Although resumed, finally, on a modest scale after World War I, industrialization could not keep up with the educational system, which expanded exponentially under nationalist pressure. By 1952 university graduates had already out¬ stripped Egypt’s narrow industrial base, and pressures for further educational expansion were irresistable. Since the educated elite was such a self-sustain¬ ing achievement, it was perhaps only natural in the end for Nasser’s practice to converge with theories that made it the dynamo of modernization. The extent of the disproportion between the numbers of Egyptian univer¬ sity graduates and the country’s industrial infrastructure may be illustrated by comparisons withx>ther countries. Though in general there is a relationship between a country’s annual output of graduates and its degree of industriali¬ zation, as measured by per capita energy consumption and other indicators, Egypt had proportionately twice as many university students as Britain in 1960, as Malcolm Kerr observed.15 Egypt remained a highly deviant case in 1970, supporting over twice as many, among third world countries, as the industrial infrastructure would have predicted. The composite scattergram in figure 1.1 shows that it is surpassed in this respect only by the Philippines and Peru. These data confirm Egypt’s head start in academic import substi¬ tution. Egypt’s recent past may in fact be the future, at least in this respect, of many developing countries. The overproduction of university graduates is hardly unique to Egypt, but Egypt provides one of the most mature illustra¬ tions of its effects. This study focuses on Egyptian engineers rather than university graduates in general because the roles for which engineers are trained are closer to the industrial means of production than those of other university graduates. While exemplifying modernization, they consequently also anticipate indus¬ trialization and suggest possible relationships between the two processes. In the Egyptian context, moreover, this segment of the educated elite offers the fairest illustration of the practice of theoretical modernization. Under Nasser they acquired sufficient numbers, prestige, and strategic positions in the po¬ litical-administrative elite to permit one to test the propositions about profes¬ sionalization, stratification, and rationalization of the state apparatus associ¬ ated with modernization theory. Indeed the sheer growth of the profession, relative to industrialization, was

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

Students per 1,000 Pop.

Energy consumption per capita (kilograms of coal equivalent) R2 = 0.31 (n = 48) Figure 1.1 Students Per Capita by Energy Consumption Per Capita, 1970.

5

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

6

staggering. From an output of a mere 161 graduates in 1945, the numbers tripled over each of the three succeeding decades.16 Among third-world coun¬ tries in 1970, per capita energy consumption predicted just under half the variance in the propositions of the population studying engineering.17 Engi¬ neering education in fact seemed, at least quantitatively, to bear a closer re¬ lationship to industrial infrastructure than did higher education in general, suggesting that academic import substitution is less volatile in the more tech¬ nical fields. But Egypt was clearly out of line. Figure 1.2 shows that for Egypt to have become normal—fitting the regression line, given its level of energy consumption—it would have had to eliminate more than two-thirds of its engineering students. Though such norms ought not to be taken seriously, Egyptian sources in¬ dependently confirmed that too many engineers were being produced to be properly absorbed into the economy (though like all other graduates they were guaranteed government jobs). In 1963 an interministerial manpower planning committee projected from inflated estimates presented by govern¬ ment agencies and public sector companies that Egypt would annually require eleven hundred engineering graduates until 1980.18 In fact, over five thousand were annually graduating by the early 1970s. Comparative time series data for the years 1955-1975 also suggested that Egypt was overproducing engi¬ neers. Data were available for the United States, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Mexico, and Sweden. While engineering education tended almost everywhere except in energy-wasting America to expand more rapidly than energy consumption, Egypt in the early sixties produced the largest increases in enrollment, controlling for increases in energy consumption (figure 1.3). After 1964 per capita energy consumption actually diminished, temporarily, while engineering education continued its steady expansion—interrrupted only slightly by the June War and ensuing student demonstrations. While Egypt’s progress was not as spectacular in the following decade, it still had half as many more engineering students per unit of energy consumed in 1975 as its nearest competitor, Mexico. The growing numbers of engineers not only illustrated but amplified the disproportion in Egypt between university graduates and industrial infrastructure. Together with medicine and pharmacology, however, engineering retained high prestige even after Egyptian industrialization efforts faltered in the mid 1960s. Thus not only were there sufficient numbers of engineers for them to be viewed as a complex profession, but they also maintained the requisite status and strategic positions to be a principal component of the new middle

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

Engineering students per 10,000 Pop.

Energy consumption per capita (kilograms of coal equivalent) R2 = 0.48 (n = 42)

Figure 1.2 Engineering Students Per Capita by Energy Consumption Per Capita, 1970.

7

8

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

Figure 1.3 Engineering Students per Thousands of Metric Tons of Coal Equivalent Consumed in Selected Countries, 1955-1975. Sources: UNESCO Statistical Data on Engineering Education, Office of Statistics of UNESCO, Unesco House, Paris, December 9-13, 1968.

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

9

class and potential rationalizers, enhancing the capacity of the state appara¬ tus. The focus on engineers therefore permits a testing of propositions related to social stratification and rationalization of the state as well as to profession¬ alization. This study is divided into three parts which respectively analyze the engi¬ neers as professionals, as members of a new middle class, or state bourgeoi¬ sie, and as agents of technical rationality who may enhance state capacity. Each of these identities corresponds to one of the three dimensions projected by the development syndrome. As professionals, engineers may be envi¬ sioned as agents of differentiation, exemplifying a process of professionali¬ zation that is supposed to characterize the transition to modem, organically ordered society. Part I tests this important dimension of theoretical moderni¬ zation by assessing the extent to which the engineers actually measured up to the canons of professionalism adumbrated in the functionalist model of professions. In a similar vein, part II analyzes their connections with Egypt’s class structure, to test the view that modernization is furthering an equality of initial opportunity, or greater social mobility. In part III their contributions to the state’s capacity to handle complex technical issues are explored. This approach to Egypt—and to modernization theory—is admittedly unorthodox and possibly presumptuous. Were engineers less central to Egyp¬ tian public life, the procedure adopted here would not be intellectually ten¬ able. It would have been necessary, instead, to study a variety of professions, to analyze class structure in other ways, and to draw on broader samples of the political elite, defined in terms of their positions, reputations, or effective influence, to study capacity. But if modernization, as distinct from industrial¬ ization, is defined as creating the specialized roles chracteristic of industrial societies, then the training of engineers may be identified with modernization per se. In Egypt, moreover, substantial numbers of engineers acquired stra¬ tegic positions, as if anticipating rapid advances in industrialization. They were in fact a weightier component of the political-administrative elite after 1967 than any other single category of university-trained people, including graduates of the military academy. It might still be argued on theoretical grounds, however, that engineers cannot reveal societal tendencies with respect to professionalization, stratifi¬ cation, and rationalization. In industrial societies, after all, they do not con¬ stitute a profession that is susceptible of as sharp a functional definition as physicians or lawyers. Their class status also seems ambiguous: engineers range in position from top-level manager to glorified skilled worker or, in a

10

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

Marxian perspective, from bourgeois to proletarian if they are not, as pure engineer-technologist, altogether buried in the forces of production.19 And as putative rationalizers in the tradition of Thorsten Veblen,20 few engineers ac¬ tually become technocrats without somehow acquiring other financial or man¬ agerial skills unrelated to engineering. Nor do they seem especially suited by their training to serve as administrators or bureaucrats; there is no evidence that the technical training that Max Weber required of his ideal type bears any relation to engineering. At best, the graduates of certain technical insti¬ tutes may in some industrial societies be favored as an elite corps operating parts of the state machinery.21 In societies of delayed industrialization, however, engineers may acquire exaggerated identities with respect to profession, class, and political-admin¬ istrative power precisely because the infrastructure making them engineers in industrial societies is lacking. In Egypt they illustrate the processes of professionalization, class formation, and rationalization suggested by mod¬ ernization theory and practiced in the Nasserist triptyque of corporatism-socialism-statism. In examining the identities assumed by Egyptian engineers, one can test the theories, to see whether modernization in the shape of increases in the numbers of engineers has been accompanied by greater professional differentiation, more equality of initial opportunity, and enhanced state capacity.

Professionalization Durkheim was no less foreign to Egypt than the more arcane engineering specializations, but corporations of sorts had existed at least in name almost until the turn of the century, and by this time the modem professions began to organize.22 Law and particularly medicine offered a functionalist model of professions that Egyptian engineers could emulate. The model “views profes¬ sions as ‘communities’ held together by certain values and norms shared by all members of the profession” and inculcated by long periods of formal train¬ ing. The typical profession is valued by society, and its members enjoy ca¬ reers in it for life and “tend to value the approval of their peers above that of outsiders.”23 In fact, engineers in industrial societies do not measure up to these functionalist canons as well as lawyers or physicians, for two reasons. However functional for industry, they are not usually held in high esteem; instead, perhaps in an unconsciously Marxian reflex, they are expelled from the prestigious superstructure to the means of production—to be rehabilitated

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

11

as managers or even scientists but not as engineers. They seldom enjoy a lifelong identification with their professional corps because technology is constantly changing, infecting the profession with the cancer of obsoles¬ cence. In rapidly changing fields it may be hard to systematize some body of applied knowledge for lifetime use. In industrial societies the applied engi¬ neering sciences are evolving so rapdily that engineers have in common less training, not to mention degrees, licenses, and the like, than members of the more established professions. But in societies such as Egypt, where industrialization has been delayed while higher education has flourished, the university diploma may suffice to bind the engineer to his profession for life. It is also likely to be a relatively prestigious degree if the society is dominated by a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime bent on industrialization from above. Ironically, too, academic import substitution may neutralize some of the effects of technological obsolescence by freezing fragments of applied knowledge in static university curricula. There may be a certain interest on the part of an authoritarian regime in fostering or perpetuating an array of professional corps, if only to occupy political space and distract university graduates from more subversive forms of activity. In Egypt professional organizations in fact became the principal vehicle for signifying, if not mobilizing, the support of the new middle class. Egyptian engineers were organized as a corporate body several years be¬ fore the Free Officers seized power. Within the third world Egypt enjoyed a head start in establishing an engineering profession. Ancient traditions of pyramid building must be discounted, but Muhammad Ali established the Egyptian Polytechnical School with the help of French Saint-Simoniens as early as 1836, and it survived almost continuously in different locations, reorganized by Egyptian, British, and Swiss engineers.24 Modem university schools of engineering were almost fully Egyptianized by the end of the Sec¬ ond World War. Already in 1920 a fully Egyptianized professional society was launched, and a professional syndicate achieved recognition in 1946. Significantly, too, the professional syndicates were among the very few structures of the ancien regime to be preserved by the July Revolution. The study of engineers may display corporatist mechanisms at work, regulating organic solidarity, or rather controlling it from above. The professional pol¬ itics of the engineers turn out to be more interesting than those of other groups because the regime’s stress on industrialization propelled them to the top of the professional pecking order. Consequently it was more difficult to regulate them than most other professions. In fact the Syndicate of Egyptian

12

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

Engineers was the one professional syndicate to defy all efforts of socialist reorganization during the Nasser era, even if it could not measure up to the old-fashioned functionalist ideal of self-regulation. Professionalization, however, was superificial. Asserting professional identity was a first step in assimilating the foreign roles associated with en¬ gineering, but the functionalist model had been derived from other profes¬ sions more or less successfully grafted on the peripheral society, not from engineering as practiced in industrial societies. This study explores the limits, at least in connection with engineering, of differentiation viewed as a mod¬ ernization process occurring within an educated elite independently of indus¬ trialization. Chapters 4 and 5 focus upon problems, respectively, of technical education and applied scientific research. Academic import substitution could hardly give rise to an organically coordinated set of specializations. The uni¬ versity factories instead acquired a momentum independent of economic needs. Egypt produced a plethora of university-level engineers rather than the applied technicians desperately needed to staff extant industry. Paradoxi¬ cally, too, the sultanic political system in which all power in theory was concentrated in Nasser’s hands was incapable of coping with the problem even though political leaders were much aware of it. Research and development, too, became a political football in the hands of Nasser’s lieutenants. Despite substantial investments in manpower and labo¬ ratories, the government could not coordinate the research efforts of its own agencies or even define priorities. Meanwhile its imports of capital-intensive technology probably intensified Egypt’s technological dependence and back¬ wardness by generating demand for further imports at the expense of locally developed technology or adaptations of foreign technology. Possibly, too, the standards of academic research were declining or at least diverging from in¬ ternational standards, especially in rapidly changing fields. Engineers wed¬ ded to the fixed bodies of knowledge associated with the functionalist model of professions might tend to minimize these issues of technological depen¬ dence and obsolescence, but professors and research scientists were expected to keep up with international standards. To the extent that they were failing, deprofessionalization rather than professionalization was occurring. Engineering provides the critical test of such processes because its profes¬ sional criteria most closely reflect the world’s industrial progress. Other professions transposed to societies of delayed industrialization are less sub¬ ject to international references. Lawyers, for instance, need not keep up with

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

13

techniques derived from foreign cultures. Not even the medical, pharmaceu¬ tical, and other science-based professions are under the same pressures, given the indiviual or abstractly scientific rather than collective stakes of their re¬ spective arts. New medical techniques may be a luxury, but industrializing countries cannot afford not to understand the latest technologies relevent to their economic and military choices. Technological needs prompted regimes such as that of Muhammad Ali to import specialized skills, launching mod¬ ernization in the first place. Thus engineering offers the most strategic illus¬ tration of Egypt’s professional development.

Stratification In Egypt engineering acquired sufficient prestige and numbers during the Nasser era to be a useful testing ground for propositions about stratification as well as professionalization. By 1967 over 40 percent of the top 646 ad¬ ministrators and managers of the civil service and public sector had an engi¬ neering background.25 In general, industrialization from above under bureau¬ cratic-authoritarian auspices has propelled engineers, more than economists, lawyers, or other skill groups, into positions of administrative and mangerial authority. They may appear to be the principal stratum of a new middle class ideally committed to industrialization at the expense of any existing class structures. But analysis of the pool of engineers from which the technocrats were drawn may contribute to a more critical view of the regime’s political economy. In what senses might the regime be reproducing a bourgeoisie, as Marxists usually argue? Was professionalism in fact an ideological stance disguising class interests which might be the real basis of the apparently exaggerated professional identity and cohesion achieved in corporatist regimes? Since Durkheim’s analysis of organic solidarity was designed to mute class conflict, professionalism might from a Marxist perspective be construed as an aspect of bourgeois ideology. Marxists, however, do not agree on the class position of engineers in industrial societies. Communist regimes place them in a spe¬ cial stratum, that of the “technical intelligentsia,” rather than in a class.26 French Communist party ideologists, perhaps anxious to expand their con¬ stituency, have recently placed them among the ‘quasi workers” who are an¬ timonopolist and potentially proletarian.27 Following Gramsci, on the other hand, Nicos Poulantzas identifies them with the bourgeoisie because “they

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

14

realize the political and ideological relationships of subordination of the working class to capital (the division between intellectual and manual labor), and this aspect of their class determination is the dominant one.”28 In Egypt, too, engineers may marginally contribute to those political and ideological relationships by serving the regime, which employs the large ma¬ jority of them. Subjectively, moreover, they aspire to be bourgeois, if they are not already so by virtue of their family origins. Yet Marxist analyses of administrative bourgeoisies in such regimes are not altogether convincing. It is usually assumed that the state is fulfilling some set of bourgeois functions, such as creating industry or collaborating with forces of international capital¬ ism in a variety of ways and that those who run or control the state are therefore members of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois functions may be so elastic that any state will qualify unless it is in turn run (at least on paper) by a party of the “correct” Marxian orthodoxy. The notion of an administrative bourgeoisie then becomes pure polemic, and it is usually not even clear what kinds of relationships with the state qualify for membership in the hated club.29 In keeping with the spirit of Marx, the concept of an administrative bourgeoisie should perhaps be restricted to ownership of certain means of production. In state-run economies a private sector may still flourish in col¬ lusion with the public sector. In Egypt the construction industry was of par¬ ticular interest because it consumed an enormous share of public investment and funneled it to the private sector. Among the engineer-managers of the public sector it then became possible to locate an administrative bourgeoisie, consisting of the owners of the means for converting public into private re¬ sources. They could in fact accumulate the financial resources needed for sustaining patron-client networks, which in turn protected and expanded the private sector despite official commitment to the public sector. Less restrictively, however, the administrative bourgeoisie can also be de¬ fined simply as high-ranking functionaries, together with high flyers who can expect in the course of their careers to reach positions of top management in government or the public sector. Such a conception skirts questions of class consciousness and behavior because it cannot be assumed that these officials identify as a group with the regime’s project of rationalizing the means of production or other bourgeois functions that Marxist critics have ascribed to it. Engineer-managers did in fact seem, even before 1952, to identify them¬ selves with Egypt’s industrialization efforts, and some of them urged in the spirit of Thorsten Veblen that they take command of the economy as techno-

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

15

crats. But after 1952 they could not speak with a common voice even if they can be viewed analytically as a stratum of the administrative bourgeoisie. Despite theoretical shortcomings, however, the looser conception of an administrative bourgeoisie has the advantage of facilitating an analysis of Egyptian social stratification. Focusing on the pool of engineering profes¬ sionals makes it possible to examine the effects of class bias in the educa¬ tional system, coupled with bureaucratic expansion, on the society’s class structure. Against the hypothesis of growing equality can be tested the prop¬ osition that statist industrialization was helping reproduce a dependent bourgeoisie supposedly abolished by official socialism. Because of class bias in the educational system, engineering actually became a preserve of the up¬ per classes once it appeared especially promising as a way of arriving at top positions in the regime. An analysis in chapter 6 of the social origins of a relatively representative sample of Egyptian engineers surveyed in 1973 shows that roughly half of the most recent graduates seemed to be coming from families of the upper 1 percent of the population.30 From longitudinal data about the numbers of en¬ gineers being produced, the numbers of top positions in the civil service and public sector, and the proportions of engineers occupying these posts, the chapter also assesses the chances of engineers’ acquiring bourgeois status in their own right. Reproduction, of course, has taken other forms. Through corruption, managers—notably engineers in the construction industry—can literally reproduce a bourgeoisie by taking charge of the metaphorical means of production whereby public resources are converted into private ones. On the other hand, among the huge elite of engineering graduates the down¬ wardly mobile may become as numerous as those who are fortunate enough to retain their families’ bourgeois status. Academic import substitution may then in the end serve less to reproduce a bourgeoisie than to create a new lumpenbourgeoisie once the production curve of graduates soars above in¬ dexes of industrialization and bureaucratization. Analysis of conventional stratification, however, does not do full justice to the Nasserist thrust toward an equality of initial opportunity. Though the re¬ gime in the last analysis did little to alter the conventional social hierarchy, its educational and administrative practices did much to alter the status of women. Of course some young women studied male-dominated disciplines such as engineering before the July Revolution, but the numbers and propor¬ tions increased sharply in the 1960s. Chapter 7 analyzes the adaptation of women engineers to administrative roles after graduation, by comparing the

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

16

fifty-eight females included in the 1973 sample of graduates with their male counterparts. There are few signs of formal inequality, and in fact the females seem more satisfied and better adapted to their roles than the males. Such indications of modernization may, however, require some reinterpretation. Men and women engineers may be becoming equally superfluous in the Egyptian bureaucracy, facilitating the adaptation of the less professionally committeed women. Women may be rising in the profession but amid in¬ creasing professional impoverishment. Their formal equality with men may signify not their liberation but a general process of deprofessionalization. Women may then be replacing men as the ideal-typical engineers, but engi¬ neering may be becoming a clerical, feminine occupation. So also the women, who tend to come from wealthier families than the men, better ex¬ emplify its class character.

The Rationalization of Statecraft In their distrust of politics, bureaucratic-authoritarian regmies are often tempted to act out Saint-Simon’s famous parable of substituting technical for political elites.31 Being no exception, Nasser’s Egypt offers a field for observ¬ ing how technically skilled elites, notably engineers, can make special con¬ tributions to the capacity of such a political system, by helping to make ra¬ tional decisions and the like. Modernization theorists have suggested three possible sorts of contributions. First, as experienced technologists not in¬ volved in day-to-day politics, they may foster an enlightened public opinion because, in Edward Shils’s words, they “embody the major practical experi¬ ence of the modernized sector of society.” Even—perhaps especially—if they withdraw from demagogic politics to their professional sphere, they “will contribute to the establishment of civility by creating alternative modem ob¬ jects of attachment, and will thus provide an alternative to hyperpoliticiza¬ tion.”32 Second, as technocrats exercising important managerial, administra¬ tive or political functions, they may exercise a creative influence on strategic areas of public policy poorly understood by and perhaps of only marginal interest to the handful of officer-politicians at the top. Third, the mass of engineers may by virtue of their superior technical training demonstrate spe¬ cial organizational skills in the middle echelons of the civil service and public sector management. Chapters 8-10 explore these respective possibilities, for the Egyptian engineers were ideally situated for playing each type of role. In Nasser’s Egypt, however, the possibilities of apolitical opinion making

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

17

were distinctly limited, in part because the regime was authoritarian, in part because of prior engineering traditions. Chapter 8 analyzes the British and subsequently Egyptian tradition of blanketing political controversies in inter¬ minable discussion of engineering details. Precisely because the blankets be¬ came so transparent, failing to cover up the political designs of their technical advocates, Shils’s distinction between technical and political argumentation got lost. Nasser’s use of showcase projects—“modem objects of attachment”— as legitimating myths increased the vulnerability of potential technical critics; so also did his use and abuse of technocrats. The practice of technocracy, in fact, developed contradictions that may, as chapter 9 shows, be inherent in the concept. Experts in engineering, as in other fields, were co-opted by virtue of an outstanding professional reputation to positions of important influence and power; however, influence, power, and connections were required to gain the appropriate professional image. Chapter 9 traces some of the these relationships within the engineering profession and identifies some influential networks. The technocrats had to fit into the complex web of patron-client relationships and alliances on which Nasser’s rule rested. Called on to legitimate the sultanic system, engineers found that their influence inevitably became as diffuse as the political envi¬ ronment in which they worked. Experience from industrial societies suggests that engineers might be con¬ tributing to rationalization principally as bureaucrats and managers, rather than as technocrats or opinion makers. In the United States, for instance, engineering “was bureaucratized almost from the start,” originating with the needs of large-scale organizations, notably the military and related public works agencies.33 So also in Egypt, the Public Works department established in 1836 was the engineer’s principal employer for more than a century. Were not engineers in Egypt, too, “the original organization men”34 displaying ex¬ emplary technical training for rationalizing bureaucracy? Chapter 10 exam¬ ines their attitudes and bureaucratic behavior in light of the survey conducted in 1973, which included a cross section of government agencies and public sector companies. In the United States “the engineer’s problem has centered on a conflict between professional independence and organizational loyalty”;35 in Egypt, by contrast, the conflict seems to be between commitment to the profession and to clientelistic networks. These networks seemed especially pervasive in the older government agencies, such as the successor to the original Public Works department, suggesting that the engineers simply adapted to the indigenous bureaucratic culture rather than changed it. In some

18

The Practice of Theoretical Modernization

of the more recently created industrial showcases, by contrast, they displayed greater professional commitment and less awareness of clientelistic con¬ straints. In fact, despite the virtual disbanding of the Arab Socialist Union by 1973, there was some evidence that political relationships had superseded clientelistic ones within the more modern agencies. Possibly engineering elites will display a greater potential for political in¬ novation in settings more conductive than Egypt’s in the 1960s and 1970s to sustained economic growth and authoritarianism. Particularly in the Arab world, funded by petrodollars, other bureaucratic-authoritarian experiments may yet display a more felicitous convergence between corporatist, statist practices and the processes of differentiation and rationalization envisioned by Western theorists of modernization. This study of Egyptian engineers may shed some light on the future of other engineers by suggesting, in conclusion, how their professional, bourgeois, technocratic or bureaucratic identities may be superseded, enabling engineers to become a political force in their own right, a vanguard among the professional corporations.

I

ENGINEERS AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

*

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession In relatively unindustrialized Egypt engineers paradoxically appear to be more committed to their profession than those in industrial societies. The Egyptians are committed to it at the very least for life; and shortly after a number of them made their contribution in 1973 to the crossing of the Suez Canal and destruction of the Bar-Lev Line, Cairo’s Executive Council even promised land in Nasr City for an engineer’s cemetary—literally, “collective tombs.”1 Whether or not many takers are preparing to make this ultimate gesture of solidarity, the profession seems to exemplify the sort of corporation that Emile Durkheim thought should order modem society. The Roman arti¬ sans’ funerary college obviously fascinated this theorist of late nineteenthcentury industrial society. “United, like the Gentiles, in the same cult during their life, the members of the corporation also wished, like them, to take their final rest together.”2 Though the modem professions were not expected to recover the religious cohesion of their medieval or classical forebears, the idea of grafting traditional funerary solidarity on one of them would surely also have appealed to Durkheim—especially in the land of pyramid builders and cities of the dead. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of funerary societies in Egypt, and it would not be altogether surprising if the Engineers’ Syndicate were to join their ranks.3 More anomalous, perhaps, is the professional identity that the engineers display in this world, even those who do not live together in Cairo’s City of Engineers. Virtually all graduates of engineering schools remain muhandisin for life, the prestigious title of Engineer (Muhandis) being prefixed to their names as in some Central European and Latin American countries. In the early 1970s, moreover, some three-quarters of the graduates were members of the Engineers’ Syndicate, and it was a closed club: irrespective of occu¬ pational function, no one without the proper undergraduate engineering de¬ gree could belong, even if he had a doctorate in an engineering science but had happened to study something else as an undergraduate. In the United States, by contrast, the profession is more open, less organized at the national level, and less terminal in the sense of being a lifelong pursuit. Only 56 percent of those who claimed to be engineers in the 1960 census had com¬ pleted a college education, and not all of these had studied engineering. Less than 10 percent of the American engineers belonged to the National Union of Professional Engineers, the equivalent of Egypt’s Engineers’ Syndicate, in the early 1970s.4 And of course substantial proportions of college-trained engineers move from technical engineering into other occupations in the course of their careers. To be sure, engineering in certain other industrial

Engineers and Professional Development

22

societies displays greater closure and organization at the national level, but only with respect to particular specializations or schools. The closest ana¬ logue to the Egyptian syndicate would be a French grand corps de I’Etat, but each of these denotes graduates of a particular grande ecole, not the profes¬ sion as such, and protects their privileges as an elite cadre of administrators rather than as professionals. The syndicate, by contrast, tried to defend the interests of private professionals as well as administrators, and the latter be¬ came too numerous and academically diversified to compare with an elite French corps. In industrial societies, as a sociologist of North American engineering has argued, It is necessary to realize that there are no “engineers” as such. There are only engineers working in specific occupational positions in specific or¬ ganizations—for example, an assistant projects engineer in a large plant of an electronics firm. The professional role exists only as part of a broader occupational role, consisting of the engineer’s work activities, his organizational position, his organization, and his work colleagues.5 Durkheim himself was ambiguous on this point. Sometimes he defined the members of a modem corporation in occupational terms, as “all the agents of the same industry” or of “each form of industry,” while elsewhere he under¬ lined the need for corporations grouping “each profession.”6 Thus a corpora¬ tion might include all employees of petroleum companies, the ditchdiggers for the pipelines as well as petroleum engineers, or it might on the model of law or medicine include all petroleum engineers irrespective of their company affiliations. Equally indebted to Durkheim are corporatist theories, which tend to envelop entire industries in the interests of integrating labor and man¬ agement with a functionalist sociology of professions. In industrial societies professional engineering roles seem to fit the occu¬ pational model to a greater extent than do the roles of physicians or lawyers. It is more difficult to envisage a petroleum engineer who is not employed in the petroleum sector really exercising his profession than, say, the lawyer who works for a corporation rather than a law firm or district attorney’s of¬ fice, or the physician who works in a public health agency rather than in a hospital or private practice. The lawyer or physician more easily fits the func¬ tionalist model in which professions are viewed as independent communities based on shared norms and values, a substantial body of applied knowledge acquired mostly through formal education, and a lifelong career commitment. The engineer fits this model less easily even if he has engineering degrees, because his professional identity depends on continual exercise and devel-

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

23

opment of technical skills and an appropriate organizational environment. However antiquated and underutilized their respective skills, the lawyer or physician seems to have a less vulnerable professional identity than the en¬ gineer in a dynamic industrial society. In less developed countries such as Egypt, an engineer’s professional iden¬ tity would be even more precarious if it depended on a continual development of skills in appropriate settings. But technological obsolescence is obviously less problematic in societies that are relatively deprived of industry and tech¬ nology. Few engineering jobs require any great exercise of technical skills, much less keeping up with the latest international developments of a given technology. Moreover, any overproduction of engineers, relative to indus¬ trialization, reduces the graduate’s chances of finding an appropriate job for developing his technical skills. In Egypt, as in much of the third world, a colonial legacy has also minimized the demand for these skills. In the 1930s and 1940s, before education outran industrialization, the new positions that the economy was generating for engineers usually went to foreigners. In the decade prior to the Second World War only 2 percent of the Egyptian gradu¬ ating classes were employed by the private sector, while the huge majority went, as always, into government service.7 Even here, however, as a Euro¬ pean sympathetic to Egypt observed, “the tradition of the Egyptian engineer¬ ing service has never been sufficiently strong to remain independent of Eu¬ ropean experts. In fact, it has really become a part of the tradition in technical branches of the Egyptian services that serious enterprises are always under¬ taken by Europeans.”8 And while the war stimulated a measure of Egyptianization, so that growing numbers and proportions of engineers entered private industry in the 1940s, the demand for graduates relative to the supply subse¬ quently dried up, forcing them back to the traditional government employ¬ ment. Occupational structures, in short, never even encouraged the continual development of technical skills. Professional identity rested on other foun¬ dations, helping to explain why it became stronger in Egypt than in industrial societies.

The Foundations of Professional Identity Engineering began to crystallize as a profession in Egypt long before the mystique of industrialization enhanced its social standing. In the medieval period it could no longer claim achievements on quite the scale of the ancient pharaohs, though Ibn Khaldun was not referring to the Egyptians in the four-

24

Engineers and Professional Development

teenth century when he observed that “buildings erected by Arabs, with very few exceptions, quickly fall to ruins.”9 The pharaonic achievements, how¬ ever, were recovered. One fruit of the Napoleonic conquest of 1798 was the discipline of Egyptology. The rediscovery of the pharaonic legacy contributed in turn to a modem strain of nationalism which affirmed continuities with Egypt’s pre-Islamic past, including its engineering achievements. Indeed, pharaonic architectural designs once again became fashionable in the 1930s. Ecologically, too, Egypt remained, in Herodotus’ phrase, “a gift of the Nile,” hence literally a product of irrigation and hydraulic engineering. The profession in fact owed considerably more to Muhammad Ali than to the French Egyptologists. Half a century before the British occupation of 1882 a nucleus of Egyptian engineers was being trained abroad and then training others at home and acquiring experience managing the Nile. To fi¬ nance his military and political designs, Muhammad Ali introduced longstaple cotton to the Nile delta and built the first modem (Scottish-designed) barrage to increase its water supply. The production of cash crops increased twelvefold from 1832 to 1872, generating a surplus that might have been converted into self-sustaining industrial expansion.10 Engineering became vi¬ tal to Egypt, and by 1882 the irrigation specialists were largely Egyptian. Subsequently the British did not so much innovate as develop what was al¬ ready more or less in place. The barrages built by Muhammad Ali were made to work properly, and further investments in Nile control were given priority to increase the tax base of agricultural produce and make Egypt pay for it¬ self—and for the Anglo-Egyptian invasion of the Sudan.11 Insofar as professionalization may be considered a process common to all modem specialized activities, engineering had advanced at least as far as law or medicine by the time the British took over the country.12 A cadre of full¬ time officials was already engaged in specialized tasks, and the Polytechnical School had existed almost continuously for forty-five years. Moreover, under British tutelage the profession made rapid advances in keeping with the Brit¬ ish stress on irrigation works. Reorganized in 1903, the Polytechnical School was gradually expanded. Thus from a yearly average of 8 graduates between 1887 and 1910, the output rose to an average of 110 during the interwar period (1924-1940). In 1935 the school was finally integrated into Cairo University, marking a new step in the process of professionalization. Law and medicine preceded engineering, however, into the next phase, the formation of national professional associations. From 1920, when the engi¬ neers made their first attempt to establish a syndicate, they had to wait until

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

25

1946 to achieve full legal recognition of their profession. The lawyers, by contrast, were allowed to found their syndicate, or bar association, in 1912, and the journalists were recognized in 1940, followed by the physicians, pharmacists, veterinarians, and dentists in 1942.13 It was perhaps only natural for the engineers to strive to emulate their fellow graduates of Cairo Univer¬ sity. The lawyers had modeled their bar association on that of the Mixed Courts, the European legal presence established in 1876.14 But other forces were also at work in shaping these new professional corporations. A tradition of medieval guilds was still alive, if hardly flourishing, until the First World War. It hardly seems accidental that the chairmen of the new syndicates (niqabat) were called naqlb-s, a title reserved in some of the old guilds for the person who initiated the members into professional or religious mysteries. Historians agree that any religious rituals associated with the guilds had fallen into disuse long before the twentieth century, but the ven¬ erable title remained available and could be transposed into the modem con¬ text. Moreover, professional leaders sometimes stressed the continuity be¬ tween the medieval guilds and modem syndicates. In his inaugural speech the first chairman of the Royal Engineering Society paid homage in 1920 to the tradition of the craft guilds and interpreted the ongoing attempts to estab¬ lish professional syndicates as a return to the old system.15 This was at best, however, a backhanded compliment to the supporters of an engineering syn¬ dicate, and the audience of engineers seemed to have little concrete knowl¬ edge of guilds, much less any attachment to them. They could be a source of some vocabulary but certainly not a practical model for modem professional organization. The terms guild and corporation, in fact, are somewhat misleading trans¬ lations of the terms arbab al-hiraf (masters of crafts) and tcCifa (professional groups, but also foreign minorities, local neighborhood groups, or Sufi or¬ ders). Certainly the autonomy and self-regulating characteristics of their me¬ dieval Western counterparts were largely absent, even though virtually the entire urban populace, ranging from the prostitutes and water carriers to the artisans, builders, merchants, and slave dealers, were organized in an elabo¬ rate hierarchy. In eighteenth-century Cairo, they apparently served mainly as tax farms. “More important than the supervision they assured the rulers of exercising over the trades was in fact the accompanying fiscal or para-fiscal exploitation which was the system’s supreme end.”16 By the late nineteenth century their regulatory functions were being carried out by other government agencies, spelling the quiet collapse of the system.17

26

Engineers and Professional Development

Bureaucratic regulations, in fact, were the major impetus for the engineers to organize. Large majorities of them had always worked for the government, and until the civil service reform of 1951 their pay scales were a constant source of frustration. In 1905 the government had approved a special scale for government engineers in which an irrigation inspector was given the same rank as a counselor in an appeals court. In subsequent decades, however, disparities grew between the salaries of law graduates employed by the judi¬ ciary and engineering graduates employed by the Public Works department. Engineers calculated in 1947 that the average graduate was making only twothirds of the salary of his counterpart in the judiciary and that the discrepan¬ cies increased with years of service.18 The drive toward professionalization must also be viewed, however, in the general context of the British occupation and, subsequently, a nominally in¬ dependent and parliamentary regime in which the Palace, the British, and the Wafd contended for power. As Donald Reid suggests, “government willing¬ ness to permit the lawyers to organize [in 1912] was also crucial; perhaps the authorities thought the syndicate could control the lawyers who were too outspoken in their nationalism or were unruly in other ways.”19 In 1906 Lord Cromer was already fearing that the law school, with 358 students, was be¬ coming overcrowded and that higher education should be restricted to admin¬ istrative needs so as not to engender troublemakers and agitators.20 While neither he nor subsequent rulers, Egyptian or British, consciously advocated corporatism as a means of controlling the nationalist opposition, the rise of professional organizations sometimes served this purpose. Egypt, whether under Cromer or the pseudo-parliamentary regime established in 1923, re¬ mained an authoritarian system, albeit considerably more restricted in its scope of power and more tolerant of a limited pluralism than the one estab¬ lished by the Officers.21 Consequently some of the pluralism that was toler¬ ated could serve to divide and distract the opposition—almost as a rich vari¬ ety of secondary associations may stabilize a pluralist regime by concentrating people’s attention on specific issues rather than on abstract and ideological ones.22 Until 1936 the Palace and the British usually shared a common inter¬ est in weakening the Wafd; subsequently the Wafd, too, shared the interest in fostering divisions within urban, educated strata that it could no longer con¬ trol. Professionalization sometimes served the needs of the regime by divid¬ ing the principal stratum, which might otherwise have more effectively op¬ posed it. Not that such a strategy was necessarily intended: Egypt’s ancien

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

27

regime hardly measured up to Salazar’s Portugal, and the Egyptian Salazar, Ismail Sidqi, did not promote professional syndicates when he was at the height of his power.

The Rise of Professional Organizations In 1920, just as the Americans were finally establishing the Federation of American Engineering Societies, the Royal Society of Egyptian Engineers was founded in Cairo. One of its most active members in the early 1970s, the late Muhammad Saqr, recalled its founding in the wake of nationalist dem¬ onstrations in which he had participated as a student in 1919. He was un¬ doubtedly not alone in interpreting the emergence of Egypt’s first professional engineering society as a nationalist reflection of the Revolution of 1919, one of the first signs, together with the simultaneous founding of the Egyptian Medical Association, of Egypt’s coming of age. But to associate the founders of the engineering society with nationalism would be to underestimate the raison d’etre of this august discussion club. They tended, in fact, to be on the wrong side of the barricades. The founder and moving spirit behind the society, Mahmud Sami Bey, had been the highest-ranking Egyptian civil servant in the Ministry of Public Works during the 1919 Revolution. Promoted in 1916 when the British were in full control, he continued to hold high office until 1924, when the Wafd came to power and exiled him as cultural attache to Washington. In 1920 he had invited some nationalists, such as the future Wafdist minister, Osman Muharram, to be charter members of the society, but his major objective seems to have been to head off technical criticisms of British irrigation projects. Ear¬ lier in the year a Liberal-Democratic engineer, Abdallah Pasha Wahbi, had headed a national committee against the Nile Projects adopted by the British. A series of dams were to be built in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, not Egypt, and the nationalists believed that they would facilitate British control over Egypt’s water supplies. Wahbi also launched a professional engineering jour¬ nal, perhaps partly to mobilize Egyptian engineers for nationalist causes. In August 1920, just four months before the society was founded, he helped organize a new professional engineers’ syndicate, modeled on that of the lawyers. During its first year, 340 of the 442 engineering graduates joined the syndicate, and it might well have challenged the government on a variety of fronts, including the Nile Projects and the Egyptianization of technical min-

Engineers and Professional Development

28

istries, as well as bread-and-butter issues.23 The provisional naqib, Mahmud Fahmi, was hardly a flaming radical, but he had cautiously supported Wahbi’s national committee against the Nile Projects.24 Without overtly opposing the new syndicate, Mahmud Sami Bey tried to sidetrack it from political issues into the more divisive ones involving tech¬ nical qualifications for different occupational roles. By equating the syndicate with the old guild system, with its distinctly lower-class, plebeian connota¬ tions, he was already implicitly blurring the distinction between an engineer¬ ing graduate and a skilled worker. In his inaugural speech he also explicitly argued that the syndicate should pursue material group interests even to the extent of helping “the skilled workers who help engineers execute their dif¬ ferent projects.” He added that the society, by contrast, “has a more important national goal of giving sound technical and scientific advice on different na¬ tional issues.”25 To ensure that its advice was sound, membership in the so¬ ciety was restricted to those having “sufficient education and training to prac¬ tice the profession,” at least fifteen years of professional experience and, perhaps most stringently, an ability to pay an annual dues of LE 6 plus an inscription fee of LE 10. Educational qualifications for joining this elite or¬ ganization were less rigorous than those of the syndicate, which insisted on a Polytechnical degree or its equivalent, because many of the senior engineers did not have one. The Royal Society never acquired a membership of much more than one hundred, and its technical discussions were more easily con¬ trolled than those of a larger and better-educated forum such as the syndicate. In fact the closest the society would ever come to making an effective criti¬ cism of the government was in 1947, over the advisability of pumping Al¬ exandria’s sewage into the Mediterranean.26 In 1920 Sami helped to cool the nationalist ardor of his fellow engineers. He lured the provisional naqib into becoming vice-president of the society. Wahbi conveniently died before the society was bom, so that Sami was also able to take over the editorship of Engineering. When the Wafd reached a tacit compromise with the British and King Fuad, nationalist fervor became more manageable. The king was able to recognize the Royal Society in December 1922 and ignore the syndicate’s bid for recognition.27 During the interwar period prominent engineers occasionally resuscitated the idea of an engineers’ syndicate, but there was no rank-and-file agitation for one. The only professional syndicate in existence, that of the lawyers, served as a useful political safety valve. While deprived of political respon¬ sibility by periodic alliances between the British and the Palace, nationalist

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

29

lawyers of various hues could become engrossed in a metaphorical political competition for leadership of the syndicate.28 Finally the spiraling inflation caused by the Second World War created a need among other professions for comparable distractions. During the war the cost of living almost tripled while the salaries of government engineers stagnated.29 The rank and file of young graduates organized a league in 1944 to press for a professional syn¬ dicate, and in 1945 they threatened to strike for more equitable salary scales. In the postwar context of intense social unrest, student agitation, and unre¬ solved national issues (the British military presence in Egypt and the political future of the Sudan), the government had to make some meaningful responses to civil servants’ demands. An engineering syndicate, without attaining the heavenly political status of the bar association, might also be a safety valve, containing the struggles of functionaries in essential services for higher sala¬ ries by displacing them into struggles for prestige among different segments of engineers. Certainly the Royal Society, tainted by an elitist and possibly pro-Axis image,30 could no longer serve as an effective gatekeeper, though senior engineers would be able to retain their preponderance in a professional syndicate. The engineers most responsible for founding the Egyptian Syndicate of Engineering Professions of 1946 varied in their political affiliations but were all solidly identified with the regime, not with nationalist movements radi¬ calized by wartime conditions. The prime instigator was Osman Muharram, who as minister of public works in the wartime Wafdist government prepared draft legislation for a syndicate in 1944. By this time he was certainly no longer “persistently hostile to British officials in his Ministry,” and the British were presumably no longer emphasizing his “strong family strain of lunacy” in their confidential reports.31 His support in 1937 of a key concession to a British firm had precipitated the Wafd’s most serious internal schism,32 and his participation in the corrupt and pro-British wartime government hardly enhanced his nationalist credentials. He urged the establishment of a syndi¬ cate in 1944, ostensibly because it would provide engineers with a pension and annuity system in place of the one for all civil servants that Ismail Sidqi had revoked in 1930 at the height of the depression.33 The death of three young engineers, leaving their families penniless, had dramatized this need, but the new legislation proposed by Muharram also fitted his party’s corporatist strategy of legalizing trade unions and putting them under the control of the notorious Fuad Sarag al-Din, the Wafdist minister of the interior. If Muharram was the engineers’ Sarag al-Din, the other prominent sup-

Engineers and Professional Development

30

porters of the syndicate seemed even less related to postwar nationalism. The first naqib, Muhammad ShafTq Pasha, was once described by the British as having “the faults of his virtues, but his rigidity and overconscientious ob¬ stinacy are outweighed by a pleasant simplicity of manner and complete in¬ tegrity.”34 This technocrat was not politically unsophisticated. In 1920, at the height of the controversy over the Nile Projects, he had agreed to serve as minister of public works, thereby giving the projects an Egyptian endorse¬ ment while claiming afterward to have used his leverage to undermine them.35 He had also served the most authoritarian of Egypt’s antinationalist politi¬ cians, Ismail Sidqi, and apparently then, in 1933, had already proposed the founding of an engineering syndicate.36 The engineer who actually got the syndicate officially recognized in 1946 was Ahmad Abd al-Qawi, the incumbent minister of public works and suc¬ cessor to Shafiq as chairman of the Royal Society. After 1922 (possibly en¬ lightened by charter membership in the Royal Society) he had consistently taken pro-British positions concerning the Nile Projects and, like Shafiq, had served in a number of cabinets dominated by the Palace. In 1946 he was serving Ismail Sidqi, the prime minister who in 1930 had abrogated the Con¬ stitution of 1923 to preserve de facto British rule through the Egyptian mon¬ archy. By the law of August 4, 1946, the senior engineers—those who had prac¬ ticed the profession for at least fifteen years—were assured of a preponderant influence in the syndicate’s affairs. While constituting only 16 percent of the membership, they were given thirteen, or 62 percent, of the twenty-one seats on its governing board (table 2.1). Moreover, the functionaries from the Min¬ istry of Public Works tended to wield a decisive, if informal, influence on the outcome of the annual elections of the naqib. Each of the three chairmen who ruled the syndicate until the revolution was a former minister who maintained a clientele within the ministry. Even after the revolution, the core of this ministry, which became the Ministry of Irrigation after other public services were detached from Public Works, continued to wield significant influence. Not only was it responsible for distributing annual subsidies to the syndicate, but it also mobilized votes. Though irrigation engineers constituted only 4 percent of the profession by 1970,37 they elected their leaders (Ahmad Ali Kamal in the early 1960s, Abdal-Khaliq al-Shinnawi in the early 1970s) whenever the political authorities were not imposing their candidates. Under the ancien regime the naqib sometimes exercised de facto ministe¬ rial power through his administrative connections even when he was not the

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

31

incumbent minister. Shafiq Pasha, for instance, was determined to exercise a virtual censorship over the Magallat al-Muhandisin, the monthly engineer¬ ing journal, founded in 1945, which articulated the economic grievances of the younger engineer-bureaucrats. When the treasurer of the League of Engineering Graduates implicitly criticized the syndicate, complaining that “young engineers can defend their demands better than the sympathetic rich engineers who have little time for these grave problems,” he was transferred to Upper Egypt “to watch the developments of the annual Nile flood.”38 The Minister of Public Works at this time was none other than Ahmad Abd alQawi, who earlier in the year had scolded the league for threatening to strike. “A strike is a weapon that Egyptians should use only if some authority thinks of changing the course of the Nile or if Egypt is deprived of its right to a dignified honorable life.”39 Subsequently Nasser’s High Dam would fulfill one of these conditions, but the engineers never launched a formal strike. In fact, the creation of the syndicate cut short a slowdown organized in some departments of government. The very existence of professional syndicates made it possible for postwar governments to deal separately with different categories of civil servants. In his 1954 survey of the Egyptian bureaucracy Morroe Berger discovered that three-quarters of the higher civil servants favored the creation of a union to promote their economic interests.40 The syndicates, however, had already preempted the terrain, and by the late 1940s competition within and between them compromised any possibility of a united union of college-educated functionaries. Even the more militant League of Engineering Graduates, which gradually faded away once the syndicate was established, had phrased its salary and pension demands in terms of comparisons with other profes¬ sions. When in 1945 they demanded an additional LE 400,000 to be budgeted for Public Works employees who were engineers, they justified this sum by again comparing their wage scales with those of the judiciary and medical services. Some activists further substantiated their claim by suggesting an¬ other comparison: “An engineers’ strike, if only for a week, is bound to paralyze the economy and leave the legalists helpless.”41 But the government easily divided their ranks and averted a strike by paying the irrigation engi¬ neers an additional LE 22,000. The syndicate helped institutionalize these government practices but added a new professional twist. In the tradition of the league, the first naqlb care¬ fully compared the salaries and ranks of government engineers with those of the judiciary since the turn of the century only to conclude that “the injustices

32

Engineers and Professional Development

done to engineers” justified their being permitted to engage in part-time pri¬ vate practices—like physicians and schoolteacher tutors—to supplement their government salaries, rather than being granted any huge salary in¬ creases.42 In 1949 irrigation and drainage engineers received further special indemnities, but the demands of other engineers were ignored. Finally in 1951, when engineers were again threatening to strike, the government agreed to allocate an additional LE 50,000 for raises and promotions—half the absolute minimum demanded by the league five years earlier. To achieve even this meager victory had required delicate negotiations between a Wafdist naqib, Osman Muharram, and the Wafdist government in which he was serv¬ ing. The minister of finance had first proposed new salary scales for govern¬ ment lawyers, doctors, and teachers but not engineers. During these years, as subsequently, engineers were distracted from their material demands by struggles over the pecking order within the profession and its status compared with that of other professions. Creating the syndicate involved legally defining an engineer or specifying, in other words, who had the right to prefix the prestigious title of Muhandis to his name. The custom of being addressed as Engineer So-and-So had no precedent in either the French or British traditions that had developed Egyptian engineering, but it survived in Egypt on the grounds that the title “is exactly similar to the title of Doctor used by physicians.”43 In fact, engineers became furious when the agronomists, who called themselves agricultural engineers, also achieved le¬ gal recognition of their title with the creation of a syndicate in 1949.44 The biggest problem, however, was to define the qualifications for various types of engineering activities within the profession. The issue was almost as old as Egyptian experiences in training engineers. In 1849, shortly after completing his engineering studies in France, Ali Mu¬ barak was castigating the “engineers” in charge of irrigation in Upper Egypt. “When I arrived in Menia,” he reported to the khedive Abbas, “I examined the engineers who were trained in the schools of the diwan [ministry] of education. . . . They did not even know their multiplication tables, and when, puzzled, I asked them why they could not do operations so basic to their profession, they answered that their Coptic assistants did their multipli¬ cations for them.”45 He seems to have persuaded the khedive to replace some of the chief engineers with graduates of Egypt’s specialized School of Engi¬ neering. But as late as the First World War relatively few of the Egyptians employed as engineers had graduated from the School of Engineering or

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

33

equivalent institutions. In 1920 conditions for membership in the exclusive Royal Society did not include the equivalent of a university degree. While the syndicate was being organized, four categories of graduates were claiming status as engineers. First there were the university graduates represented by the league. Second, graduates of the Higher Institute of Ap¬ plied Engineering, some sections of which had since 1939 provided the equivalent of four years of higher education, were insisting on full recogni¬ tion. Third, graduates of the School of Industrial Arts, which after 1941 dis¬ pensed the equivalent of four years of higher education, also claimed to be engineers. Fourth, graduates of secondary level industrial schools aspired to the title. The latter were rejected in the 1940s, but the issue would be revived in the Nasser era. So bitter were the conflicts between the first three categories that the leg¬ islation defining membership in the syndicate took two years to draft. Prom¬ inent engineers, however much they distrusted some of their more militant juniors in the league, could agree that the university graduates “must keep their distinct identity as the superiors of the graduates of the Higher Institute of Applied Engineering.”46 Shafiq Pasha, for instance, threatened to resign as president of the Royal Society rather than accept the principle endorsed by both the Ministry of Public Works and Parliament that the graduates of the applied technical colleges be admitted by seniority, without any special ex¬ amination.47 Even after the league accepted the government’s position, prom¬ inent engineers in the society continued to wage a rearguard action against admitting “intruders” to the profession and finally settled for the compromise only to avert a strike by the league over the salary issue. In addition to the class A university graduates, the compromise recognized a class B, graduates of the Higher Institute who had exercised the profession for at least five years, and a class C, those from the School of Industrial Arts who had been practicing for at least ten years. Representation on the syndi¬ cate council was weighted to give a majority of the seats to class A graduates who had exercised the profession for at least fifteen years. Table 2.1 com¬ pares the percentage of seats allotted to each category with its percentage of the total membership in 1947. The young university graduates, who made up 38 percent of the membership, were unhappy about receiving only four of the twenty-one seats and class B graduates complained of being outvoted by their more numerous class C colleagues for each of the four seats they were jointly allocated. Crosscutting the horizontal divisions among class A, and between

Engineers and Professional Development

34

Table 2.1 Distribution of Membership and Council Seats by Engineer Categories Membership (%) (A = 4,582)

Seats on syndicate council (%) (A = 21)

15+ yr

16

62

(13)

0-14 yr

38

19

( 4)

Class B and

11

Class C

35

19

( 4)

Categories Class A

46

Sources: Magallat al-Muhandisin, August 1946, pp. 72-73; February 1947; Law of July 1946, establishing the Syndicate of Egyptian Engineering Professions.

classes A, B, and C, the sections for architecture, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering (a chemical section was added in 1947) were also in competition for some of the class A seats. Far from being able to define engineering activities and press vigorously for new government salary scales, the syndicate was immobilized by its very divisions. In 1946 over four-fifths of the class A engineers were functionaries in government ministries, but their prestigious leaders, such as Shafiq Pasha and Husayn Sirri Pasha, gave priority to the interests of engineers in the private sector.48 One irrigation inspector, too, might not have been far off in the mark in suggesting that the tension between senior and junior class A engineers was a consequence of colonial relationships. “The British officials used their posts in the Egyptian government to assert their superiority over the Egyptian employees. The departure of the British officials did not alter the situation, for the Egyptian officials adopted the same pattern of behav¬ ior.”49 Even assuming, however, that a number of senior class A officers of the syndicate identified with the demands of the younger engineers, how could the syndicate effectively articulate them yet also satisfy class B and C engineers? One of the principal grievances of the league in 1945 had been that young class A engineers were materially worse off than their class B and C age cohorts. When, in 1957, class A engineers seemed on the verge of finally attaining a special government salary scale, class B engineers opposed them. In 1952, and again in 1956 and 1957, syndicate congresses were dis¬ rupted by conflicts pitting class A against classes B and C. As late as 1963,

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

35

class C engineers boycotted the annual congress because a decision to abolish the distinction between the three categories was not being implemented. By then, too, the issue of stratification within the profession was compounded by the creation of new technical institutes. Similarly, the harmony between architects, civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers celebrated by the league in 1945 was not to last. In 1965, for example, the mechanical engi¬ neers managed to paralyze the syndicate by boycotting the council and pre¬ venting a quorum. After a modest beginning in 1949, moreover, the syndicate never suc¬ ceeded in getting legislation passed to define engineering activities in either government or the private sector.50 It was never allowed to organize joint employment contracts for engineers in the private sector, despite legislation passed finally in 1957. Apparently, despite official encouragement, divisions within the syndicate also prevented it in 1954 from inspecting various com¬ panies, banks, and contracting agencies to enforce existing legislation.51 In¬ deed the syndicate never seems to have regulated the profession the way a bar or medical association might, by disbarring an incompetent or negligent engineer from practice. Exasperated when yet another new building col¬ lapsed, in 1962, because of faulty construction, the editor of the Magallat alMuhandisln urged that the syndicate prevent incompetent engineers from practicing “just as the physicians’ syndicate does. . . . Otherwise it will just become what many members are already calling it, a benevolent society. . . .”52 His plea obviously fell on deaf ears. Perhaps more significant than the syndicate’s failings, however, is that such a criticism could be made. Engineering activities in industrial societies are notoriously difficult to define, much less regulate. In these societies engi¬ neering does not really fit Durkheim’s corporate model, at least not nearly to the same extent as law or medicine. To accept such a model as a basis for criticizing the syndicate already suggests that the critic had internalized the sociological notion of professionalization. So, too, have most Egyptian en¬ gineers. They seem to share the career expectations and commitments asso¬ ciated with being totally fitted, as Durkheim put it, in the “chain armor of professional organization.”53 Evidence of these attitudes is furnished by a survey of over 500 engineers conducted in 1973. Of those surveyed, 331 effectively represented the male engineering community with respect to age, specialization, and type of employment. (For a description of the sample, see the appendix.)

36

Engineers and Professional Development

Professionalism among Engineers The functionalist model assumes that after long periods of training the “professionals tend to remain in the profession throughout their careers.”54 In industrial societies the model is less relevant to engineering than to a number of other professions because, as previously suggested, engineers tend to be promoted out of engineering into other functions and because they may not necessarily be able to keep up with the changing body of knowledge expected of a professional in their specialized fields. In Egypt, however, neither of these considerations seemed to detach engineers from their profession. With respect to career expectations, for instance, the Egyptians were asked whether they envisioned their future “in the leadership and administration area, using leadership and management abilities to direct and coordinate the activities of others,” or in “the scientific and technical area, using technical knowledge and methods to solve technical problems and to develop technical processes and information.” Only 29 percent of the men chose administrative pursuits.55 Even among the sixth of the sample that had reached the top three ranks of the Egyptian bureaucracy, only 38 percent considered their future to lie in leadership and administration. By way of comparison, 46 percent of a sample of American engineers intended to move into general administration while only 43 percent wished to remain in technical work.56 In fact, even if their future is top management, Egyptian engineers may not like to admit that they have left their technical area. One of Egypt’s top five industrial managers, for instance, insisted in a personal interview that he was merely a technician, not a manager or policymaker. When pressed—for he had been closely associated with Dr. Aziz Sidqi, Nasser’s industrial czar, since 1956—he admitted that “making policy is natural for engineers as they grow older and more experienced.” Yet he continued to identify with engi¬ neering activities, as if the functionalist model of the lifetime career in one’s profession gave him political security. Within the sample, too, identification with a technical as opposed to a managerial career bore little relationship to the engineer’s actual functions or the agency that employed him. A full half of the technocrats (by virtue of their rank and decision making) considered their future to be primarily in the technical arena. The career expectations bore statistically significant relationships to occupational activities such as the shares of time spent on design, writing technical reports, or inversely, sales, management and decision making, but these activities in conjunction with one another explained only 9 percent of the variance in attitude. In short, technical identifications did not die easily.

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

37

The functionalist model requires more, however, than conserving one’s title of muhandis or a subjective identification with some technical realm. It really assumes a lifelong commitment to professional values, to a code of ethics, preferably an unwritten one rather than a propaganda piece. Such a code must contain and affirm the notions of a professional body of knowl¬ edge, formal learning, and intellectual discipline as well as purposes that may be specific to a given profession. With the help of informants, it was possible to derive from the survey a simple set of items that signified professional commitment: (1) advocating that engineers be tested for technical compe¬ tence at regular intervals throughout their careers, (2) perceiving engineering as an academic discipline rather than a matter of practical know-how, and (3) disagreeing that increasing production is more important than develop¬ ing processes of production. These items, statistically intercorrelated, were added together to form a 12-point scale measuring professional commitment. There are no data on the commitment, in this sense, of engineers in indus¬ trial societies. However, there is some evidence that certain correlates of commitment may be more prevalent among Egyptian than among British or American engineers. For instance, intrinsic work values, such as the oppor¬ tunity to be creative, may be “more associated with commitment to a profes¬ sion than are . . . ‘extrinsic’ work values,’’ such as money, prestige, or influ¬ ence.57 The Egyptians were in fact asked, “In your opinion, what is the principal attraction of the engineering profession today?” As table 2.2 indi¬ cates, those mentioning the intrinsic value (item 3) were considerably more committed, on the average, than their colleagues. They also constituted more than two-thirds of the sample. Their mean score of professional commitment was 7.2 compared with means ranging from 6.0 to 6.4 for those who men-

Table 2.2 Professional Commitment by Work Values

Work values: Principal attraction of engineering

Mean score of professional commitment

N

1. Well paid

6.0

( 21)

2. High prestige

6.4

( 37)

3. Allows one creativity and originality

7.2

(208)

4. Opens the way to leadership positions

6.1

( 42) p < 0.005

Engineers and Professional Development

38

tioned extrinsic values. Work values explained only 5 percent of the variance in commitment, but the results were statistically significant at the 0.005 level.58 Commitment was also associated to almost the same extent with the kinds of reasons that engineers gave for originally choosing engineering studies. These correlates of commitment have been examined among American and British engineering students. Summarizing these studies, Evan observed a “diversity of motivation and work values’’ that poses “difficult problems for the profession.” In none of the studies did more than 52 percent of the stu¬ dents provide an intrinsic reason for their choice of career. In addition to the graduates 203 engineering students at Ain Shams were interviewed in 1973. Though no precise comparison is possible with the diverse English and American studies, it may be worth noting that 63 and 65 percent of the stu¬ dents gave intrinsic responses, respectively, to the questions concerning work values and their choice of engineering. These patterns of responses differed little from those of the graduates. Whether or not Egyptians were more intrinsically motivated and perhaps therefore more committed to the profession than their colleagues in industrial societies, other factors that supposedly diminish commitment in the course of an engineer’s career did not seem operative in Egypt. In particular, neither shifts in career from technical to managerial functions nor the intellectual obsolescence associated in industrial societies with changing technologies appeared to have much of an impact on the Egyptians’ commitment to their profession. The survey permitted the testing of these hypotheses. One way of measuring Egyptian obsolescence was to ask the engineers to assess their level of technical competence in light of the “recent worldwide explosion of knowledge in most engineering fields.” Another method was simply to assume obsolescence to be proportionate to the period of time elapsed since graduation. Admittedly, it is dangerous to infer trends from data taken at one point in time, for several reasons.59 The sample did not appear to be hiding any effects of self-selection or attrition rates over time, because the distribution of sample ages was representative of that of the engineering population at large. The time elapsed since graduation could, however, be measuring generational effects rather than those of aging and obsolescence. If, for instance, the quality of Egyptian engineering education had deterio¬ rated, then the impact of education on different generations of Egyptians might be outweighing any effects of obsolescence. Older engineers would

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

39

Table 2.3 Possible Correlates of Professional Commitment Career Variables

University

Public sector

Ministries

Male sample

Intellectual obsolescence Engineer’s self-evaluation Years since graduation

0.01

-0.07

0.02

-0.09

-0.26

0.03

-0.15

-0.11

-0.27 0.14

0.10 -0.12

-0.09 0.16

-0.07 -0.04

Occupational roles Percentage of time in management Rank

consequently be less threatened by obsolesence than their cohorts in indus¬ trial societies. The shift to managerial roles was easier to ascertain. Subjective career aspirations could be discounted, but the engineers were also asked to calcu¬ late the percentage of their time spent in various activities, among them par¬ ticipating in management and making important decisions. The objective measure of administrative rank could also be used, though high rank was not necessarily incompatible with carrying out primarily technical functions. Table 2.3 reports the correlation coefficients between professional commit¬ ment and these independent variables. Evidently the relationships are very weak: years of service since graduation explained less than 2 percent of the variance in commitment. It stood to reason, however, that commitment might vary with the type of agency that employed the engineer. Some of the agencies selected for the sample were engaged in more technical tasks than others and utilized more sophisticated technologies. If being a “real” engineer involves a broader oc¬ cupational role, as was suggested earlier in connection with industrial socie¬ ties, then professional commitment would presumably reflect, at least in part, the tasks of the agency employing the engineer. Table 2.4 shows that this is indeed the case. The average level of commitment among engineers em¬ ployed in real industries, such as automobiles and iron and steel, was much higher than that manifested in traditional government agencies such as the Ministry of Irrigation or even the Industrialization Authority (which also functioned much like a traditional ministry). Table 2.4 compares these levels with the commitment indicated by a panel of professors and teaching assis¬ tants at Cairo and Ain Shams universities. The engineers working in the in-

Engineers and Professional Development

40

Table 2.4 Professional Commitment by Place of Work Place of work

Professional commitment

(A)

Cairo and Ain Shams universities

7.8

(51)

7.7 7.8 6.7

(36) (41) (76)

7.2 7.0 6.8 6.4

(35) (17) ( 5) (20)

6.2 6.1

(34) (49)

Public sector industries Nasr Automobile Factory Iron and Steel Company Arab Contractors Company

Public authorities Rural Electrification Transport Cairo Airport Aluminum Project

Government ministries Industrialization Authority Ministry of Irrigation

dustries utilizing advanced technologies seemed almost as committed, on av¬ erage, as the panel of academics. The place of employment explained 7 percent of the variance in professional commitment. Perhaps, then, the effects of career roles or intellectual obsolescence were being obscured by the diversity of agencies included in the sample. To control for the diversity, table 2.3 examines the possible correlates of professional commitment within the relatively homogeneous clusters of agencies—the in¬ dustrial companies and the traditional bureaucracies—and the panel of aca¬ demics is included for purposes of comparison. Again the relationships are shown to be very weak. None of the correlation coefficients was significant at the 0.05 level. Oddly, the amount of time elapsed since graduation seemed to undermine the professors’ commitment to their profession more than that of the engineers in industry or the civil servants (r =

—0.22,

+0.03,

— 0.15, respectively). On closer inspection, professors seemed to be experi¬ encing a decline in commitment once they entered their forties, but there were only eight of them on the panel. They still mustered as much commit¬ ment, on average, as the younger civil servants (while the older functionaries had already started to decline in their thirties). The most surprising finding, however, was that the engineers employed in industry experienced no decline whatsoever. Moreover, they differed from the professors and civil servants in that the more time they spent managing and the higher their rank, the more

The Paradox of a Corporate Engineering Profession

41

committed they seemed to their profession. In Egypt’s showcase industries, engineering seems to approach the functionalist model of sustained, careerlong commitment to the profession. Commitment among those in the sample, high in the first place, tended to remain high over time. Yet even the bureau¬ crats who were relatively uncommitted, probably whiling away their time in the ministries doing paperwork (they admitted a mean of 18 percent of the time spent on such routine, compared with 9 percent for the rest of the sample), were trying to live up to the functionalist model. Career orientations had little impact on commitment; still, 70 percent of the engineers employed in the ministries envisioned their future in primarily technical rather than administrative pursuits, just as their colleagues in industry did. Perhaps engineering in Egypt really does resemble a corporation in Durkheim’s sense, even without becoming a funerary society as well. Indepen¬ dently' of industrialization, and belying the experiences of obsolescence in industrial societies, it seems to fulfill the functionalist model of a profession. Under Nasser it reached new heights, suggesting the same special congruence of the profession with an industrializing regime present in the bureaucraticauthoritarian traditions of Muhammad Ali and Ismail Sidqi, It is now time to look at the development of engineering associations under the “chief political engineer,” as a columnist of the Magallat al-Muhandisin once imagined the leader of the July Revolution to be.

3

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

Though he probably never read Durkheim’s De la division du travail social, Nasser’s praxis fulfilled to the point of contradiction its theoretical implica¬ tions of professionalization and corporatism. On the one hand, his policies of rapid industrialization and concomitant recruitment of managers gave the en¬ gineering profession a prestige that it had not achieved since the time of Imhotep’s pyramids. On the other hand, his authoritarian revolution encour¬ aged professional syndicates to resemble a political base that would control the enthusiasms of the new middle class. Using the syndicates this way, he undermined and almost destroyed them in the mid 1960s, and by this time the sultanistic tendencies of his regime diminished the chances of any genu¬ ine reform of the profession. But before we examine the substantive incon¬ gruities between his regime and the development of the engineering profes¬ sion, it is instructive to examine their ironic affinities.

The Inflated Prestige of Engineering In his zeal to erase Marx’s anomic picture of the division of labor in modem society, Durkheim may not have sufficiently stressed the functional need of professions, if they are to develop as corporations, to acquire prestige in the eyes of society. Prestige, after all, has certain bourgeois implications that he may not have wished to underline. The bourgeois characteristics of Egyptian engineering are discussed in chapter 6. What is of interest here is how Nas¬ ser’s policies, by enhancing the prestige of engineering beyond even the rec¬ ognition it is accorded in industrial societies, contributed to its professional image in Egypt. In addition to the problems of obsolescence and career changes, one ob¬ stacle to the professionalization of engineers in industrial societies is the gen¬ erally low prestige they enjoy. At least one commentator on American engi¬ neers has suggested that their functions, though as vital as those of plumbers, are hardly more respected.1 It is tempting, indeed, to hypothesize that the prestige of engineering may vary inversely with the level of the society’s industrialization. Rigorous cross-national comparisons are not possible be¬ cause different prestige studies of professions were conducted by different methods and in different years. From the available data, however, it seems that there may be a negative relationship between per capita national income and the prestige of engineering compared with that of other professions. If this is indeed a cross-national trend, the same data also suggest that the pres¬ tige of engineering in the poorer countries may have been a function of the

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

43

scarcity of engineers in relation to industrial needs or aspirations.2 Thus what makes Egypt a deviant case may be not the dramatic increase of the profes¬ sion’s prestige so much as the fact that it has held its own so long while industrialization has stagnated and the surplus of engineers has become ap¬ parent. The increase in prestige is visible on many levels. Shortly after the Free Officer’s coup, they issued a decree abolishing all ranks and titles of the ancien regime. Engineers apparently then had so little professional self-con¬ fidence that some of them wrote a letter to Magallat al-Muhandisin begging permission to retain the title of muhandis—just as physicians were keeping their title of doctor.3 They need not have worried. The title of muhandis rapidly acquired some of the connotations of the court titles, such as pasha and bey, that the revolution had formally discarded. Within a decade a Cairo taxi driver, for instance, could with equal propriety address his passenger as pasha or muhandis. Since the nineteenth century, if not earlier, the irrigation engineer had en¬ joyed a special position of authority in the countryside, where his ability to turn off the taps, especially under strong central governments, made him feared and respected. But if the rural status of a bashmuhandis was high, his status as a member of the national elite was marginal. Ali Mubarak was not the only observer to have ridiculed the competence of his colleagues in the boondocks.4 Yet successive modernizers, from Muhammad Ali to Lord Cromer, found it difficult to recruit the sons of the elite into their new tech¬ nical schools. In the early nineteenth century engineering could not escape its military stigma; to go to one of the technical schools was like being drafted into the army. In the early twentieth century Cromer’s Polytechnical School was faring little better. He and his public works secretary reported in 1904 that they had to raise the salaries of government engineers and reduce tuition to attract Muslim students.5 By mid century there were plenty of students, but a succession of postwar cabinets did little to improve the material condi¬ tions of government engineers, and salaries had virtually stagnated since the time of Cromer. Perhaps it was their very lack of prestige and social standing that persuaded the engineers in 1946 to accept a few crumbs of prestige in place of salary increases. In part, perhaps, the taxi driver’s new respect for engineers in the Nasser era resulted from an urbanization that ruralized Cairo, inserting rural percep¬ tions of status into the national urban culture.6 But there were other, more compelling reasons for their rise in status. Even as Jacques Berque in the late

44

Engineers and Professional Development

1950s was lamenting about their continued marginality, al-Ahram was al¬ ready underlining the shortages of engineer manpower.7 These shortages were the consequences of two sets of policy decisions: those taken within months of the July Revolution to build the High Dam, a national steel industry, and a variety of other industrial enterprises that in effect set the regime on its statist trajectory of economic development; and the nationalization of the Suez Canal and other foreign enterprises in the wake of the Suez War. The crucial break for engineering came in 1956. Symptomatically, it was an Egyptian army engineer, Mahmud Yunis, who took over the canal instal¬ lations by prearranged signal, just as Nasser pronounced the name of their French builder in a public speech. Not only would an engineer run the canal successfully, but this episode of decolonization triggered a chain of events that within a year virtually achieved, with the wave of further nationaliza¬ tions, the decolonization of the engineering profession. To be sure, the Eco¬ nomic Organization established in 1958 to supervise the nationalized firms would continue to hire some foreign experts. But the process begun tenta¬ tively in the 1920s with the Egyptianization of some technical functions in the civil service and accelerated after the Second World War with a cautious policy of Egyptianizing private businesses, after a tactical retreat beat by the Free Officers when they seized power, culminated in 1956 and 1957 in the withdrawal of a substantial proportion of foreign engineers from Egypt. Even engineering consultancy, pioneered in the 1930s by an Egyptian civil engi¬ neer, William Salim Hanna, in a forest of exclusively foreign competitors, was now Egyptianized by a new generation of professors trained after the Second World War. Naturally the status of engineering soared as engineermanagers, whether from the army corps of engineers, the universities, or from private enterprise, were called on to run the ex-colonial enterprises, the new public sector, and a growing proportion of ministries. The most reliable barometer of a profession’s prestige in Egypt may be the student demand for studying the academic discipline, compared with demand for other disciplines. The centralization of higher education admissions standards since 1961 has facilitated the task of making such comparisons. Every year the local press publishes the minimum thanawiya al-c amma (col¬ lege board) scores required of students entering the respective faculties or colleges. Since the scores cluster by discipline rather than by university, it is possible to rank-order the student demand for the respective disciplines, hence professions, each year by comparing the minimum scores. If, for in¬ stance, students entering engineering faculties each had a score of at least 78

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

45

while those entering medical faculties had to obtain 80 or better, then clearly the demand for medicine—its prestige in the eyes of students—was greater than for engineering. Figure 3.1 presents the rank order for different disci¬ plines from 1961 to 1976. Since academic admissions were not centralized until 1961, with the creation of a Ministry of Higher Education, the available data cannot trace the rise of engineering to the top position. By 1961, how¬ ever, the academic standards demanded of students entering engineering were higher than those for any other discipline. Demand for studying engineering held until 1967; afterward medicine, more lucrative at home and possibly more in demand in other Arab countries, attracted the most gifted students.8 The survey carried out in 1973 partially corroborated these findings. Not only engineering graduates, but also samples of engineering and law students were asked to rank a list of professions in order of their social prestige. Table 3.1 presents the mean rank order for each profession as the respective sam¬ ples evaluated them.9 More interesting than the small differences are the broad areas of agreement expressed by the different types of students.10 Even law students put engineering in third place and relegated the practice of law to the bottom half of the ladder. So also, secondary students surveyed in 1966 indicated a distinct preference for becoming engineers rather than military officers, physicians, policemen, or lawyers." It is surprising, however, that engineering has continued to do so well. If decolonization and, in a lesser measure, new industries created a high de¬ mand for engineers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there seemed to be little use for the bulk of them by the 1970s, except in military service. Com¬ parisons between the Egyptian output of engineers and industrialization, as measured by per capita energy consumption, have already been discussed, as have the manpower projections made in 1963. Possibly, however, the prestige of engineering became self-sustaining, independent of economic opportuni¬ ties, once the better students selsected it instead of most other courses of study. More recent classes simply followed suit. Perceptions of prestige in 1973 seemed relatively independent of those concerning financial opportu¬ nity. In the survey respondents were asked to rate professions according to their financial rewards as well as their prestige. The relationships between the ratings of engineering’s social prestige and its financial rewards were statis¬ tically significant but weak among both students and graduates. Among the graduates, for instance, the profession was ranked fourth on the financial scale, below medicine, as expected, but also below the less prestigious professions of pharmacology and the military. (Tau-beta, measuring the

Engineers and Professional Development

46

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 i

i

Medicine Pharmacology Dentistry Engineering Economics and political science Veterinary science Education Science Commerce Agronomy Letters Law

Figure 3.1 Ranking of Professions, 1961-1976. Source: al-Ahram, September 1961-September 1976.

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

47

Table 3.1 Mean Rank Order of Selected Professions Profession

Engineers (N = 361)

Engineering students (N= 162)

Law students (N = 85)

Medicine

1.6

1.5

1.9

Judiciary

2.7

3.2

1.9

Engineering

2.8

2.3

3.4

Pharmacology

3.8

3.8

3.9

Military

3.8

4.0

3.8

Business administration

4.1

4.0

4.2

Sciences

4.1

4.1

4.0

Law

4.2

4.1

3.9

strength of the relationship between the two ordinal scales, was less than 0.2 of a possible 1.0 for both samples.) Engineers still tended to be better paid on average, however, than most other professionals, except physicians.12 Though the students shared the dis¬ mal prospects of a government job at LE 25 per month, not to mention mili¬ tary service, they enjoyed a marginal advantage over the students of other faculties in the struggle for these jobs, which were in principle assured to all college graduates. As such, the prestigious title of engineer seemed worth protecting, though the prestige was being dissociated from the fulfillment of any vital function.

Nasser’s Corporatist Practices Until the mid 1960s professionalization seemed quite compatible with the practices of the Free Officers’ regime. Shortly after the revolution political parties were ordered to purge themselves, and leaders of professional syndi¬ cates who were closely identified with the parties, such as Osman Muharram, were also retired. The parties were then abolished and, to .fill up political space in classic authoritarian fashion, the Liberation Rally was launched in early 1953.13 Throughout the entire Nasser era, however, the professional syndicates survived; indeed new ones, notably for schoolteachers, scientists, accountants, musicians, and artists of the stage and screen, were officially recognized. From a political standpoint these syndicates served to “contain" the new middle class by offering outlets of controlled participation supple¬ menting those of the Liberation Rally and, subsequently, the National Union,

Engineers and Professional Development

48

renamed the Arab Socialist Union in 1962. In times of domestic political crisis, contending leaders could appeal to the syndicates. In early 1954, for instance, both President Muhammad Nagib and Nasser, his prime minister, were cultivating them. So also, after the breakup in 1961 of the first SyroEgyptian United Arab Republic, the rift between President Nasser and Mar¬ shal Abd al-Hakim Amer over who had lost Syria generated a prolonged, if covert, political crisis. Nasser promptly produced the Arab Socialist Union, but he used the syndicates, along with labor, peasant, and other functional (if defunct) organizations to represent the “popular forces” that were supposed to prepare it.14 In times of international crisis, of course, the syndicates could also be mobilized in support of the national cause. Nasser had one of the writer’s informants examine the Portuguese and other conservative as well as “progressive” authoritarian models like the Yugoslav one, but he never officially espoused a corporatist ideology even if, as he had confessed in his Philosophy of the Revolution, the revolution came increas¬ ingly from above, from the Free Officers, in default of political leadership. The syndicates just happened to be a useful instrument of political control, though there is no word for corporation in the Arabic political lexicon.15 They were virtually the only parapolitical structures to survive the revolution rela¬ tively intact, but they also somewhat embarrassed the architects of the new regime. In the early days the Free Officers did not quite know what to do with the syndicates. To the consternation of the physicians and the agronomists, as well as the engineers, the Ministry of Commerce drafted legislation in 1953 that would have excluded all government employees from their respective syndicates. The ministry also rejected joint employment contracts for engi¬ neers working in the private sector, for fear of discouraging foreign private investment.16 By the end of the year the future of the Syndicate of Egyptian Engineering Professions (SEEP) seemed so bleak that its official organ, the Magallat al-Muhandisin, confined its reporting of engineers’ grievances to reprinting articles from al-Ahram. In those days SEEP could hardly measure up to the bar association or even the Syndicate of Egyptian Medical Professions in prestige or importance. But to a greater extent than the doctors or the lawyers, the engineers enjoyed one major tactical advantage—close ties with the Free Officers through the Army Engineer Corps. From its inception the syndicate had admitted army as well as civilian engineers and indeed had supported officers’ grievances concern¬ ing such sensitive matters as military promotions.17 Furthermore, by training

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

49

there was nothing to distinguish an army engineer officer from his civilian class A counterpart. Each had graduated from an engineering faculty. In fact substantial proportions of university graduates from the classes of 1938, 1939, and 1940 joined the corps, which was founded in 1938. At that time graduates were finding it difficult to obtain civilian jobs, and the corps did not have quite the stigma that most educated Egyptians attached to military service. As university graduates, they were automatically admitted to the syndicate in 1946, and indeed a number who later became prominent in Nas¬ ser’s regime, including Mahmud Yunis, were already running for elections to syndicate office in the late 1940s.18 While none of the members of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was an army engineer, a number were Free Officers who already knew Nasser. Mahmud Yunis had served as his instructor at the War College in 1948, and ten of Nasser’s twenty-three classmates in this advanced seminar for officers were also engineers, including Samir Hilmi, Sidqi Sulayman, Amin Hilmi, and Nazih Amin. When Nasser in turn taught at the War Col¬ lege, he must have had extensive contacts with army engineers, for their skills evidently favored them for advanced military training. Immediately after the Free Officers’ coup, both Mahmud Yunis and Samir Hilmi were attached to the RCC as technical advisors and became the trusted intermedi¬ aries between this supreme body and technical ministers and consultants. After serving a year as deputy leader of the syndicate, Eng. Lt. Col. Yunis was unanimously elected naqib, in December 1953. Within a couple of months an interministerial committee chaired by the undersecretary of com¬ merce reported against excluding government employees from the syndi¬ cates.19 By this time, on the eve of the showdown between Nasser andNagib, SEEP even won a concession that had eluded it for years. Like the children following their fathers’ footsteps into medical faculties, those admitted to faculties of engineering would pay reduced tuition. “Engineers carry the greatest burdens of the Revolution,” Nasser exclaimed, while Nagib also in¬ tended to compliment them by asserting that “they are just like military offi¬ cers.”20 When the showdown finally occurred and Nasser at first beat a tactical retreat, the syndicate cautiously welcomed the government’s promise to re¬ lease political prisoners and abolish martial law and press censorship but did not welcome the promise of a return to constitutional government. Tipped off by Yunis and possibly other engineers, such as Aziz Sidqi, who were in a position to understand Nasser’s tactics, SEEP avoided the mistakes of the bar association, which took a position vigorously favoring Nagib and a constitu-

Engineers and Professional Development

50

tional government against Nasser. As soon as Nasser regained the upper hand (with th help of subsidized demonstrations of labor support for the revolu¬ tion), SEEP could, without contradiction, recommend on March 29 against “the return to party politics with all its disadvantages” and support “the con¬ tinuation of the Revolutionary Command Council as the highest authority in the country”21 The bar association had to pay for its political miscalculations. It virtually ceased to function until 1958, when a presidential decree requiring that can¬ didates for office in professional syndicates be active members in the official political organization ensured that the lawyers’ leadership, however unrepre¬ sentative, would at least be reliable. Protected by army engineers, SEEP did not have to face this problem. If in theory the presidential decree of April 3, 1958, applied to all fourteen of the professional syndicates, in practice the certification of engineer candidates seems to have been a bureaucratic for¬ mality that only occasionally delayed elections until the mid 1960s. The of¬ ficial political organization, after all, was virtually nonexistent. The engineers, in fact, were the vanguard of Nasser’s inadvertently corporatist enterprise. While calling for the RCC to continue to rule the country, they also requested, in addition to a cabinet “responsible to the RCC,” the formation of a consultative body based on professional rather than geographic representation. Though the latter principle prevailed in the election of Nasserist parliaments, the syndicates were allocated official representation in the Liberation Rally and its various reincarnations. SEEP became a model syn¬ dicate. One of its columnists was already setting the proper tone in 1955. “The Revolution has proved itself to be right in all its action. We might as well, therefore, give it our unconditional support because our revolutionaries usually have strong and valid reasons for everything that they do.”22 In return for its fulsome praise of the regime, SEEP gathered in some benefits for engineers. But it could express only the “desires” not the “de¬ mands” of its supposed constituency; strikes and any form of bargaining were out of the question. The closest, in fact, that SEEP came to achieving rec¬ ognition as a bargaining agent was in 1958, when it was granted the right to negotiate contracts for engineers working in the private sector. Unfortunately most of the foreign companies employing engineers were already national¬ ized, and SEEP was unable to negotiate successfully with Sidqi Sulayman, the former army engineer who directed their state holding company. Since most remaining private firms employing engineers were nationalized after 1960, SEEP never negotiated any contracts.

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

51

The biggest favor granted to engineers was a full-time service fee, given in 1957 to all full-time government employees who qualified as engineers. It was supposed to compensate them for not carrying on a private practice, though the LE 6 to 15 per month amounted to considerably less than the engineers had been requesting. Mechanical engineers for instance had asked for a “specialization fee' comparable to the ones received by physicians and army engineers.23 Another favor was the annual government contribution to the syndicate’s pension fund. SEEP was forced in 1953 to cut its pensions by 15 percent when the government reduced its annual subsidy, but the govern¬ ment helped restore the cuts the following year, probably as a reward for good behavior in the Nasser-Nagib affair. Engineers, the Magcillat al-Muhcindisin exulted, “are no longer hindered by the lack of money and lack of appreciation they faced before the Revolution. The achievements of the Rev¬ olution on behalf of the people are great indeed, but the ones for engineers are greater. In return, engineers will do more than their best to play their assigned roles in the development plans.”24 In fact the syndicate had to perform doggedly for every piaster as well as echo its master’s voice. In the case of the pensions, for instance, the Council of Ministers decided at first to balance the books by imposing a levy of four piasters per ton on cement. But the minister of commerce, Hasan Marei, an engineer subsequently serving on so many professional committees that he became known as the joker (of the deck of engineer cards), refused to imple¬ ment the levy because it would adversely affect “the interests of the con¬ sumer.” A syndicate reporter argued that the levy would have amounted to only 0.08 percent of the price of cement, whereas physicians were already receiving 2 percent of the price of medicine. Such discussions persisted irre¬ spective of regime. Two decades later, the government finally agreed to a levy of two piasters per ton, but the editor of Magallat al-Muhandisin pointed out that “our syndicate has failed to develop its resources. The agronomists’ syndicate gets two piasters for every ton of sugar cane and half a piaster for every ton of cotton.”25 In addition to its pension fund, the syndicate was free to build up a coop¬ erative for medical services, a housing cooperative (Engineers City), and summer vacation programs. But the most it could do on bread-and-butter issues was to insist on the correct application of existing decrees. It could remind the government, for instance, that all engineers working full-time were supposed to receive the full-time service fee. It could point out apparent injustices, and it could also represent the grievances of particularly under-

52

Engineers and Professional Development

privileged categories of engineers such as the grade C graduates or a class of university graduates whose promotions were being delayed in a particular agency. The syndicate also occasionally attempted to defend individual en¬ gineers. While he was naqlb Yunis once protested to the minister of justice against the arrest of an engineer for smoking in a courtroom.26 Nevertheless the articulation of such interests, while often underlining divisions within the syndicate, could hardly embarrass the government. The syndicate seems to have had no impact whatsoever on any issues of major significance to the profession. Take that of employing engineers, for instance, in jobs corresponding to their specializations. Faced with shortages of engineers, the government issued an engineers’ employment order in 1955 to fill up positions in the ministries of public works, communications, and municipal and rural affairs. Each succeeding year, without consulting the syndicate, the government simply conscripted the new graduates. As the rec¬ tor of Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering admitted, the universities could not play any role in placing their graduates either: the employment order “must be viewed as military service”—but for an indeterminate pe¬ riod.27 When an architect complained, SEEP’s architectural section replied that the order was part of the government’s general policy and that the syn¬ dicate was doing its best to improve working conditions for engineers. The secretary of the civil engineering section was more sympathetic to his former students and objected in the pages of Magallat al-Muhandisln to the imple¬ mentation of the order, if not to its principle. Officers of the electrical section also protested, but the syndicate could never take an official stand. The pro¬ fessor who had temporarily replaced Yunis as naqlb dared only observe that “the market value of Egyptian engineers is now very high. If we want to know how high, then all we have to do is let the government cancel its employment order and see what happens.”28 When Yunis resumed his lead¬ ership in 1957, there was no question of directly involving the syndicate in the issue. The Magallat al-Muhandisln subsequently congratulated Yunis for his admirable management of the Suez Canal, but complained that he had done nothing for the engineers.29 The syndicate, however, was internally di¬ vided. While electrical engineers opposed the order because they were in great demand, the civil engineers urged that it become permanent, guarantee¬ ing tenure or suitable compenstaion in case of dismissal. Class C engineers pleaded that the order be applied to them.30 After Yunis retired from the syndicate, however, the chief editor of Ma¬ gallat al-Muhandisln directly attacked the application of the order, if not the

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

53

principle. Engineers were being misplaced—radio engineers were being put into airplane factories—and some of the members of the government com¬ mittee which distributed the engineers did not have an engineering back¬ ground and thus were incompetent to sit on the committee, the editor alleged. So, too, the committee ignored the choices of public sector companies choices and the geographic origins of graduates. Finally, in 1963, an editor openly attacked the authoritarian principle of the employment order and sided with the alternative of allowing market forces to prevail. But he then reversed himself and urged instead that the syndicate participate in distributing the engineering graduates, once Nasser officially adopted the principle of “the right man in the right place” to solve Egypt’s growing economic problems.31 Of course the syndicate was never given such responsibilities but instead lost some of the administrative functions it had won in 1946. In 1954 the Ministry of Public Works discontinued the syndicate’s practice of conferring the title of engineer on properly qualified ministry employees on the ground that SEEP was neither an academic nor scientific, but rather a professional organization. In the heat of the Suez conflict the syndicate had expunged all British, French, and Australian engineers from its rolls, but it was not even consulted, much less asked to implement a law passed in 1959 barring all foreigners from practicing without special licenses. By this time at least onequarter of the new class A Egyptian graduates, drafted by the government, were not bothering to enroll in the syndicate. Under Nasser’s authoritarian regime, in fact, virtually the only inducement for joining the syndicate was its pension. Legally all engineers were still supposed to register, but it was up to the various government agencies, not the syndicate, to decide who received the other salary increments associated with technical engineering functions. While the syndicate continued to enroll the vast majority of engineers, real participation in its activities seems to have declined. Attendence at the annual general assembly was usually poor; in 1961, for instance, only 871 engineers bothered to turn up for elections— two-thirds of the turnout in 1948 although its membership was three times as large. When Yunis was first elected naqib in 1953, very few civilians had joined the 300 officers of the army engineer corps in celebrating his victory. The election of the naqib was rarely contested, and though internal rivalries between the different classes and specializations occasionally stimulated par¬ ticipation at the annual assembly, even the rivalries were losing their intensity over time. Since the educational system was no longer producing class B and class C engineers, the membership became more homogeneous.

Engineers and Professional Development

54

Corporatist practices, then, hardly promoted substantive professionaliza¬ tion, however serviceable the syndicate tried to be for the regime, but the external signs were preserved. Engineers acquired both the prestige and the numbers to be respected and influential in the larger society. The regime even subsidized the syndicate’s construction of a vast headquarters next to those of the old Royal Society. Preserving privileges for a specialized elite was quite compatible with an authoritarian revolution from above and an expanded state apparatus. The shift to socialism after 1960, however, reflected shifts in the regime’s power structure that would endanger the form and further undermine the substance of professionalization.

Sultanic Socialism Nasser was not suddenly converted to Arab Socialism when he accelerated the nationalization of private Egyptian firms by signing the July 1961 social¬ ist decrees. In Robert Mabro’s words, The demise of the private modem sector was brought about by forces which operated from the start and rapidly gathered momentum rather than by fundamental changes in Nasser’s attitudes. The capitalist bourgeoisie, considering its composition, its political sympathies, and the economic power concentrated in its hands, did not stand great chances of survival under his regime. He moved against this bourgeoisie when the circum¬ stances seemed favorable and when the pressures partly built up by his own policies—egyptianization, State involvement in the economy, estab¬ lishment of a public sector, planning and control—appeared to reduce the range of choices.32 “Socialism” was a useful slogan justifying tactics against a potential opposi¬ tion to his regime. The nationalizations affected primarily families that had been influential under the ancien regime; the measures also produced state capital for new industries. Although the introduction of socialism reflected a shift in tactics rather than a basic change in Nasser’s political strategy, it also marked a transfor¬ mation of his regime. While the state—which was consuming over half of the gross national product by the late 1960s—seemed to be absorbing the economy and society, Nasser was absorbing the state. Instead of being a first among equals in a relatively cohesive and effective corps of Free Officers, he was becoming an absolute ruler. As the state apparatus grew, his rule became increasingly patrimonial, resembling the sultanic variant of highly concen¬ trated personal power depicted by Max Weber. And as Weber had observed,

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

55

the political tension inherent in sultanism is the threat to the sultan posed by his praetorian guard. Just as sultanism tends to generate a praetorian counterweight, so in Egypt the tensions among the Free Officers contributed to the emergence of a sultan. Originally Nasser strengthened his hand over other members of the RCC, notably Zakaria Muhi al-Din, Abd al-Latif Baghdadi, and Kamal al-Din Husayn, by delegating control of the army to his close personal friend and fellow RCC member, Abd al-Hakim Amer. But “Like the heroes of the Greek tra¬ gedies,” in the words of another close associate, “it was Nasser’s fate to escape from the hold of one center of power only to fall into the grasp of another.”33 When he wished in 1961, just after the Syro-Egyptian scission, to cashier certain top commanders for disobeying orders, Amer, who had been Egypt’s proconsul in Syria, refused on the grounds that he was as guilty as they. He then used the Yemen War as a pretext for not carrying out Nasser’s instructions.34 Temporary compromises were reached, but Nasser distrusted Amer’s personal following in the army and concocted a Presidential Council, consisting of the top ten Free Officers of the regime and only two civilians, to reaffirm collective leadership and assert control over top military promo¬ tions and dismissals. In order not to burn his bridges with his old friend, however, he did not attend the meeting in early 1963 at which the issue of the military promotions was raised. Instead he placed Baghdadi in charge with instructions to pass a resolution authorizing the council to control all appointments at field grade levels. Husayn, who objected to Arab Socialism, joined Amer in unsuccessfully opposing the resolution.35 The field marshal promptly resigned, followed shortly thereafter by several top army, navy, and air force commanders. Rather than risk a civil war, Nasser patched up his relations with Amer in subsequent weeks. In 1964 he made him first vicepresident. But the reconciliation merely intensified the regime’s sultanic tendencies. Nasser’s most capable administrator and senior Free Officer, Baghdadi, re¬ signed in disgust at the nominal rise, rather than dismissal, of the upstart field marshal. So also did Husayn, for different reasons. Indeed, once Muhi alDin was removed from the premiership in 1966, little remained of Nasser’s former inner circle other than Amer. Second-string leaders such as Ali Sabri could move into the vacuum, but as mere staff subordinates rather than as genuine collaborators, as Baghadadi and Muhi al-Din had been. Since 1961, too, Nasser multiplied his intelligence services and relied on a variety of

Engineers and Professional Development

56

secret personal networks to keep tabs on Amer. Socialism, then, was associ¬ ated in practice with increasingly sultanic rule. Within such an environment of mutual suspicion, the Arab Socialist Union’s prospects were never bright. From Nasser’s point of view, one of its primary functions in 1962 was to penetrate the army, but the army instead infiltrated its youth organization.36 When Sabri tried in 1966 to activate the Arab Socialist Union by struggling against “feudalism,” Amer joined the campaign, permitting his officers to check Sabri’s. Nasser tried to keep con¬ trol by balancing the contending clienteles, with the help of his secretary and intelligence aide, Sami Sharaf, but Sharaf himself then acquired an influential network. After the elimination of Amer in the wake of the June War, Nasser’s Rasputin in turn checked Sabri.37 Sultanism may in the end be endangered not so much by the praetorian guard as by an immobilism resulting from competition among the personal networks needed by the ruler to govern and to protect himself. Escaping the control of any organization, these networks may be taken over by notables in the way that Weber describes the takeover by honoratiores of the liturgical structures established to meet the ruler’s political and economic needs.38 Though the notables are individually subservient to the ruler, their networks, like Weber’s satrapies, may acquire sufficient resources to evade or at least reinterpret the meaning of his directives. How the practice of socialism con¬ tributed to the notables’ resources, hence strengthening their clientage net¬ works, is discussed in chapter 6. The networks of Nasser’s associates and their friends proliferated and checked one another. While informal relationships play crucial roles in any political or administrative system,39 they carried a considerably heavier func¬ tional load in Nasser’s Egypt than in more institutionalized systems. The shilla, which originally had connoted a circle of friends, gradually became the principal unit of Egyptian political life, for authoritarian rule blotted out all other forms of political memory or identification. The fact, too, that most of the regime’s major political choices were made by 1954 obviated the need for further identification. The personalization of politics was reflected in po¬ litical recruitment. When the Revolutionary Command Council co-opted a key civilian, the choice usually had a political as well as a personal ration¬ ale.40 By the late 1960s the only criteria seemed to be professional compe¬ tence and personal relationships with people such as Sharaf. For lack of al¬ ternatives, the shilla had become the functional equivalent of a political party. Even more ominously, the egalitarian connotations of the term were being

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

57

lost; for politically informed Egyptians the shilla, at least in its political con¬ text, usually presupposed a patron to hold the circle together. Thus concep¬ tually it became possible to conceive of the Egyptian system, behind the imposing hierarchies of organizational charts, as consisting of pyramids of patron-client clusters topped by key shilla-s. Under these new political conditions it is not difficult to see why socialism might endanger the corporatist organization of the professions without seri¬ ously undercutting the most privileged and prestigious ones. Originally Nas¬ ser celebrated his conversion to Arab socialism by freely attacking the syn¬ dicates. Though they were fully represented on the Preparatory Committee convened in 1961 to define Egypt’s new system, other members of the com¬ mittee lambasted them, and Nasser himself set the tone: “There is no syndi¬ cate which doesn’t have reactionaries in it. Why do syndicates exist? In whose interests? Do they include owners as well as workers? Especially the professional syndicates—whose interests are they defending? The matter re¬ mains obscure.”41 He accused the professional syndicates, notably the engi¬ neers, of selfishly pursuing special interests, and in front of the schoolteach¬ ers' chief patron, Husayn, he also questioned whether teachers should continue to have a syndicate. One member of the committee cited rivalries between the professions as a reason for rejecting them as a basis for political representation. Another argued that the syndicates were “a hidden manifes¬ tation” of the old party system and “also flourish in capitalist societies rep¬ resenting the selfish interests of their members.”42 If only a minority insisted that they be abolished because they were “similar to a medieval guild system” and that their members be incorporated into trade unions, there was consen¬ sus that they should be changed “into organizations that are compatible with socialism.”43 Until 1966, however, no firm decisions were taken. In 1962 they were not permitted to hold their annual assemblies and elections, while Nasser consid¬ ered abolishing them altogether. In mute protest the Magallat al-Muhandisin published the reports of SEEP’s sections and general assembly of the preced¬ ing year, but influential Free Officers such as Hilmi Said, who had replaced Yunis as SEEP’s principal protector, were no longer in evidence. Whether or not it is true that the naqib, a civil servant in the Ministry of Irrigation, was placed under house arrest for refusing to supply names of engineers to serve Egypt in the Yemen War, the story is suggestive of the syndicate’s plight. In any event, normal activities were resumed and elections held on schedule in 1963. Until 1966 there was no serious interference with syndicate elections.

58

Engineers and Professional Development

The only provision for control by the Arab Socialist Union was the condition, already spelled out in 1958, that candidates be “active members.” Once Sabri took charge of the Arab Socialist Union, however, interference increased. Dr. Nur al-Din Tarraf, a conservative former minister who enjoyed close ties with the medical syndicate, remained the ASU “coordinator” of the syndicates. During 1965-1966 the picture was confused because he tried to protect them while other ASU officials were calling for purges and “real cores” of leadership “to spread socialist awareness among fellow engineers” and presumably other professionals.44 But after a three-year absence from office, Said returned as naqlb in 1966 to transform the syndicate into a “so¬ cialist beehive” that was expected to “provide the socialist basis for engi¬ neering activities and thought.”45 Sabri, claiming that the Arab Socialist Union had not had time to organize relationships with the syndicates, prom¬ ised that “if all of the syndicates are well organized, there will be no need for the political organization to look after them.”46 At the end of the year, as SEEP celebrated its twentieth anniversary, he recognized that the syndicates had a role to play distinct from that of trade unions. By this time most of the professional syndicates had indeed been “con¬ verted” to socialism, even as Nasser signaled his support for Sabri by con¬ verting verbally from Arab socialism to scientific socialism (but not Marx¬ ism).47 Converting the syndicates meant not only purging them of “reactionary” leaders but also having each of them design new laws redefining their mem¬ bership and internal organization. In general the criteria for entering the profession were loosened, and the representation of different categories within it was rendered more democratic. The lawyers were hardest hit by these reforms. They were forced to more than double the membership of their syndicate by admitting all graduates of faculties of law who worked in the legal departments of public sector com¬ panies. On the principle of one man, one vote, the public sector lawyers then voted into office the candidate for naqlb favored by the Arab Socialist Union. University-trained agronomists, who had lost their battle back in 1949 to keep technical secondary graduates out of the syndicate, now lost their legal right to two-thirds of the seats on the executive board. In an excess of zeal they even made active membership in the Arab Socialist Union a condition for membership in the syndicate.48 Pharmacists who owned their businesses were denied the quota they requested to avoid being submerged in board elections by a majority of government employees. Primary schoolteachers were awarded majority control of their syndicate at the expense of their more

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

59

highly qualified colleagues. The scientists were prevailed upon to admit a small number of laboratory technicians to their syndicate. The syndicates, however, of the two most prestigious professions, medi¬ cine and engineering, were virtually unaffected. The only leaders advocating that the doctors’ syndicate include nurses, orderlies, and the like were leftists who were trying to outflank Sabri and his socialist clientele within the profes¬ sion. In the end they joined the silent majority in opposing any significant changes in the law of 1969 that reorganized the medical profession. The engineers were even more recalcitrant than the doctors. Unlike the agrono¬ mists (“agricultural engineers”), they persisted in keeping graduates of tech¬ nical secondary institutes from joining the syndicate, while admitting on a strictly provisional basis, without voting rights, the graduates of new higher institutes who claimed that their degrees were the equivalent of the univer¬ sity’s bachelor of science. Their adamant opposition to admitting the techni¬ cal school graduates paralyzed all efforts until 1974 to amend the law of 1946 that had organized the profession. Sabri obviously preferred to avoid a frontal collision with these syndicates, though he did not hesitate to purge individuals, including the naqib of the medical syndicate.49 His tactic, in retrospect, appears to have been to culti¬ vate individual syndicate leaders, to encourage other political allies to run for office, and so acquire a personal following within the existing structures. The extent to which he infiltrated the professional syndicates can be inferred from a comparison of the boards elected in 1971, after President Sadat ousted him from power, with their predecessors. The available data are summarized in table 3.2. Turnover was obviously highest among the doctors and journalists. Table 3.2 The Syndicate Elections of 1971 Board members Syndicate

Reelected

New

Ratio of new to reelected

Journalists

2

11

5.5

Doctors

2

11

5.5

Engineers

9

22

2.4

14

26

1.9

3

5

1.7

Agronomists

18

20

1.1

Lawyers

13

8

0.6

Schoolteachers Scientists

60

Engineers and Professional Development

whose new boards each contained eleven new members and only two from the previous administration. Apparently they had been the most heavily infil¬ trated syndicates and hence were liberated to the greatest extent by the new elections. SEEP, too, was infiltrated to a greater extent than the other syndi¬ cates. In fact, with the exception of the journalists and the schoolteachers, whose political potential must have attracted Sabri’s attention, the degree of apparent infiltration correlates remarkably well with the prestige order of the professions as defined by college board examinations in figure 3.1. Journal¬ ists evidently had been among the most important political targets, and their syndicate, too, had survived socialism relatively intact, without admitting functionaries of the government broadcasting and information services. SEEP, then, formally survived the Nasser era, but it became a paper orga¬ nization. If in theory it was politicizing its members rather than enhancing the image of the profession or expressing particular interests, in practice few engineers were responding to the mobilization efforts. In 1969 a syndicate official complained that many positions were vacant because engineers were not bothering to run for office. Younger ones, in particular, were not filling their allotted seats.50 Such a state of apathy would have been inconceivable two decades earlier. Engineers who had practiced less than fifteen years were clearly uninspired by scientific socialism. So also, the naqib had difficulty mobilizing engineers in the provinces. Caustically the Magallat al-Muhandisln described some of his efforts in 1969. “At every meeting he ended his talk with tea or dinner. ... the Sayyid al-Naqlb announced that the mother syndicate had given some money to the provincial council to carry out its mission ... as if nothing had happened—as is proven by the councils asking photographers to take pictures of these meetings.”51 Meanwhile Sabri reaf¬ firmed his support for the professional syndicates in order to persuade mem¬ bers to pay their dues. The decline of the syndicates, and SEEP in particular, did not reflect the influence of socialist ideology so much as the impotence of the Arab Socialist Union. Socialist reform least affected the most prestigious syndicates; despite scientific socialism, Nasser did not alter the elitist rules governing member¬ ship in the engineering or medical professions, much less nationalize medi¬ cine or even engineering consulting offices. In this negative sense engineer¬ ing continued to enjoy a marginal affinity with sultanic socialism. Political control of the syndicates operated as in the past, through the personal con¬ nections of professionals with political leaders. The major difference under Sabri was that the political leadership was considerably weaker than in the

Selective Affinities with Nasserism

61

earlier period following the revolution. The weakness was highlighted by President Sadat’s showdown with Sabri in May 1971. It was sufficient for Sadat to prosecute ninety-one individuals to break the secret organization that Sabri had developed as the vanguard within the mass organization.52 Engineering enjoyed other marginal affinities with sultanic socialism, but they are equally irrelevant to professional development. From the standpoint of the profession substantive problems far outweighed that of defining the formal status of engineers. The regime did not cope with them for the same reason that it did not reform the syndicate. The paradox of sultanism was its limited power, hemmed in by the personal networks it apparently required for survival. While Nasser could act on big issues, especially in international affairs, he often could not act on secondary ones. As politics became more personalized, he tended to postpone decisions or subordinate them to preserv¬ ing or balancing his networks. Even on the biggest domestic issue, that of controlling the army, he temporized, and Baghdadi resigned rather than play the game of equilibrium. The loss of Baghdadi in particular encouraged fur¬ ther temporization in virtually all fields related to economic development. Substantive professional development in the areas of education and research would be discouraged by such a system.

4 Engineering could live up to the artificial functionalist model of a profession in Egypt better than in industrial societies partly because of the paralyzing effects of academic import substitution. The general structure of engineering education changed little after 1926, when a group of Swiss professors thor¬ oughly reorganized the Royal School of Engineering and helped train their Egyptian successors. Even at that time the Swiss recognized that their curric¬ ulum put extraordinary stress on engineering specializations and workshop experience. In Egypt, students of engineering have no opportunities, as their col¬ leagues have in England and other countries, of being trained for practices in places other than the School of Engineering. . . . This unfortunate sit¬ uation prevents students from undergoing an apprenticeship, and the School is compelled, in the circumstances, to consider not only the sci¬ entific preparation of students, but, at the same time, their introduction into practical engineering. The graduates, who, in their majority, are ap¬ pointed to Governmental jobs, must be able to do, straightaway, useful practical engineering work. . . . [Consequently] the School was forced to provide [workshops] within its premises.' Perpetuated at Cairo University, the pattern was also reproduced at the newer engineering faculties so far as resources permitted. To be sure, new speciali¬ zations and departments were added, but within a structure emphasizing spe¬ cializations rather than basic science. Even the teaching of science reflected the corporate character of engineering: the science course usually had to be taught inside the faculty of engineering by an instructor whose undergraduate degree was in engineering not science. A group of American engineering professors sent to evaluate Egyptian en¬ gineering education in 1960 was appalled by the number of splinter depart¬ ments and specializations, which “tends to reduce universities to the level of trade schools.” In industrial chemistry, for instance, students were being trained for particular industries though “these ideas were dominant in the United States thirty years ago,” while in mechanical engineering “specialized courses . . . [were] designed not only for a particular industry but for branches of each industry.” Despite a proliferation of graduate programs, dis¬ cussions with teaching staffs “indicated little interest except in very applied research.” The tradition of workshop training was being perpetuated on the graduate level, though “one does not or at least one should not use graduate engineers to do shop work.”2 The concern of the Americans was overstated though understandable at that time. Previously the emphasis in U.S. engineering education had been shifting from specialization to basic science. It was believed that the highly

The Politics of Technical Education

63

specialized engineer tended to become obsolete whereas the graduate with a broad scientific background could adapt more easily to new technologies. Recently, however, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been lead¬ ing the way back to workshop training—producing engineers who are more employable than the graduates of other engineering schools whose curricula remain frozen in the sixties. In Egypt the traditional emphases on workshop training and specialization have never changed, a fact that has contributed to the engineer’s corporate identity by perpetuating a relatively fixed body of knowledge.3 The engineering graduates and teachers surveyed in 1973 appeared to ac¬ cept the underlying principles of the system. They were asked whether the balance in the current curriculum between theoretical and applied subjects was satisfactory or, if not, where more emphasis should be placed. They were also asked whether there should be more specializations, whether the current emphasis on specialization should be reduced in favor of giving students a broader background, or whether the current system was satisfactory. Table 4.1 compares the responses of the representative sample of graduates with those of the teaching staff. Only 25 and 30 percent of the sample respectively favored a more theoretical and general curriculum, and the view of the in¬ structors did not differ appreciably from those of the graduates employed outside the universities. More surprising were the views of the eleven West¬ ern-trained Ph.D.’s among the panel of instructors. Six of them favored more Table 4.1 Views on Curriculum Reform Views

Sample

Professors

Theoretical versus applied More theory

25%

22%

Status quo

36

59

More applied

39

19

Total

100 (N= 395)

100(V = 27)

Specialization versus general More specializations

44

46

Status quo

26

14

More general

30

39

Total

100 (N = 394)

99 (W = 28)

Engineers and Professional Development

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general engineering and science education, but only two advocated more the¬ ory.4 The Anglo-Swiss engineering pedagogy of the 1920s had apparently been institutionalized. This incremental response to technological change was also in tune with the broader rhythm of Egyptian modernization displayed in ideational, eco¬ nomic, and social as well as pedagogic spheres. Patchwork solutions juxta¬ posing the new and the traditional usually prevailed over synthetic responses, which would have required a radical reworking of habits and traditions. For instance, modern medical and engineering faculties were created at al-Azhar University in a way that left the traditional curriculum intact. Similarly, in¬ dustrial showcases functioned" independently of the rest of the economy; and in the realm of ideas, the case for Islamic reform relied on a transposing of traditional theology,5 while eclectic Arab and eventually scientific socialisms were tacked on to a nationalist ideology inspired largely by Islam. Perhaps the method of juxtaposition could have produced engineers prop¬ erly qualified to meet Egypt’s economic needs, but only on two conditions: a slow rate of technological change and nearly perfect planning to match the specializations with the needs of industries, government authorities, and the like. Unfortunately, the specialized segments proliferated and expanded quite independently of Egyptian needs, signaling an anomic division of labor that Durkheim’s corporations in theory were supposed to prevent. All pretenses of educational planning failed because neither the universities nor the plan¬ ners could restrict the numbers of students entering faculties of engineering. Egypt, like many industrialized societies including the United States, was already in need of applied technicians in the early days of the revolution to assist its academically trained engineers, and industrial expansion soon ex¬ panded demand for them. In 1955 the first of eleven higher institutes was established to train technicians and technical instructors. In theory these in¬ stitutes were to have channeled high school graduates into industry or into secondary-level technical instruction after providing three to four years of specialized training. Had the policy been properly implemented, the Egyptian educational system would have been producing two fairly distinct types of engineer, the research or design-oriented university graduate and the applied engineer fit for industry. The higher institutes would have alleviated the pres¬ sure on university faculties of engineering to admit vast numbers of high school graduates by channeling away some of them and perhaps even damp¬ ening the flow, by encouraging children to enroll in technical secondary in¬ stitutes rather than high schools.

The Politics of Technical Education

65

By stressing workshop experience and micro specialization, however, the universities tended to produce armchair technicians rather than engineers of a theoretical persuasion. The higher institutes, too, tended to copy the uni¬ versities and borrow their teaching staff. In the end there was so little to distinguish them from the universities, other than the watered-down quality of instruction, that in 1968 their degrees became formally equivalent to uni¬ versity diplomas, marking the failure of the experiment. Nasser’s planners fell victim to the same academic inflation that had un¬ dermined earlier efforts to train technicians. Originally the Giza Polytechnical School became part of Cairo University, and then the Higher Institute of Applied Engineering, which was supposed to train technicians, became an¬ other faculty of engineering, at Ain Shams University. Founded at Boulac in 1839, this industrial arts school had been reorganized in 1932 to meet the demand for technicians stimulated by new industries.6 By 1937 it included an applied technology section open to high school students who had completed their first baccalaureat. In 1940 the program was lengthened from four to five years, so that its postwar graduates received a total of only one year less schooling than graduates of the university faculties of engineering. In 1946 the Higher Institute tightened its entrance requirements to admit only students having their second baccalaureat in science, as was required of entrants into the university faculties. Much to the regret of engineers aware of Egypt’s greater need for technicians,7 it was then only a small step to incorporate the school as a regular engineering faculty in 1950. Meanwhile the industrial arts schools at Giza and Alexandria that had produced class C engineers were also discontinued. The higher institutes created in the mid 1950s were designed to fill the gap between faculties of engineering and technical secondary schools, which attracted only students who could not get into the regular high schools leading to the university. The underlying cause of academic inflation was no mystery. As Harbison and Ibrahim explained in 1958, “the government had a habit of making a price list for school certificates and diplomas. This meant that a person with a particular certificate . . . was entitled to a certain salary and grade in gov¬ ernment service irrespective of the nature of his work or his ability to perform the tasks assigned. Promotion was also geared to certificates and degrees.”8 Quite understandably, then, Egyptian parents tried to send their children to university degree-granting institutions. Whether in 1960 or two decades ear¬ lier, shunting them off to a higher institute inevitably met resistance. In the postwar period Egypt’s weak and corrupt political system followed the path

Engineers and Professional Development

66

of least resistance against the students of the Higher Institute of Applied Engineering when, encouraged by extremist movements, they took to the streets to demand a university. Ironically Nasser’s ostensibly powerful bu¬ reaucratic-authoritarian system followed the same path, although it did not have to contend with overt mass pressures.

The Politics of Degree Inflation The case of technical education reveals the regime’s growing indecision, at least on secondary domestic issues, as sultanic tendencies developed. The story begins in 1961, the year Nasser turned to Arab socialism and national¬ ized most of the large enterprises remaining in private Egyptian hands. De¬ spite his declining influence, Kamal al-Din Husayn was able to promote his friend Abdel Aziz Sayyid, who had earlier helped him purge the university of leftists, to the newly created post of minister of higher education. Natu¬ rally the new minister acquired an interest in maintaining the higher institutes that his ministry had inherited. They may have been an even more important source of ministerial influence than the more autonomous universities. In¬ deed, a subsequent minister of higher education privately confessed that he opposed turning them over to industry lest his ministry be abolished. Per¬ haps, then, Dr. Sayyid had an administrative interest in inflating the academic status of the institutes. He would also soon acquire a political interest, for as his conservative patron’s influence with Nasser waned, Dr. Sayyid needed the favor of Sami Sharaf, the president’s private secretary, to stay in power. This intelligence operative would be far more sensitive to murmers of student and parental discontent than to problems of manpower planning. In June 1961, shortly before Dr. Sayyid became minister, Vice-President and Planning Minister Abd al-Latif Baghdadi established two Permanent Committees of senior civil servants and industrial managers to study Egypt’s manpower needs. After deliberating, as their rapporteur Eng. General Abd al-Magid al-Abd recalls, for three thousand man-hours, the committees con¬ fidentially recommended in December 1962 that the higher institutes tempo¬ rarily continue their three-year programs, that shorter courses be introduced to convert more of the current crop of high school graduates into technicians, and that technical high school and on-the-job training eventually replace the higher institutes and shorter academic programs. Though he attended at least one of these deliberations, Dr. Sayyid refused to commit himself to the rec-

The Politics of Technical Education

67

ommendations. By the time they were finalized, he had already confidentially approved adding a year to the programs of some of the higher institutes. By the autumn of 1962, in fact. Dr. Sayyid was probably operating in a policy vacuum. Vice-President Baghdadi still had too much residual influ¬ ence to be contradicted publicly, yet Nasser had already relieved him of eco¬ nomic planning and retired him, together with Husayn and other remnants of the original Revolutionary Command Council, to the Presidential Council. Baghdadi, however, was probably the only leader with sufficient weight, ad¬ ministrative skill, and sensitivity to economic problems to have implemented unpopular measures of educational and manpower planning. The only incum¬ bent minister who might have had a direct interest in seeing the Baghdadi recommendations implemented was Aziz Sidqi, the minister of industry who had just reorganized the public sector. Although he enjoyed Nasser’s favor for longer periods of time than almost any other civilian, Sidqi had also made numerous enemies within Nasser’s military entourage. He could not afford to become involved in the maelstrom of education politics and did not support Baghdadi’s initiative, though he did not prevent representatives of his minis¬ try from sitting on the Permanent Committees. Ali Sabri, appointed prime minister in September 1962, had no commitment either to Baghdadi or to manpower planning, and Nasser’s inner circle was probably too preoccupied with potential dissidence in the army at this time to worry about such a minor issue. By keeping the Baghdadi-Abd recommendations secret, the govern¬ ment enabled Dr. Sayyid to follow the path of least resistance. Within a year, however, Dr. Sayyid abruptly reversed his policy concerning the higher institutes. During the summer of 1963 Nasser ordered him to admit to the university all high school graduates qualified for higher education, though the ministry’s admissions bureau calculated that the number would exceed by half the number of places originally allocated. Suddenly educa¬ tional planning took on an added urgency. Finding space for the additional students, much less professors and classes, required imagination. The only practicable way seemed to be to reduce the number of years of instruction in the higher institutes and to channel more students into them. Accordingly, Dr. Sayyid set up new committees to study manpower needs in the different disciplines. Baghdadi’s collaborator, General al-Abd, was included on the engineering committee, and consequently the manpower projections of the original committees were rediscovered, published, and eventually even dis¬ cussed in Parliament. Egypt would need an annual average of 8,100 techni-

Engineers and Professional Development

68

dans, but the higher institutes were presently graduating only 215; the uni¬ versities, by contrast, were well within sight of the required annual output of 2,650 engineers.9 Predictably, the committee on engineering education rec¬ ommended that the higher institutes cut back instruction to three years and that their enrollment be rapidly expanded to ease the pressure on university engineering schools. Dr. Sayyid accordingly went ahead with his plans to expand a system of three-year higher institutes. The Executive Council approved his ministry’s budget, and the ministers of industry and public works, Dr. Sayyid subse¬ quently claimed to Parliament, “asked us to supply them with any amount of technicians we can supply ... at salaries exceeding those offered to new graduates of the university engineering schools.’’10 In the euphoria no one seems to have asked where the teachers would come from. As it turned out, the existing institutes were staffed mainly by moonlighting university profes¬ sors, so that sharp distinctions between respective curricula could not be made. But there were other more immediate obstacles to implementing the new scheme. In early 1964 Nasser disbanded the Presidential Council and promoted Marshal Amer to first vice-president. Baghdadi resigned, feeling Nasser had betrayed him. Though none of the ministers directly concerned with technical education were changed, Ali Sabri’s new government no longer seemed to have the will to make controversial reforms. Astonishingly, Parliament, which was usually a rubber stamp, was permitted to debate the issue of higher technical education and even to exercise some influence. Dr. Sayyid’s tribulations began in May, when he presented his ministry’s budget to the National Assembly. One deputy, who bore him a personal grudge unrelated to educational issues, questioned him, and then two others raised points of information about the reform of the higher institutes. Speaker Anwar Sadat, who would not have permitted discussion that might displease Nasser, allowed the question period to blossom into a free-wheeling debate.11 Evidently the new Parliament was supposed to project an image of public participation, and technical education was expendable. All sorts of extra¬ neous criticisms were made. One deputy argued that the new policy would hurt Egypt’s African relationships by preventing African students at the High Technical Institute of Shoubra from receiving bachelor’s degrees. With the backing of twenty deputies, Sadat’s brother-in-law requested that Parliament devote a special session to problems of higher education. Though the full dress debate was postponed until December, Sadat meanwhile persuaded

The Politics of Technical Education

69

Nasser, apparently against Prime Minister Sabri’s wishes, to delay signing the formal decree instituting the reform until it could be discussed further in Parliament. The final debate, which lasted three sessions, was summed up by Speaker Sadat as “a glorious victory to our socialist and democratic regime.”12 By the end of the second session Dr. Sayyid had to agree to submit the reforms, which his ministry was already implementing, to the National Assembly’s Education and Sciences Committee for approval. By the third session, the minister was no longer in evidence, and Prime Minister Sabri promised to postpone the reforms for a year and refer them to a new interministerial com¬ mittee on manpower. Though no formal precedent was established for making governments responsible to Parliament, Sadat and Sabri made a pretense of it. Dr. Sayyid lost his job, and the reform was blocked—permanently, as it turned out. Both seem to have been the victim of Nasser’s need in 1964, after formal reconciliation with Marshal Amer, to develop counterweights to the army. In 1964 the effort was focused on building up the appearance of a strong National Assembly; after 1965 the focus shifted to the Arab Socialist Union, and Parliament was again docile. Parental and student pressures could not have been very great in early 1964, when only 4,345 students were enrolled in the higher technical insti¬ tutes. Deputies opposed to the reform, however, cast their argument in the wider but irrelevant context of a “socialist” attack on professional syndicates. Syndicates were sinister because they defended special professional privi¬ leges. Syndicates like SEEP were especially notorious because they made distinctions within the profession between different kinds of graduates. Therefore the reform should be rejected because it would create new distinc¬ tions, in addition to those that already differentiated class A from class B and C engineers. Since Nasser still distrusted the syndicates, such arguments were acceptable. Sadat drafted the resolution concluding the National Assem¬ bly’s debate on technical higher education in a language calculated to side¬ track future discussion from reforms of substance to those concerning the syndicates. “The problem of the university and higher education in reality results from the existence of unjust laws, the laws governing the professional syndicates, which stand as a barrier to equality and justice among the mem¬ bers of each profession, by discriminating against certain groups and granting special privileges to others.”13 In practice, however, the Egyptians most knowledgeable about the politics of technical education agree that the most determined opponents of the reform of the higher institutes were politically

Engineers and Professional Development

70

connected parents who wanted their children who had been unable to get into university to enjoy the same privileges as their more fortunate peers. Delays in making any reform of course meant that more students, parents, and pos¬ sibly the administrators and teachers of the higher institutes would acquire a vested interest in adding years of schooling and rendering them equivalent to university schools of engineering. By 1968 the institutes enrolled 9,352 stu¬ dents. The ministry of Higher Education bowed to the inevitable, recognized their five-year programs to be equivalent to university, and awarded bachelor of science degrees to the higher institute graduates. These new “engineers” were admitted provisionally into the SEEP in 1966 and granted full member¬ ship in 1974. Meanwhile, after Dr. Sayyid’s demise, discussions of technical education and training were halfheartedly resumed. The interministerial committee on manpower created by Sabri survived, though its first chairman quit after a few months to join Ali Sabri in the Arab Socialist Union. Ministers of higher education had inordinately short careers: there were four of them during Nas¬ ser’s final five years. Conversion of the higher institutes was no longer polit¬ ically practicable, but the problem of training technicians needed in Egyptian industry, however much the economy faltered after 1964, would not go away. Alternatives to the original three-year higher institutes had to be found. In two lengthy articles published by al-Ahram, Rushdi Said, a university professor active in the Arab Socialist Union, articulated a “new philosophy” of higher education to justify the inflation of higher institutes to university status yet solve the problems of training technicians. After the ninth grade the technicians should receive a special three- to four-year course preparing them for industry. To encourage good students to enter such programs, how¬ ever, the higher institutes and universities would have to open their doors to graduates of these technical high school programs.14 In fact this was the only novel aspect of Dr. Said’s proposals. On past experience, however, opening such a loophole could be expected to encourage a stampede of students hith¬ erto barred from higher education. The new philosophy critical of elitist con¬ ceptions of higher education therefore tended to be a recipe for an even greater inflation of university diplomas. But Dr. Said’s plan was not to be applied. Faced with serious financial difficulties, with foreign currency reserves on the verge of vanishing, Nasser called on Zakaria Muhi al-Din in 1965 to form a government committed to austerity. The new minister of higher education, an academic who was related

The Politics of Technical Education

71

to the prime minister by marriage, would have favored relieving pressures on the universities to expand. In addition, the new minister of industry, Mustafa Khalil, showed considerably more concern for technical training than his predecessor. But despite close personal ties with the prime minister, he, too, was unable to develop a policy. Evidently it was politically impossible for a government to advocate academic deflation as well as austerity. After less than a year of austerity, in fact, Nasser dismissed both Muhi al-Din and these close personal allies in favor of a new government headed by a politically neutral former army engineer. Perhaps it was Nasser’s intention to upgrade the Arab Socialist Union by making the government appear more “technical.” But of course Ali Sabri’s oganization still could not implement the new phi¬ losophy or any other educational reform, though one of Sabri’s followers would, as minister of higher education after the June War, open up the flood¬ gates to the universities. Meanwhile in 1966, five years after Baghdadi’s initial efforts, Nasser fi¬ nally accorded political priority to reforming higher education to meet man¬ power needs—even while, characteristically, stressing in his official speeches that education be “classless” and “open to everyone and for everyone.”15 He mandated the new minister of higher education, Izzat Salama, to prepare a series of congresses to discuss once more the goals and especially the priori¬ ties of higher technical education. Educators, administrators, and public sec¬ tor managers were again assembled, together with an impressive array of ministers and former ministers and Prime Minister Sidqi Sulayman made sure that his former fellow officer in the Army Engineer Corps, General al-Abd (by now rearmed with a Ph.D. degree from East Germany), was prominently included in the preparations and proceedings. Invited as a former deputy prime minister to the engineering congress, Khalil summarized with exceptional candor the views probably shared by most of the professors and managers: The large number of students passing the General Certificate Exam [at the end of secondary school] obliged us to admit large numbers into our uni¬ versities. The high institutes became poor duplicates of the university col¬ leges. They accepted students whose academic level was too low for uni¬ versity studies. ... No attempt was made to correlate the output of the universities with the needs of our society. University graduates were there¬ fore appointed to places where they were not needed. . . . Instead of ad¬ mitting such large numbers, the universities must admit only those num¬ bers that satisfy social needs.16

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Dr. Khalil concluded that the higher institutes ought to be shut down because they were not training the technicians that were really needed. He suggested that these be trained in intensive five-year courses beginning in the tenth grade. Consistently, he also opposed the loophole that Rushdi Said had ad¬ vocated of permitting technical high school graduates to advance into the universities. Indeed the only speaker at the engineering congress who favored such a loophole was Hilmi Said, the naqlb of SEEP, who by this time was working closely with Ali Sabri’s Arab Socialist Union. On this crucial issue the con¬ gress offered very small consolation to the technical high school graduates: exceptionally, they could enter university if they passed the entrance exami¬ nation with as good a score as the regular high school graduates. Those al¬ ready working in industry could get higher education only in the unlikely event that their company agreed to finance the regular five years of study. After all the preparation and discussions, however, the only immediate result of the congress was more administration. The recommendation of the congress to establish a Central Training Organization (CTO) was immediately implemented, and the prime minister’s former comrade in arms, Dr. al-Abd, was appointed director, with the impossible task of coordinating, without any training budget of his own, the various efforts of different ministries involved in industrial and vocational training. Once Dr. al-Abd’s principal supporter was no longer prime minister, his organization became as impotent as the permanent committees, five years earlier, without Baghdadi. Though the CTO survived the June War, it had to rely on other ministries, the public sector, and international agencies to fund its programs. When Dr. Sidqi re¬ turned, in 1968, to head the ministry of industry, coordination became even more difficult. He excercised his influence as deputy prime minister in 1971 to abolish Dr. al-Abd’s organization. Meanwhile, during his nine months before the June War as minister of higher education, Dr. Salama tried to set up an intensive twenty-two month technical training program for high school graduates, but Nasser was unwill¬ ing to neutralize the inevitable objections of the Arab Socialist Union to such a scheme. Twenty-two months suspiciously resembled Dr. Sayyid’s threeyear programs and ran counter to the Arab Socialist Union’s new philosophy. Dr. Salama had to settle instead for a temporary two-year, sixteen-month course producing an annual seventeen hundred technicians. This was less than one-quarter of the number apparently needed, and the training period was too short to ensure graduates of jobs, unless they could transfer into a

The Politics of Technical Education

73

higher institute! On the brighter side, Dr. Salama’s efforts eventually re¬ sulted, under the second of his successors, in the establishment of a five-year technical school of the sort advocated by the engineering congress and orig¬ inally proposed by the interministerial committee on manpower. The Shubra Technical Institute was reorganized in 1970. Financed by the United Nations and the East Germans, it was an expensive undertaking. Similar institutes were created in the late seventies. Dr. Khalil, out of office except for a brief period just before Nasser’s death, was appointed in 1968 to head a committee of the Ministry of Higher Edu¬ cation on engineering education. Consisting of managers, former ministers, and top administrators as well as university deans and engineering professors, it superficially resembled the congress held in early 1967. But meanwhile so many students were admitted to universities that one of its young reforming members had resigned as dean of Cairo University’s School of Engineering. Created to symbolize reform in the wake of student riots against the regime, the committee rarely met after 1968 though it was never formally disbanded. Predictably, it advocated abolishing the higher institutes. The minister of higher education, on the other hand, took the frankly inflationist view that five years at a higher institute, however inappropriate it might be for the student who would have to become a technician, was cheaper and politically more feasible than reforming the secondary schools. The committee could do little but discuss in subcommittee the very minor annual revisions of the university engineering curricula. Its members were not even aware of efforts in the early 1970s to promote some higher institutes into a new university— thereby fulfilling Nasser’s legacy of degree inflation.

Toward an Anomic Division of Labor Under the pressure of degree inflation, Egypt’s engineering “corporation” ob¬ viously could not enjoy the organic solidarity advocated by Durkheim. Tech¬ nical education policy, or rather the lack of one, violated two of the theoreti¬ cal conditions that he posited for an orderly division of labor. The profession could not regulate itself, and its special skills were underutilized. In fact Egypt’s educational system implemented only one of Durkheim’s precaution¬ ary measures against an abnormally “constrained” division of labor: selection by talent, as indicated by college board examinations, rather than by class or caste, for the various specialized roles. And, contra Durkheim, this measure would hardly liberate the system from “abnormal” class constraints.

Engineers and Professional Development

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To combat anomie, Durkheim might have favored corporatist regulations as well as liberal professional self-regulation. But his functionalist model still presupposed an underlying societal dynamic of differentiation and limited government. In Egypt, by contrast, not only was government unlimited in theory, but in practice its inertia arrested any societal dynamic toward differentation. Instead of being self-regulating organisms, coordinated by some organic hand (whether invisible or not), the engineering profession and its specialized branches became inert segments, the product of a mechanical solidarity imperfectly regulated from above. From a Durkheimian perspective Egyptian engineering was regressing, not progressing, with the development of the higher institutes. On the positive side, these institutes seem to have relieved the pressure on the universities, but not as much as Dr. Sayyid and other educational planners had hoped. Until the mid 1960s enrollment in the university schools of en¬ gineering was almost doubling every five years; subsequently the annual in¬ crease was never more than 5 percent.17 However, they were already so over¬ loaded that the quality of instruction was seriously compromised. By 1969 the ratio between regular staff, including teaching assistants, and students had reached one to sixty—off by a factor of five from the internationally recommended norm.18 Most of the equipment and workshops at Cairo Uni¬ versity predated the Second World War, yet the student body had quintupled. The new waves of students, having inundated the old workshops and labo¬ ratories, could not acquire the practical experience originally envisioned by the Europeans who had designed Egyptian engineering education. Further¬ more, secondary schools had deteriorated. Though courses nominally contin¬ ued to be taught in English, professors complained that students could no longer understand it and that consequently they had to be taught in Arabic interspliced with English technical terms. Paradoxically, 55 percent of the students surveyed at Ain Shams University in 1973 said they would have preferred more instruction in English, while only 28 percent wanted more in Arabic. Nevertheless, given the difficulty of translating international texts, de facto Arabization of engineering education, supplemented by official ef¬ forts in 1927 and 1960, probably contributed to freezing the curriculum. In any event the students did not appear to spend much time reading engineering literature. Saddled with up to thirty-five hours a week of classes, the sample of seniors in 1973 claimed on the average to read only two hours per week— one-quarter of the time they spent studying and copying their lecture notes!

The Politics of Technical Education

75

Reading time, incidentally, was statistically unrelated to grade point aver¬ ages. Just as the original engineering school at Giza had been absorbed into Egypt’s academic factory, the new higher institutes would operate like uni¬ versity schools, albeit like less prestigious and more overcrowded ones. With the possible exception of Shubra, the institutes were not equipped to train either applied technicians or academic engineers. Throughout the 1960s the faculty could not keep pace with the rush to expand their enrollments and extend the length of their programs, and the Central Agency for Public Mo¬ bilization and Statistics officially reported the shortages of teachers to be “shocking.”19 During 1968-1969 the overall ratio of permanent staff (more than one-quarter of which had only a bachelor’s degree) to students was less than one to a hundred. So-called taxi professors from the universities helped fill the gap, but with disastrous consequences for any functional differentia¬ tion between higher institute and university graduates. It was not only, as one magazine reported, that these professors “were usually too tired” after trav¬ eling by train from Cairo or Alexandria to the provinces “to give the students the time and effort they needed.”20 Perhaps more important, they were also likely to repeat their university lectures. Laboratory equipment, too, tended to be in even shorter supply than in the overcrowded universities. A Russian UNESCO expert called in to examine one institute that the Hungarians had founded a decade earlier reported that “everything is in disorder and covered with dust.”21 Other institutes endowed with equipment were short of the qual¬ ified personnel to maintain them. After the June War at least one of them lacked the physical space to contain thirty-eight hundred students “in a very small building that can only take 2000.”22 Saddest of all, however, was how the logic of degree inflation could ruin even a carefully conceived and well-financed project. In 1962 West Germans helped launch a higher technological institute at Helwan to train in a fouryear program the type of applied engineer normally produced in three years in Germany after six years of secondary school. But their enrollments, estab¬ lished by the Ministry of Higher Education, rapidly expanded while their Egyptian teacher trainees usually preferred to stay in Germany or work for a doctorate which would enable them to become university professors. By 1969 the Germans had managed to Egyptianize only four teaching posts for a stu¬ dent body of 1,750, and part-time staff had to be hired from Egyptian uni¬ versities. Naturally, increasing numbers of students were taught versions of

Engineers and Professional Development

76

university courses. By 1971 the Germans were training technicians in only one of the institute’s ten sections. The Ministry of Higher Education, more¬ over, was questioning their teaching credentials, for foreign instructors in Egyptian institutions of higher learning were expected to have doctorates. Helwan was decolonized—by invoking standards more colonial than those of the metropolitan power. Unable to transfer their part of the institute to the Ministry of Industry, the German faculty departed in 1972. In 1975 Helwan became the nucleus of a new Technological University. UNESCO’s technical assistance fared little better than West Germany’s. Between 1961, when assistance was requested, and 1965, when UNESCO started sending instructors to the Higher Institute of Petroleum and Mining, the original three-year program for training technicians became a five-year program producing bachelors of science, much to the consternation of the new arrivals. Like the West Germans, UNESCO sent prospective Egyptian instructors abroad for master’s degrees, but then had to extend their training to the doctorate to meet the new academic standards required of lecturers in the higher institutes. By 1972 none had returned. With a permanent facultystudent ratio of one to twenty-five, Petroleum and Mining was in better shape than most of the other higher institutes, but it was feared that some of the Egyptian staff might transfer or moonlight to earn up to twice their current salary. The need for more teachers, in turn, produced further inflation. Almost half of the teaching assistants in the higher institutes were graduates of these institutions, and although their degrees were recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education in 1968 to be equivalent to those of university graduates, the universities would not admit them to graduate studies. After the failure of a special graduate program launched at Helwan Higher Technical Institute in 1968, a new one was established in the mid 1970s at the Technological University. The new university was supposed to coordinate institutes for ag¬ riculture, commerce, teaching, social services, home economics, tourism and hotel management, and faculties of fine and applied arts, as well as its nu¬ cleus of the Helwan Higher Technical Institute. Further inflation, however, was not likely to improve technical training in the higher institutes or its umbrella university, much less enhance the image of their graduates and post¬ graduates in the eyes of other employers, notably industry. While the “tragedy of technological education’’ was now publicly admit¬ ted, one of its ostensible causes was being eliminated. The cause, as the organizer of the Technological University explained, was that “we had two

The Politics of Technical Education

77

different systems in our higher education; a university system that had a high academic level, the best professors, and most of the facilities, and a techno¬ logical system with a different type of study and working conditions. There is nothing wrong in having different academic systems, but the best students go to the more prestigious universities. ... If we are to attract good students to the Technological University, we must offer them equal employment and educational opportunities.”23 Already, in fact, the academically weakest stu¬ dents admitted to some of the better higher institutes, including Helwan, were not much weaker than some who were being admitted to university schools of engineering. In 1974 the standards for admission into Helwan were almost as high, for instance, as for al-Azhar’s engineering college.24 By college board standards, at least, Helwan was also attracting better students than university schools of commerce, science, or law. But it was probably not an applied technology track as such that was acquiring the increments of pres¬ tige. If students were attracted by the prospect of the equivalent of a univer¬ sity degree in engineering, it was less likely that they aspired to be applied technicians and foremen, fulfilling the functions most needed in Egyptian industry and for which the higher institute at Helwan had originally been established. The revised system of “degree pricing” simply meant that they could aspire to the same careers as university graduates, undermining any potentially fruitful division of labor. Durkheim might have agreed that an underlying source of the tragedy was that “those in charge of decision-making do not understand the nature of technological education . . . while engineering educators have no free hand in the organization of their schools.”25 While the profession, left to its own devices, would probably not have upgraded the status of applied technicians, facilitating functional differentiation, the political system also prevented it from restricting the numbers of university admissions to keep standards high. Ironically the status issue was being settled only because distinctions were reduced to a lowest common denominator of academic degrees. The torrents of graduates in turn overran another of Durkheim’s dikes against an anomic division of labor: discipline on the job. “The first concern of an intelligent and experienced manager will be to suppress useless jobs, to distribute the work so that everybody is sufficiently occupied, and conse¬ quently to increase the functional activity of each workers, and order will spontaneously be recreated just as the work will be more economically man¬ aged.”26 So might every Egyptian manager dream, but Nasser had decreed otherwise. The government had to employ every college graduate, irrespec-

Engineers and Professional Development

78

tive of “functional activity” and the employment order allocated the engi¬ neers of both universities and higher institutes almost independently of the wishes of employers and employees. Moreover, to the extent that managers had a choice, they clearly preferred university-trained engineers to the prod¬ ucts of the higher institutes, even though most of the jobs called for the applied skills that were supposed to be taught by the institutes rather than the universities. The Suez Canal Authority, for instance, enjoyed relative free¬ dom of recruitment and usually hired university graduates, considered to be better trained, and retooled them. The head of the nationalized petroleum and mining sector was only saying publicly what other managers indicated pri¬ vately when he declared to the Engineering Society in 1971 that his sector needed technicians, not poorly trained engineers. He went on to claim that the Higher Institute of Petroleum and Mining, founded to train technicians, produced the most poorly trained graduates; the departments of al-Azhar and Cairo universities were slightly better though they were also training the wrong sort of engineer.27 And indeed the director estimated in 1972 that only 10 percent of the graduates of the Higher Institute of Petroleum and Mining were subsequently employed in these sectors.28 The survey of engineers and students conducted in 1973 also offers evi¬ dence that the educational system was producing too many engineers inade¬ quately trained for their jobs. Though less than one-third of the sample of graduates disagreed with the proposition that “because of our need for engi¬ neers, we must expand our engineering education at the university level,” 60 percent thought that “we must redirect a great number of university engineer¬ ing students to technical education.” The latter belief was reiterated by 75 percent of a panel of experts that included university professors as well as the most technically proficient graduates surveyed in industry and government. The experts, too, seemed singularly unimpressed with the technical abili¬ ties of the current crop of graduates. Almost three-quarters of those who had been out of school for ten years or more disagreed with the proposition that “on the average, the newly graduated engineer is better equipped to carry out technical responsibilities than his counterpart 10 or 20 years ago.” Only three of the twenty-eight professors nourished some illusions about the products of their system. Perhaps because of the way it was selected, the sample could not provide much direct evidence of an underemployment or redundancy of engineering graduates. When asked what qualifications a hypothetical replacement might need to do their jobs, only four of the graduates (1 percent) chose the re-

The Politics of Technical Education

79

Table 4.2 Type of Work by Type of Education Education Work

Applied (7V= 188)

Academic (N — 187)

Applied

93%

66%

Academic

7

34

sponse, “The job I was doing should be cancelled.” Similarly, only 12 percent admitted that a person with less than the equivalent of a bachelor of science in engineering could do their job. Indirectly, however, there was considerable evidence that theoretically trained engineers were being wasted in applied tasks. Without raising any possibly invidious distinctions between university and higher institute gradu¬ ates, the questionnaire explained to the respondents that there are two types of engineering graduates: (1) the applied engineer, who studies the details of technological oeprations and can, upon graduation, handle the tasks of exe¬ cution, supervision, and maintenance, and can make ordinary engineering designs, but is not qualified for scientific research or advanced development activities; (2) the academic engineer, who studies the theories of engineering, mathematics, and analytical sciences, and is lightly exposed to applied as¬ pects, so far as they help him comprehend different design theories, but who is prepared to perform mainly engineering reserach design and development operations, not technical executory operations. The graduates were then asked to choose between these alternatives in describing their educational background and the sort of engineering they actually practiced. Table 4.2 cross-tabulates the responses and indicates that two-thirds of the academically trained engineers—one third of the entire sample—were doing applied work. Conceivably engineers switch from more theoretical to more applied work as they grow older, but 62 percent of those receiving academic training since 1967 claimed to exercise applied functions. Among graduates of higher institutes, perceptions of the type of training concorded better with practice; nevertheless, one-quarter of them considered their training to have been primarily academic. As for the Egyptian university graduates, the dissonance between their tasks and training would have been much greater had 43 percent of them not considered their education to have been primarily applied. It was not possible to infer from the survey the extent to which the gradu-

Engineers and Professional Development

80

Table 4.3 Mean Percentage of Time Devoted to Various Activities by Type of Schooling Sample

Industry

University (A = 277)

Higher institute (A = 67)

University (A = 53)

Higher institute (A =17)

30%

34%

31%

28%

Participation in higher management decision making

6

4

4

4

Sales activities and inventory

3

2

2

3

Technical report writ¬ ing

15

17

10

8

Equipment or struc¬ tural design

16

13

12

11

Testing and technical measurements

6

7

12

9

13

11

11

11

Engineering consulta¬ tion and related work

5

7

4

13

Teaching and training others

7

7

12

16

Activity Supervision of con¬ struction or industrial production

Administrative rou¬ tine

ates’ specializations and subspecializations matched their jobs. They were, however, asked about their allocations of time between the activities reported in table 4.3. Had the educational system encouraged an effective division of labor, the graduates of the higher institutes could have been expected to de¬ vote proportionately more time than the university graduates to supervising construction or industrial production. Table 4.3 compares the average per¬ centage of time spent by the different types of graduates on these and other activities. When (in the second pair of columns) the graduates working in the operational industries—iron and steel and the automobile assembly plant— are singled out, the graduates of the higher institutes actually seemed to be spending less time than their university colleagues in supervisory activities (though the differences were not statistically significant). Of the twelve junior engineers in industry spending over half their time in supervisory work, pre¬ sumably directly overseeing an industrial process, none had been trained at a

81

The Politics of Technical Education

Table 4.4 Academic Relevance by Type of Schooling and by Dissonance between Type of Training and Practice Type of schooling

Dissonant perceptions

University

Higher institute

Relevance of academic studies

(N = 388)

(N = 90)

(N= 120)

My academic studies are more useful for the prestige they confer than for helping me to deal with any concrete problems

13%

10%

13%

My academic studies are of little practical use in my work but give me a useful technical perspective

13

13

20

I use my academic knowledge occa¬ sionally but depend mainly upon knowledge learned on the job

28

41

26

My academic knowledge is about as useful to me as knowledge learned on the job

26

17

28

I am constantly benefiting from my academic studies

21

19

13

higher institute.29 In short, any division of labor was fortuitous, not related to educational background. A final confirmation of the inappropriate training, if not the redundancy, of the engineers was their response to how relevant they considered their studies to their present jobs. More than half of them admitted that they used their '

training only occasionally, if at all, in their jobs. As table 4.4 reports, the graduates of the higher institutes were less likely than university graduates to admit that their academic knowledge was at least as useful as knowledge gained on the job. Only 36 percent of them affirmed the value of their edu¬ cation, compared with 47 percent of the university graduates. Curiously, it made little difference whether a graduate perceived a dissonance between his theoretical training and applied practice, for 41 percent of those who per¬ ceived it also affirmed the usefulness of their academic training. Finally, al¬ though aging, intellectual obsolescence, or career changes might make older engineers perceive their original training to be less relevant to their jobs, there was no relation between year of graduation and perceptions of academic relevance (r = 0.03). The survey thus not only corroborates the absence of any effective division

82

Engineers and Professional Development

of labor between the different types of engineering graduate but also suggests that neither type of training was particularly suited to the functions actually fulfilled, at least in their own eyes, by a fairly representative cross section of engineers employed in engineering enterprises. Even the students surveyed at Ain Shams University were already experiencing dissonance between the kind of education they were receiving and the type of function they expected to fulfill after graduation. Only 28 percent claimed that they were being trained as applied engineers, whereas 88 percent (realistically) expected to be “assigned” to applied jobs. Yet the survey also suggests that the students—and, in retrospect, many of the graduates—might have welcomed greater differentiation within the edu¬ cational system between applied and academic engineering tracks. Two-thirds of the students and a majority of the university-trained graduates would have preferred being trained as applied rather than theoretically oriented engineers. Among the 60 percent of the students and the 30 percent of graduates who were experiencing dissonance between their training and their (expected) functions, respectively 71 and 47 percent would have preferred applied train¬ ing. Moreover, only one-quarter of the students objected to the idea of chan¬ neling university students into technical education. Predictably, the students with the highest grade point averages tended to be committed to theoretical engineering, but the large majority apparently accepted the concept of an education more closely fitted to their expected roles, now that status differ¬ ences within the profession had diminished. There seemed to be room, then, for separate tracks of ostensibly equal university status. Seen in the light of student demand, the creation of a new Technological University was perhaps a step in the right direction. Yet staffing and equip¬ ping it, in addition to servicing the rapidly expanding enrollment of the higher institutes, diverted any available resources that would be required for reconverting the established universities. The engineering student body had nearly tripled since Baghdadi took the first serious initiative to encourage apropriate technical training, and Egypt could no longer afford substantial investments in education. In this area of public policy, as in the area of scientific research, Egypt had been too interventionist to allow market forces to bring supply in line with demand, yet insufficiently so to reshape them by extensive planning. Neither Nasser nor Sadat, trapped into policies protecting their university graduates, could follow Durkheim’s advice for increasing the functional activity of en¬ gineers by hiring only those who were suitably qualified and actually

The Politics of Technical Education

83

needed.30 Consequently there was no market incentive for students to become technicians and to settle for less prestige than that of the full (academically trained) engineer. Yet the ostensibly powerful and centralized political system could not directly intervene to produce more of the suitably trained, applied engineers and technicians in place of the surplus of theoretically trained ones. Curiously, Durkheim himself more or less anticipated the consequences of the Egyptian imbroglio. “In countries where an extreme density of population makes existence too difficult, the inhabitants, instead of specializing them¬ selves, retire definitively or provisionally from the society; they emigrate to other regions.”31 The Egyptians indeed were trying to emigrate, although only after first specializing. Educational planners seemed by the mid 1970s to have abandoned attempts to tailor engineering to the country’s needs. As the rector of the Technological University tactfully put it, “Because of Egypt’s special standing in the area, we must also take account of the great number of spe¬ cializations needed by these [other Arab] countries.”32 But even if, as one prominent engineer claimed in 1974, up to 30 percent of the Egyptian engi¬ neers were working in other Arab countries,33 it was doubtful that the aca¬ demically oriented ones could continue for long to emigrate in proportion to the expanding Egyptian output. Meanwhile there were continuing shortages in Egypt of skilled labor and applied technicians. A functionalist model of the profession, reflected in titles and high pres¬ tige, continued to prevail, but the substance of professionalism—a relatively fixed yet adaptable body of knowledge—seemed to be eroding. Paradoxi¬ cally, the greater their prestige, the more dysfunctional engineers became. Most recent graduates, like their peers in other disciplines, were the modest beneficiaries of a state bureaucracy which kept expanding to disguise unem¬ ployment. As for the profession, the mysteries of its body of knowledge were preserved in English from outsiders but perhaps also from increasing numbers of practitioners. Meanwhile industrial progress, however limited, was mak¬ ing Egypt more dependent on foreign technology, suggesting a greater need for indigenous research and development.

The Politics of Research and Development One of Sadat’s vice-presidents once exclaimed that “the mere thought of the rapid scientific and technological progress being made abroad makes me un¬ able to sleep at night.”1 Indeed Egyptian scientific research conducted by nationals inside the country was not keeping up with that of a regional neigh¬ bor, much less the industrial world. Between 1967 and 1971 one Israeli was producing as much science, measured in publications, as fifty Egyptians. The Egyptians should have been turning out one hundred times as many publica¬ tions, had the size and productivity of their university teaching staffs kept up, by international standards, with the expanding student body.2 In the engineering fields covered by the Engineering Index, articles written by Egyptians based in Egypt increased after 1973 from a yearly average of 50 to over 150.3 Even at the increased rate of production, however, Egypt was producing only one-fifth of the internationally recognized articles that its population would have predicted, had production been evenly distributed throughout the world. Production was barely keeping up with the country’s declining share of the world’s GNP.4 Its contribution to international science could also be questioned. Presumably any article that makes an impact is cited, in turn, by other articles. But a sample of 148 Egyptian articles regis¬ tered in the Engineering Index between 1969 and 1973 were, until early 1978, cited a total of only fifty times in the Science Citation Index, and 84 percent of them were not cited a single time. The world seemed to pay little attention to Egyptian research, though non-Egyptian sources accounted for two-thirds of these citations.5 Egyptian research, in turn, did not seem to be keeping up with the most recent international literature, at least not in the sense of citing it as frequently as was the international practice. The entire apparatus of references of Egypt’s most prestigious journal, the Journal of the Egyptian Society of En¬ gineers, was analyzed from the year of its founding, 1962, through 1976. The average age of citations—that is, their date of publication subtracted from the publication date of the article citing them—was 13.5 years, and only 4 percent of them were 5 years old or less. By contrast, Eugene Garfield found in the international engineering literature that the average textbook cited was 5 years old, the average article only 2 years old. If the 27 articles most cited in 1973 averaged 11.9 years, 44 percent of them were 5 years old or less.6 Perhaps the Egyptians were citing vintage articles, but their patterns of references did not suggest that they were keeping up with active research fronts.7 In the engineering disciplines, as in other scientific field, academic import

The Politics of Research and Development

85

substitution apparently was not generating much intellectual capital. Yet meanwhile efforts to push industry beyond the phase of import substitution to the manufacture of capital goods were presumably presenting new tech¬ nological challenges. In general, Engels once insisted, “if a society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities.”8 It seemed odd, in fact, that Egyptian research was accomplishing so little. Ma¬ terial constraints, while significant, did not appear decisive. Egypt under Nasser supported a considerable scientific establishment and devoted over 1 percent of its GNP to scientific research, not an insignificant sum by world standards, at least among the less developed countries.9 To be sure, universi¬ ties were overcrowded, and the faculty had little time for research. Budgets were so constrained that senior professors were limited to an annual $300 for foreign journals and laboratory equipment. The results of technical education were reflected in the laboratories of the National Research Center: one labo¬ ratory technician for every five scientists instead of the norm of three techni¬ cians per scientists. Nevertheless, the state was funding four thousand re¬ search scientists in 1972, freeing them from teaching responsibilities, and supporting a variety of centers that might have been producing more research. Theories of scientific growth may help explain why there was so little of it in Egypt. One theory relevant to capitalist societies predicts technological progress as a function of market incentives. “Like other economic activities,” Nathan Rosenberg argues, “inventive activity is responsive to market forces and the prospects of financial gain. . . . Inventive activity may be visualized as a pursuit which receives its changing direction over time from the changing perceptions of future profits (profit expectations) which are attached to the solution of specific technical problems.”10 So also, Jacob Schmookler corre¬ lated the frequencies of various types of patents with economic growth in their respective sectors.11 Presumably the theory would still be operative in a state-run economy if the state could function as a surrogate for market forces, planning scientific research to dovetail with economic needs. A second theory stresses sociological rather than economic factors. Inde¬ pendently of economic need, a research area may undergo rapid expansion because it becomes fashionable and respectable to the individual scientists who are seeking prestige and recognition. They become “attracted to [a par¬ ticular set of] problems by an interesting piece of work, and they in turn convince others to join them through recruitment and training, as collabora¬ tors, or by the indirect influence of their publications. A social community with a distinctive structure appears and for a time expands rapidly while pro-

Engineers and Professional Development

86

ducing a considerable volume of work.”12 The “invisible college” may ex¬ plain an expanding research front in the applied as well as theoretical sciences as long as the individuals conducting the research are motivated like the sci¬ entists of “advanced” scientific communities. Engineers who are academics, for instance, may operate in the same system of rewards as the pure scientists. The notion of an invisible college does assume, however, that the members enjoy freedom to select their research problems. Consequently it may be more useful for explaining academic research than for explaining applied research controlled by outside organizations. In state-run, applied research organizations, in fact, the existence of an invisible college may reflect the inability of those in command to control the direction of research. Applied to Egypt, each theory has its heuristic value. The first perspective suggests that the major constraint on the development of science was the state’s weakness, its inability to plan research to meet economic needs and to substitute for dynamic market forces. As with technical education, the polit¬ ical system could not in fact carry out a coherent science policy, despite Nasser’s faith in modem science and Sadat’s pious reaffirmations of “Science and Faith.” Egyptian science policy further illustrates an authoritarian re¬ gime’s inability to cope with complex problems in a specialized area of poli¬ cymaking. The second perspective helps to clarify the nature of at least one of the obstacles faced by the policymakers, namely, the clannishness of the research scientists and their inability to interact across narrow institutional barriers. Citation analysis reveals that some of the engineers in applied re¬ search centers were even more prone than the academics to insulating them¬ selves in their own invisible colleges, compounding the problems of the sci¬ ence administrators. Neither perspective, however, gets to the heart of Egypt’s problem. Egypt remained “colonized” by foreign technology in most areas. The transfer of technology would have required an intellectual infrastructure capable of re¬ ceiving, evaluating, and adapting it. Instead, a blind reliance on foreign tech¬ nology in many sectors simply increased Egyptian dependence, compounding the problems of the infrastructure’s isolation from the rest of the world. Ap¬ plied research seemed to be caught in a vicious circle, at least in most fields.

The Politics of Science The revolution progressively neutralized and destroyed the constituencies that had originally stimulated Egyptian research. Large landowners were the

The Politics of Research and Development

87

first victims, yet the Royal Agricultural Society that they had founded in 1896 had inspired extensive applied research in areas of special concern, such as cotton diseases. In fact, the society helped found the Ministry of Agricul¬ ture to pursue such research. Private industrial entrepreneurs hardly fared better than the landowners, yet they had constituted the other major research constituency before the revolution. The federation of Egyptian Industries had successfully lobbied in 1939 for the creation of the King Fuad I Research Council, which in turn became the National Research Center. While expendi¬ tures were very modest by subsequent standards, the research priorities were relatively well defined. University research, by contrast, developed autono¬ mously. In most fields the professors were participating members of an inter¬ national community of scholars. At the Engineering School, for instance, they were pioneering research in the new field of soil sciences with the help of a visiting American professor. Political intervention in university life was not altogether unknown, but at least alternative careers were available to those adversely affected. For example, the chemistry professor whom the Wafd had prevented from becoming dean of Cairo University’s School of Science eventually spearheaded applied research for Egyptian industry. The new regime tried to regiment the professors as well as eliminate the influence of the large landowners, and eventually, the industrialists. Scientific priorities were to be determined from above, by the Free Officers, in con¬ formity with Egypt’s military and economic needs. In practice a handful of Free Officers and science administrators determined them in a vacuum. Con¬ sequently, as a research professor observed in 1973, “every one of the re¬ search organizations that has been established was designed to serve the in¬ terests of a few individuals.” He demanded that scientific research be “based on science and not on patronage.”13 Yet no intervening policymaking seemed capable of translating “science”—or the personal interests of its practition¬ ers—into sets of national research priorities. The political leadership could define neither “the role that scientific research must play in development” nor, more concretely, “the crucial industrial, agricultural, economic, and mil¬ itary problems which require research.”14 Apparently their military concerns first prompted the Free Officers to take an interest in science. They did not immediately tamper with the National Research Center but instead founded the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Nasser’s choice to head it, Ibrahim Hilmi Abd al-Rahman, was one of his closest civilian advisors. He had quickly gained Nasser’s confidence after the revolution and was appointed general secretary of the cabinet in 1952. Like

Engineers and Professional Development

88

a number of other civilians co-opted in the early days of the revolution, he was a radical nationalist and an erstwhile member of the Ruwwad (young pioneers). His brilliant academic record as an astrophysicist, coupled with his reputation for believing in a strong military establishment, were ideal qualifications for fathering an Egyptian science policy. In addition to his posts in the cabinet and the Atomic Energy Commission, he was appointed general secretary of the National Planning Committee in 1955, thereby ensuring that science would be included in subsequent investment plans. While reassuring his fellow scientists that the purposes of the AEC were “to symbolize the modem state” and to explore the implications for Egypt of a thermonuclear war, not to manufacture weapons, Dr. Abd al-Rahman also educated Nasser about science in relation to long-range economic develop¬ ment. In 1957 he was permitted to found a National Science Council to draft a long-term program in conjunction with economic planning. Consequently a plan for the development of science was incorporated into Egypt’s First Five-Year Plan (1960-1965). It gave priority to basic science and provided for sending considerable numbers of Egyptian scientists abroad for advanced degrees.15 This approach coincided with that of the National Research Center, which had become increasingly academic since the revolution. It was as¬ sumed that science could not have immediate payoffs, in terms of applied research, until a basic research infrastructure had been created. As long as Dr. Abd al-Rahman retained Nasser’s confidence, most scientists benefited from considerable increases in state support, even while acquiring greater freedom than under the ancien regime to pursue research independently of its possible applications. Of course there were political exceptions. The applied research depart¬ ments of certain ministries were occasionally silenced. Hydrologists and other experts in the Ministry of Irrigation were prevented from voicing their misgivings about the High Dam project. Agronomists in the Ministry of Ag¬ riculture had studied desert soil conditions in the area south of Alexandria that would become Tahrir (Liberation) Province, but they were not allowed critically to appraise Colonel Magdi Hasanayn’s project to make the desert bloom. The National Research Center, however, was free to conduct what¬ ever research its academic leadership deemed appropriate, even though the original mission of the center had been to do research connected with the needs of particular industries. The halcyon days of Egyptian science came to an end in 1959, when Dr. Abd al-Rahman lost Nasser’s favor. In his economic planning capacity he

The Politics of Research and Development

89

disagreed with Nasser’s arbitrary decision “to amend the plan so as to ensure the execution of the programme on a revolutionary basis in a period of ten [rather than twenty] years.”16 Probably Ali Sabri, who was Nasser’s personal secretary at this time, contributed to the scientist’s downfall. Though Bagh¬ dadi gave him a post in the Ministry of Planning, Dr. Abd al-Rahman was stripped of his command of the Atomic Energy Commission and could no longer exercise significant influence on science policy. Now that the symbolic value of science was recognized, officers in Nasser’s entourage would take a direct interest in it. In particular, Kamal al-Din Husayn wanted his protege, Colonel Salah Hidayat, to get the directorship of the AEC. The only diffi¬ culty was that Hidayat had few technical qualifications for the job. He had been a Free Officer and is alleged to have concocted nitroglycerin grenades before the revolution, but his only scientific training consisted of a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, acquired while in the army after 1948, when Egypt was trying to build up military industries. To make Hidayat’s credentials more acceptable to the scientists in the AEC, Husayn first had a civilian professor appointed and then undermined his administrative leadership, so that the sci¬ entists in the end welcomed the decision to replace him with an officer enjoy¬ ing good political connections. In 1961, shortly after becoming director of the AEC, Hidayat became Egypt’s first minister of scientific research. The new minister wanted to revise drastically the science policy incorpo¬ rated in the Five-Year Plan and put the major emphasis on applied research, rather than basic scientific training and infrastructure. Promising quick re¬ sults, especially in military domains, he got the political backing to bring a number of research centers such as the AEC under the control of the ministry. He even took over one agricultural research station at gunpoint, in effect staging a holdup on the Ministry of Agriculture. He also expanded his office space by occupying a new building that was to have housed the Ministry of Higher Education. He then managed his ministry like a military command, planning the assault of a particular scientific problem in the style of a batallion commander and issuing emergency orders to his professors and research scientists by telephone, often late at night. He also devised an elaborate sys¬ tem of applied research committees and made the university professors, like their colleagues in the various research institutes, justify their work in terms of the ministry’s national priorities. Once Kamal al-Din Husayn was removed from the president’s inner circle, however, his client also lost influence and failed to sustain Nasser’s interest in science despite promising him new military technologies. Hidayat lost his

90

Engineers and Professional Development

job in 1964, and Nasser abolished the Ministry of Scientific Research in 1965. Meanwhile the respected academic who had run the National Research Center in the mid 1950s was appointed minister. As his brother was a prom¬ inent Sufi, science and faith were now firmly joined, perhaps anticipating Sadat’s pronouncements in 1971. Naturally the new minister tried to change Hidayat’s policies by reemphasizing the need for basic science and training rather than quick results. But science no longer commanded the funds or political influence that it had enjoyed earlier.17 Moreover, the ministry was now saddled with the day-to-day routine of running the applied research in¬ stitutes that Hidayat had seized from different government agencies. Subse¬ quently, from 1965 to 1968, there was neither a ministry nor much official interest in science, other than scientific socialism. Hidayat later testified to a parliamentary committee that the underlying cause of the country’s weak¬ nesses in scientific research was that no single system for organizing the national effort had been agreed upon and given a proper trial.18 The policy merry-go-round resumed after student demonstrations in early 1968 signaled the waning legitimacy of Nasser and his regime. The March Declaration, which was the regime’s response to the problem, proclaimed a modem state founded on science. A Ministry of Scientific Re¬ search was accordingly reinstated, and a science professor of one of Nasser’s sons-in-law was made minister. His successor, however, was faintly impli¬ cated in the “conspiracy” of Ali Sabri and his friends against Sadat in 1971, in that one of them had been a close political ally. He lost his job at the end of the year, and the ministry was again abolished. In its place Sadat estab¬ lished the National Academy of Science and Technology. In 1976, however, he once more affirmed his state “founded on Science and Faith” by reestab¬ lishing the ministry, possibly because his image as hero of the October 1973 war was fading. In 1977 the academy and the ministry competed for influence and administrative jurisdictions, with the academy apparently maintaining the upper hand. But whether as ministry, Higher Science Council, or National Academy, the science establishment continued to disburse most of its budget in salaries rather than research projects, and it had little authority to plan or coordinate any national effort. In effect there was no official science policy, yet the regime had also largely separated research from any of the constituen¬ cies that had previously contributed to defining its objectives. The state was clearly unable to act as a surrogate economic stimulus to research. In the abstract, politicians and scientists agreed that priority should be given to applied research in areas that could help the economy, but there

The Politics of Research and Development

91

was little concrete planning of priorities. Science policy, one young re¬ searcher observed, consisted of “some slogans that discuss the importance of science. The declarations made by our most eminent officials prove that they do not understand the nature of scientific research.” Under the various insti¬ tutional formats there was little continuity of leadership. Each time the format changed or a new minister—or president of the academy—took office, “the change in policy always means that we start from zero,” another young sci¬ entist complained.19 Symptomatically, when the leadership and format were reshuffled in 1971, the new president of the academy spent more than a year devising a new hierarchy of science consultants—as if the old ministerial committees had been faintly associated, like the minister, with Ali Sabri’s “conspiracy.” Like his predecessor, the new president had to define national problems worthy of research in a political vacuum, engaging in purely tech¬ nical consultations with scientists rather than policymakers. Though of min¬ isterial rank, he enjoyed even less access to the prime minister than his pred¬ ecessor. Priorities were devised by following UNESCO’s guidelines for science policymaking in new nations. First the academy’s staff analyzed the Egyptian investment budget projected by the National Institute of planning over the current five-year period, a rather pathetic exercise since from 1964 the gov¬ ernment had been unable to implement any five-year plan. Then scientists were asked to assign weights for each segment of the hypothetical investment to indicate the relative contribution that their respective disciplines could make. Priorities among disciplines were then determined by summing all the weights multiplied by each segment’s proportion of the total investment. (En¬ gineering sciences came out well ahead of the other disciplines.) But before the exercise could be completed by the scores of scientists participating on the committees, Prime Minister Aziz Sidqi introduced the 1973 “war budget” radically altering the original investment projections, and within a few months the president of the academy resigned to accept an important position with the United Nations. The committees survived, but the professors, research scientists, and other consultants on the committees could only play piaster politics.20 It seemed unlikely that bureaucratic boundaries within the science establishment could be redrawn in the interests of a national science policy or that existing sa¬ trapies could be infused with national purpose. The typical research scientist continued to define his own work so as to spend and incrementally expand his budgetary allocation in blissful ignorance of national research goals. Per-

Engineers and Professional Development

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haps the situation was not unlike the guerrilla warfare prevailing in many Western academic establishments, except for one important difference. Per¬ sonal relationships of either the shilla or patron-client variety seemed to be the principal check on research performance, for there were no objective, institutionalized criteria. Personal networks prevailed in science as in pol¬ itics, signifying the underdevelopment of both forms of activity.

Science Satrapies and Networks In the mid 1970s Egyptian science was divided like Caesar’s Gaul into three roughly equal parts. The ministries of agriculture and health directly con¬ ducted their own research, while the remainder was divided between the Na¬ tional Research Center and other institutes depending directly on subventions from the National Academy of Science and Technology, on the one hand, and universities and other quasi-independent research organizations, such as the Geological Survey, on the other hand. The academy financed about one-third of Egypt’s research effort, and its budget was largely mortgaged by salaries paid to tenured research staffs. Various research units originally captured by Colonel Hidayat had subsequently been surrendered. For instance, the Build¬ ing Research Institute was returned to the Ministry of Housing in 1971, and the new minister of scientific research took charge of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1976. Some units, such as the Institute of Petroleum Re¬ search, were funded only in part by the Academy after they hived off from the National Research Center. The academy, in turn, created others to deal with problems, such as coastal erosion, that existing centers not under its control might have handled. Foreign aid contributed to both processes: the French supported the Institute of Petroleum Research while the United Na¬ tions invested in the academy’s research on coastal erosion. But the dozens of research units also acquired their own interest in pursuing autonomous courses by playing off competing jurisdictions. The state could not prevent research scientists who were entrepreneurs from building up their own net¬ works and institutions, yet their “invisible colleges” rendered any general coordination of the Egyptian scientific effort all the more problematic. In applied industrial research there seemed to be little contact between the industries and either the universities or the academy’s applied research cen¬ ters. Applied scientists publicly lamented that “our officials don’t really be¬ lieve in the value of research”21 and privately observed that public sector managers had no interest in carrying out research to improve products that

The Politics of Research and Development

93

they could sell anyway on the protected market.22 In response, informants who were managers claimed that the research conducted in the universities was too theoretical and removed from industrial problems. A former minister who had bridged the worlds of academia and industry opposed much of the professors’ research in the engineering sciences as merely duplicating work done elsewhere. Another manager claimed that the professor who criticized him for neglecting research was no longer competent to conduct experiments. Occasionally managers who had doctorates would guide the applied research of a university graduate student, but the poor student was as likely to be a football as a bridge between industry and his university. Relationships between industry and the academy’s applied research centers were hardly better. A former director of the National Research Center could point to few examples of any research that had actually achieved industrial applications, despite the center’s roots in the industrial community. More¬ over, its scientists usually considered industry’s research inquiries “ridicu¬ lous” and unworthy of their attention, one ranking science administrator claimed. After 1971 the academy tried to promote joint contracts between industry and the National Research Center, with some success.23 But at least one highly placed informant who was both a respected academic and a public sector manager considered that the National Research Center and related re¬ search agencies ought to be disbanded, their qualified personnel absorbed by the universities, and the academy reduced to a scientific advisory council in the prime minister’s office. Professors naturally resented the applied research institutes (unless they happened to be affiliated) for siphoning off research funds from the universi¬ ties, even as managers criticized them for being too removed, like the uni¬ versities, from practical research of potential interest to industry. The profes¬ sors complained, too, that the research centers often duplicated university research and, moreover, adversely affected university standards by compet¬ ing for faculty and funding for libraries and equipment. So also, the more successful the National Research Center might be in gamering research con¬ tracts with the public sector, the less business there would be for the univer¬ sities. The engineers surveyed in 1973 offered some evidence of the conflicts between the universities, industry, and the applied research centers. The re¬ spondents were asked whether they favored allocating more funds to indige¬ nous applied research and whether they thought that it should be conducted through joint contracts primarily with universities or with applied research

Engineers and Professional Development

94

centers. Understandably the Ph.D.’s on the university panel were in general more enthusiastic about research than were the employees of the agencies included in the sample. However, the highest ranks of industry and govern¬ ment tended to agree with them. Ninety-six percent of the professors—all but one—advocated more applied research even if most of it would have no di¬ rect payoff, but so also did 80 percent of the seventy-eight officials of the top three ranks (including panels of experts). Nevertheless, the professors and the officials diverged sharply in their perceptions of the proper insitutional vehicles for carrying out the research. Only one of the professors favored the applied research centers, whereas 23 percent of the top-ranking officials were so inclined. Eighty percent of the professors advocated joint contracts with universities, whereas only 46 percent of the top officials unequivocally mus¬ tered comparable enthusiasm. Almost as interesting as the differences between the professors and the officials, however, were the differences in approach exemplified by engineers working in different types of agencies. In public sector industry—automo¬ biles, iron and steel, and the Aluminum Project—there was little grass roots support for the applied centers. In fact only 7 percent of the more technically proficient engineers working for these companies favored them, while almost half preferred joint contracts with universities. Support for the applied re¬ search centers came primarily from engineers working in the Transport and Industrialization authorities, not from the operational industries that were most in need of applied research and development programs. Presumably the skepticism of engineers working in these fields, coupled with the hostility of the professors, compounded the problems of official science administrators who were trying to effect cooperation between the applied centers and Egyp¬ tian industry. Familiarity seemed to breed contempt. Only one of the nineteen technically proficient engineers who claimed to use outside Egyptian experts from nonacademic organizations advocated research with the applied centers. The institutional rivalries discussed by informants and reflected in the sur¬ vey seemed also to acquire intellectual content. The little samples of Egyp¬ tian engineering science that the Science Citation Index retrieved displayed a remarkable provincialism, greater than that of the French, and provincialism suggested, in turn, that invisible colleges might be at work, conditioning the problems perceived by Egyptian scientists and constraining the efforts of the Egyptian administrators to coordinate them. The present data base was lim¬ ited, for lack of time and funds, but it at least suggested interesting patterns of citation within the Egyptian research establishment.

The Politics of Research and Development

95

The research was provincial in the sense that it was cited much more by other Egyptians working in Egypt than their academic production would pre¬ dict. In the mid 1970s Egypt was producing roughly 0.2 percent of the world’s engineering literature of international caliber. Thus if an Egyptian article had an equal chance of being cited by any other article produced in the world, its total percentage of Egyptian citations would not exceed 0.2 per¬ cent. Actually, depending on the data set, the percentages varied between 23 and 34. By contrast, French science was recently criticized as being too pro¬ vincial because French scientific journals earned from 10 to 24 percent of their citations from French sources when no more than 3.8 percent of the world output was French.24 Just because Egyptian engineering research was extraordinarily provincial, it does not necessarily follow that it was clannish, segmented by invisible colleges of scientists who cite one another and ignore other colleges of Egyp¬ tians. Citation analysis suggests, however, that invisible colleges indeed ex¬ isted and that they pretty much coincided with the formal institutional bound¬ aries that had been established within the Egyptian research establishment. The data are sketchy, but the preliminary findings coincide with informants’ observations about the lack of cooperation between Egyptian research units. This pilot study also suggests a fruitful approach to research about research, using readily accessible data that could be further exploited to test hypotheses about invisible colleges in Egypt and other provincial settings. The data were generated in three ways. First, the 200 Egyptian articles registered in the Engineering Index from 1969 to 1973 were supposed to have been processed into the computerized files of the Science Citation Index. Fifty citations appeared, but mistakes were made. In 52 cases the names of the authors generated citations that were not linked to the specific articles; the 65 citations retrieved in this way were treated as a separate, second data set. Third, the 15 authors who were cited ten or more times, independently of specific articles, generated a data set of 359 citations.25 Each data set was then examined for the numbers of Egyptian versus foreign citations and the Egyptian citations were further subdivided into self-citations and citations by other Egyptians. In every case of a citation by another Egyptian a further bit of information could be gained by comparing the institutional affiliation of the author and the writer who was citing the author. The results of these exercises are reported in table 5.1. All 17 of the Egyp¬ tian citations retrieved by the first search of the Science Citation Index were by writers who shared the author’s institutional affiliation, and 15 of them

Engineers and Professional Development

96

Table 5.1 Citations of Egyptian Authors By Country and Institutional Affiliation Data set

Egyptian

Self

Same institution

Foreign

Total

Articles (148)

17

15

17

33

50

Miscellaneous

15

12

14

50

65

109

58

86

250

359

Most-cited authors (15)

were self-citations. But these findings indicate merely egocentricity; the pro¬ pensity to cite one’s institutional colleagues rather than work done elsewhere in Egypt was illustrated by only two cases. The third set of data was more interesting, although one of the highly cited authors, A. A. Abouzeid, was cited only by himself. Of the 109 Egyptian citations, 58 were self-citations but an additional 28 of the remaining 51 citations were from authors sharing the author’s institutional affiliation. In other words, although the 15 highly cited authors came from a variety of academic and research institutions—7 from the National Research Center, 2 from the Atomic Energy Commission, 4 from the University of Cairo, and 1 each from Alexandria University and the American University in Cairo—they had to rely on their own colleagues for more than half of their national academic recognition (apart from the recognition they might be conferring on themselves). An intensive analysis of the fifty-one Egyptian citations that were not self¬ citations revealed interesting networks gravitating toward three of the prin¬ cipal, highly cited authors. Two of the three, M. Kamel and A. Kantouch, were affiliated with the National Research Center, while I. A. Ammar was a professor at Cairo University. Professor Ammar was cited by other professors employed at Cairo and other universities, but he was never once cited by anyone working for the National Research Center although his fields of re¬ search, at least as coded by the Engineering Index, overlapped with those of two of the highly cited authors working for the center. His basic field was metallurgy, and perhaps the engineers employed by the Aluminum Authority had reason, when surveyed in 1973, to be especially interested in joint re¬ search contracts with universities rather than with the applied research insti¬ tutes. Shortly after the survey, the metallurgists employed by the center hived off to a separate research center more closely linked with industry. Another odd finding concerned Kamel and Kantouch. Though they were in the same field of textile research, they never cited one another, perhaps reflecting clan¬ nishness within the confines of the National Research Center. Yet within the

The Politics of Research and Development

97

center other scientists tended to cite both Kamel and Kantouch as if trying to ingratiate themselves with both potential patrons. While most of their cita¬ tions were from colleagues in the center, Kamel also received some recogni¬ tion from universities though he apparently did not reciprocate it. The incomplete picture of the Egyptian research establishment that emerges from this preliminary analysis is that of a National Research Center virtually divorced from what was happening in other Egyptian research en¬ vironments. Professors were citing center scientists, but there was not a single case of a center scientist’s citing a university professor or indeed any¬ body else employed outside the center. This is exactly the reverse of the situation that would be expected, had there been a division of labor between the universities doing theoretical research and the applied institutes applying it to practical problems. Instead, the supposedly applied scientists seemed more isolated in their ivory tower than the professors. Findings from the survey corroborated this image, for among the rank-and-file engineers there was generally more interest in cooperating with the universities than with the applied centers. It is tempting to conclude that “applied research” had devel¬ oped into a self-sustaining bureaucracy based on traditional patron-client re¬ lationships. Scientists seemed to be mechanically citing their patrons in the hope that their published articles would lead to promotions. What one student observed of the universities could perhaps be paraphrased to apply to most research in Egypt: “Most of our researchers are chasing after scientific de¬ grees [or publications] because they are a means of promotion. Since pro¬ motion is the primary goal, no one cares about quality, and hence the research often replicates research published abroad.”26

Technological Dependence To implant a heavy industrial base, Egypt simply imported entire factories using relatively advanced technologies. As these technologies did not evolve from Egypt’s previous efforts to industrialize, few Egyptians, however ad¬ vanced their theoretical qualifications, enjoyed a working familiarity with them. Egypt lacked the intellectual as well as industrial infrastructure capable of integrating them into its economy. The showcase industries, such as iron and steel or automobile assembly, tended to be enclaves in a modem sector largely centered on the construction, textile, and food-processing industries. By importing the new technologies, the state enhanced the status of the en¬ gineers and gave some of them an opportunity to acquire new experience, but

Engineers and Professional Development

98

it perhaps also increased their dependence on the foreigners who had master¬ minded it. Apparently the experiences with new technologies were not gen¬ erating applied research, adapting and integrating them to local conditions; rather the new forms of dependence on foreign experts were becoming selfperpetuating and were discouraging indigenous research. Such at least was the view of a number of informants. In the press, too, engineers and scientists complained of the public sector’s excessive use of foreign experts. The missing link between industry and in¬ digenous research agencies was ascribed in part to industry’s distrust of Egyp¬ tian experts. In the magazine al-Talfa a professor of engineering at al-Azhar lamented that “the problems our industrial establishments face are given to foreign agencies for further study.”27 The director of the National Research Center cited the case of a public sector company’s paying a foreign consulting firm $20,000 to do research, still unfinished after two years, that his center could have completed for $2,000 in local currency.28 An informant admitted that he used foreign experts whenever possible, rather than Egyptian ones, so that he could avoid the administrative travail of dealing with an Egyptian organization. The foreign expert usually carried the added advantage of pres¬ tige in the eyes of other public sector managers, thus legitimating one’s de¬ signs. However, the informant also pointed out that foreigners could help indigenous research agencies get business by legitimating them and pressur¬ ing the public sector to use them. For instance, the Industrialization Authority had sometimes planned, sited, and built factories without checking on the availability of raw materials. But the Russians, who were paying for a partic¬ ular factory, were now insisting that the authority call in the Egyptian Geo¬ logical Survey to make the necessary analysis before the factory was sited. Such “research,” however, was routine. The real question was whether the tendency to call in foreign experts and research agencies was actually inhib¬ iting Egyptian research. It might equally be argued, at least in the advanced technological fields where foreign experts were most evident, that their contact with Egyptians could stimulate indigenous research. One public sector manager, for instance, regretted the growing international isolation of Egyptian science, as of 1973. Scientific research, he claimed, “has failed to realize its potential” in part “because the flow of foreign visiting professors became a trickle.”29 Indeed, once American aid to Egypt was resumed after the October War, one of the goals of the two governments was to reestablish scientific exchanges. In tech¬ nological fields institutional links were established between Cairo University

The Politics of Research and Development

99

and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a special Institute for Technological Planning was established within Cairo University in 1979. Until the mid 1970s, however, Egypt seemed to be getting the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, public sector managers seem to have discour¬ aged indigenous research by relying on foreign experts. On the other hand, the kinds of foreign experts helping Egyptian industry were not usually at¬ tempting to build up an indigenous intellectual infrastructure capable of re¬ placing them. The impact of these foreign experts can be assessed in part by analyzing some of the responses of the engineers surveyed in 1973 who were exposed to them. The engineers participating in the survey were asked not only whether they needed outside foreign or Egyptian experts to solve engineering problems that their agency could not handle but also about the sorts of activities to which foreign experts should be restricted. These ranged from actually erect¬ ing or maintaining modem equipment to supervising such activities, training Egyptians to do these jobs, or merely acquainting them with developments in modem equipment and answering their technical questions. These possibili¬ ties were coded into a three-point scale indicating the respondent’s permis¬ siveness in the use of foreign experts. The engineers were also asked, in connection with research strategies, whether it might not be cheaper and more effective to import foreign technology than to invest in indigenous applied research. Only 13 percent of the respondents selected this alternative, but it was hypothesized that under the worst of all worlds the engineers most ex¬ posed to foreign experts would be most likely to select it because, at least in areas of advanced technology, they would be more permissive. It was also expected that agencies employing the most advanced technology would pro¬ vide maximum exposure to foreign experts. The last point was easily confirmed. Over one-quarter of the engineers working in the Rural Electrification Authority, the Nasr Automobile Com¬ pany, the Iron and Steel Company, Cairo Airport, and the Aluminum Project claimed that they usually called on a foreign expert when they had a problem, whereas virtually none of those working for the Transport Authority, the Arab Contractors Company, the Ministry of Irrigation, or—curiously—the Indus¬ trialization Authority did. The engineers employed in these latter agencies were not involved with advanced technologies dependent on foreigners. In the Industrialization Authority they might have been studying Soviet propos¬ als in 1973, but they were not actively engaged in applying the technology in question. Evidently they had no capability for evaluating proposed technol-

100

Engineers and Professional Development

ogies, although U.S. diplomats were quietly trying at that time to interest the Egyptian government in feasibility studies to check alternative proposals. By contrast, the other five agencies were extensively penetrated by for¬ eigners or their technology. The automobile company relied on Fiat compo¬ nents, designs, and assembly processes, while the iron and steel industry used Soviet technology and technicians. The Soviets also supervised the alu¬ minum plant being built at Nag Hammady. While the French were redesign¬ ing and extending the Cairo Airport, at least ten Soviet technicians were advising the Egyptian field supervisors of the Rural Electrification Authority who were working in the villages. Only for the rural electrification program was the need for foreign technicians publicly questioned. Under free elections in 1971 the Engineering Syndicate had replaced a leadership dominated by the pro-Soviet Sabri clique with that of a staunchly anti-Communist former irrigation minister. In 1972 he was questioning the need for European (So¬ viet) technicians in the Egyptian countryside, claiming that Egyptian en¬ gineers “could electrify all of Europe” if necessary.30 Perhaps the foreign experts were needed less in this agency than in the others, where more sophisticated technology was being imported. It turned out, as expected, that greater exposure did result in greater per¬ missiveness toward foreign experts, but only if engineers in the Rural Elec¬ trification Authority were excluded from the analysis. They evidently re¬ sented the Russian presence: those who had recourse to foreign experts took a much harder line than their colleagues in the other agencies who used for¬ eign experts; in fact they were more skeptical of the Russians than the other engineers in the sample who had no contact with foreign experts. Forty-three percent of them wished to restrict foreign experts to answering technical questions, whereas only 15 percent of the engineers exposed to foreign ex¬ perts in the agencies using advanced technologies took this hard line, as did 33 percent of those not exposed to foreigners. Within the four agencies that seemed in real need of foreign experts, contacts still seemed to make a dif¬ ference. Engineers who did not see them were almost twice as likely to take the restrictive approach, and even more so if they were in contact with outside Egyptian experts or consultants. As hypothesized, the engineers exposed to foreign experts were also more likely to reject indigenous research in favor of importing technology from abroad. The contrast between those exposed principally to foreigners and those exposed to other Egyptian experts was especially great in these agen¬ cies utilizing advanced technologies. Seventy-six percent of those in contact

The Politics of Research and Development

101

with Egyptians favored investments in indigenous research, and only 8 per¬ cent preferred to import foreign technology. Among those dealing with for¬ eigners, the percentages were 47 and 25 respectively.31 Of the eighteen most permissive engineers exposed to foreigners in these agencies, only six advo¬ cated research at home, while six preferred to import the results from abroad. Perhaps, as in the bygone epoch of British colonial rule, foreign experts were still wielding critical influence, at least in this policy area of research and development. In the old days the British experts influenced the Egyp¬ tians, even after granting them nominal independence in 1922, in part by manipulating the indigenous technocrats in technical policy areas. Conceiv¬ ably foreign experts were still manipulating their Egyptian counterparts, however unconsciously, in areas of technology transfer. To assess such influ¬ ences, the impact of foreign experts on Egyptian technocrats was analyzed. It was expected that the “technocrats”—that is, senior officials who attended to important policy decisions—might be particularly susceptible to foreign influence precisely because they carried considerable responsibility. In gen¬ eral, it was hypothesized that technocrats were no more likely than their less influential colleagues to be permissive toward foreign experts or to favor importing foreign technology over investing in indigenous research. How¬ ever, those who were in regular contact with foreign experts were expected to be strongly influenced by them. They would need quick solutions to prob¬ lems and hence turn readily to the foreigner, listening more to him, perhaps, than the equally exposed colleague who did not need to make important de¬ cisions. It turned out, in fact, that there was a fairly strong relationship (r = 0.28, p < 0.05) among the engineers in contact with foreign experts between es¬ pousing a permissive attitude toward them and spending time participating in important policy decisions. Even more interesting were the attitudes of the six technocrats in the sample (including panels of experts) who admitted reg¬ ular contacts with foreign experts; five of them were extremely permissive, while the sixth took a middle position. Three preferred importing foreign technology to financing indigenous research, while only two actually favored research at home. One of them advocated joint contracts with universities, while the other preferred to do research within his own organization. No one was interested in working with an applied research center. By contrast, most of the remaining fifty-four technocrats in the sample took constructive posi¬ tions in favor of Egyptian research. Seventy-six percent of them favored some investment at home; among the twenty-six who were in contact with

102

Engineers and Professional Development

other Egyptian experts, almost 90 percent were so inclined, just as with the panel of professors. Only one of them preferred importing foreign technol¬ ogy, while respectively 27 and 42 percent favored contracts with the applied centers and universities. It seemed, then, that foreign experts really did ex¬ ercise a negative impact on Egyptian research, as many informants had claimed.32 Perhaps Egypt was getting the worst of both worlds, for other data sug¬ gested, too, that applied engineering sciences were suffering from the coun¬ try’s isolation from international technological developments. An important indicator of intellectual obsolescence was the age structure of the references cited in the Journal of the Egyptian Society of Engineers. The average age of the references of articles citing Anglo-Saxon sources was 13.8 years, consid¬ erably older than that of most internationally recognized journals dealing with these fields; moreover, their trend over time revealed growing obsolescence in most areas of specialization. In materials engineering, for instance, the average age of the references was high (14.8 years) and appeared to be in¬ creasing with more recent issues of the journal (r = 0.24, n = 35 articles). In fact the only areas that showed any progress were chemical engineering and miscellaneous civil engineering that was not concerned with either irri¬ gation or construction. The average ages of the references in these fields, however, were respectively 16.0 and 18.4 years, suggesting a need for further progress. The other field displaying a particularly venerable apparatus of ref¬ erences (average age, 17.6 years) was irrigation and hydraulics, and its age structure remained remarkably stable. Table 5.2 presents the average ages of references by specialization and, whenever there were more than ten articles, the correlation coefficient between the reference ages and the year they were published in the Journal of the Egyptian Society of Engineers. Further analysis of the references suggested another indicator of the writer’s exposure to international developments, independent of the average age of his references. After 1958, with the Soviet decision to finance the High Dam, Egypt turned almost exclusively to the Communist countries for technical assistance in developing its industrial base, and by the mid 1960s the Eastern European countries were acquiring a monopoly on postgraduate engineering education for Egyptians outside Egypt. It could therefore be as¬ sumed, not too outrageously, that writers revealing some familiarity with the Eastern European or Soviet literature in their field were more exposed to recent international developments than those who merely cited Anglo-Saxon references. Of course there were still trickles of Egyptian Ph.D.’s returning

103

The Politics of Research and Development

Table 5.2 Mean Age of References of Anglo-Saxon and Soviet- or East European-Inspired Articles by Field Anglo-Saxon

Soviet or East European Correlation Coefficient3

N

Correlation Coefficient3

Mean Age

Irrigation

19.0

40

0.08

8.3

6

Construction and structures

10.9

48

0.06

7.4

10

Other civil

17.6

10

-0.37

Mechanical and pro¬ duction

11.4

35

-0.00

11.1

8

Electrical, electron¬ ics

13.2

49

0.10

10.4

12

Materials and metal¬ lurgy

14.8

35

0.24

6.0

1

Basic science

14.6 6

Architecture and city planning

13.3

3

Mining and petro¬ leum

12.7

17

0.34

14.0

4

Chemical

16.4

29

-0.36

7.2

4

Miscellaneous5

10.3

23

0.51

6.0

1

Descriptive nonacademic

12.2

8

General Mean

13.8

303

0.03

9.5

48

11.0

Mean Age

N

Field

0.27

0.49

2

0.30

“Correlation coefficients by age of date of article if the number of articles is ten or more, includes measurement, management, economics, industrial engineering, pollution, bomb shelters, and aeronautics.

104

Engineers and Professional Development

in the late 1960s from Western countries, especially the United States, to which they had been sent in the late 1950s or early 1960s for their postgrad¬ uate work; but those who published in the Journal of the Egyptian Society of Engineers blended into the mass that had been trained earlier in Egypt or abroad, whereas those who used the new sources from the Communist coun¬ tries could clearly stand out. From 1962 to 1976 there was a total of only 172 such references, sprinkled in 49 articles. By contrast, 305 articles referred to 2,386 Anglo-Saxon sources during this period, not including sources by Arabs writing in British or American journals. The “pure” Anglo-Saxon references constituted 77 percent of the total cited in the Egyptian journal. “Communist” influence did not increase much (r = 0.11, a = 343, and the Anglo-Saxons remained preponderant. If Egyptian engineering sciences were suffering for lack of exposure to international technological developments, then the writers displaying expo¬ sure to the Communist countries could be expected to cite more up-to-date references than their colleagues, the large majority of whom had been con¬ fined to Egypt during the Nasser and early Sadat years. This was precisely the case. Those citing the possibly subversive sources were, on the average, four years more up-to-date than their colleagues. It was not just the Com¬ munist sources that were more up-to-date. These writers were citing AngloSaxon as well as East European or Soviet sources, and the age of the refer¬ ences was a general average. The 49 articles using these sources cited a total of 368 references; in other words, less than half of them were actually of Communist origin, while 124 were Anglo-Saxon. Egyptians who learned about Soviet or East European sources cited fewer Anglo-Saxon sources, but they were probably filtering them more quickly. Exposure to any bloc country was also international exposure, and the Egyptians had few alternatives until the mid 1970s. Going to a Communist country seemed a better cure for ob¬ solescence than staying at home. Table 5.2 reports by field the average age of all the references in articles citing Communist sources. Especially striking were the Soviet contributions to chemical engineering, strategic for Egyptian industrialization, and even to irrigation, although most of the articles dealt with construction, mechanical, or electrical engineering. Yet the high tide of Eastern European or Soviet influence on Egyptian en¬ gineering research had probably passed with Sadat’s rise to power. As the writers exposed to these influences settled back in their indigenous environ¬ ments, usually in universities, their references, too, became older. The more recently their article had appeared in the Journal of the Egyptian Society of

The Politics of Research and Development

105

Engineers, the older the average age of its references (r = 0.30) was. Clearly the struggle against obsolescence had to be a continuing one, involving on¬ going contacts with the outside world. That there had been too few contacts was suggested by the references of professors whose place and date of Ph.D. were also known. The place and date explained 44 percent of the variance in the obsolescence of their sources, and the little sample of published articles by these people seemed, like the layers of an archeological excavation, to reflect the trials and tribulations of technology transfer. The bedrock bottom were the Egyptian Ph.D.’s. On the average they had received their degrees earlier than foreign-trained colleagues who made the pages of the Egyptian journal between 1962 and 1966. They also presented the most venerable ref¬ erences, averaging 15.1 years. Next came the British trained, with respect to both the average year they obtained their doctorates and the average age of their references. Then came the American trained, followed by those trained in the Soviet bloc countries whose most recent Ph.D.’s were reflected in the most up-to-date footnotes. The only stratum that did not quite fit were the Ph.D.’s trained in miscellaneous countries, usually Germany, Switzerland, or Austria. On the average they received their doctorates slightly more recently than the British-trained writers, yet their references were almost as obsolete as if they had never left Egypt. Table 5.3 reports the results of the excavation. It seems obvious that Egyptian engineering sciences were in desperate need of further foreign infusions if they were to keep up with international devel¬ opments. But until the mid 1970s Egypt seemed caught in a vicious circle of technological dependence. The technological injections it was receiving, mainly from the Soviets, were discouraging indigenous research efforts, yet these in turn seemed in need of greater international collaboration. Were such aid forthcoming, however, the domestic context of Egyptian science would Table 5.3 Mean Date of Ph.D. and Age of References by Place of Graduate Study Place of graduate study

Date of Ph.D.

(AO

Age of references, in years

(AO

Egypt

1952

(18)

15.1

(13)

Britain

1955

(42)

13.3

(30)

United States

1957

(19)

12.0

(14)

Soviet Union or Eastern Europe

1963

( 6)

10.2

( 9)

Miscellaneous

1956-1957

(32)

14.5

(28)

106

Engineers and Professional Development

probably limit its impact. The science community seemed too segmented into rival factions, divided by visible institutions and invisible colleges of patrons and clients, to receive and disseminate foreign inputs to the operational arms of Egyptian industry. Science planning—indeed any kind of planning—was becoming increasingly problematic, yet it was also doubtful that Sadat’s pol¬ icy of infitah, the opening of the economy to private and international influ¬ ences, would generate spontaneous market forces encouraging indigenous applied research. It was more likely that Egyptian science would reflect the speculative boom triggered by the Arab and American funds injected into the Egyptian economy after the October War. There would be even less coordi¬ nation of the national effort as research entrepreneurs vied for international donations to perpetuate their invisible colleges, yet the entrepreneurs could not become connected with real economic activity in the absence of a pro¬ ductive entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. More generally, it must also be concluded that modernization—in the sense of producing ever greater numbers of engineers (and other scientists)—did not seem to be resulting in the greater social differentiation posited by mod¬ ernization theory. While retaining a corporate identity of sorts, the engineers were neither developing an internal differentiation between the applied and theoretical prototypes characteristic of industrial societies nor keeping up very well with the latest technologies, much less developing new ones in keeping with Egypt’s needs. Professionalization seemed to be occurring only in the formal sense that.the educational system was continuing to expand the ranks of a professionaPsyndicate, whereas graduates usually had to emigrate to preserve and develop a substantive professional identity.

Engineers and Social Change

The Reproduction of a Bourgeoisie? Most Egyptian engineers were members of the “new middle class,” in that they were salaried employees. Over 97 percent of them were employed prin¬ cipally in large organizations, not (like many physicians) in private practices. Implicit in the notion of an expanding new middle class is the hypothesis that “new men” are being promoted into a new status hierarchy that is more open to talent and consequently less rigid than the stratification system that pre¬ ceded it. In effect, society is supposed to be changing in two respects. From the standpoint of individuals there is supposed to be greater social mobility. Structurally, the hierarchy of classes is expected to change, creating a new and presumably more egalitarian distribution of social resources. Yet it could be that the professions, especially prestigious ones such as engineering, were simply new avenues whereby old classes were attempting to preserve their preeminence and privileges. Obviously upper-class children (unless they are discriminated against) stand better chances than those of less privileged families of winning the proper diplomas, however unintentional class bias may be in an educational system.1 Consequently the new middle class open to talent may overrepresent the old upper class. That it is “new” may not entail a high degree of social mobility. Structurally, too, an expand¬ ing new middle class may reflect a freezing rather than a transformation of the stratification system. The upper strata may perpetuate themselves if their education in turn propels them to new positions of influence and power which they exercise in their class interests. Bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes may be vulnerable to such influence simply because, by definition, they lack a capacity for intensive or extensive political mobilization of other social forces. They may be authoritarian precisely in order to prevent such mobili¬ zation. Marxist accounts of the Nasser regime have usually stressed its class char¬ acter, whereas other accounts have tended to emphasize the social mobility and structural changes introduced by a relatively autonomous and progressive group of Free Officers. The present focus on engineers provides a necessarily limited but revealing picture of social continuity within the supposedly new middle class. It also shows how the profession contributed to the reproduc¬ tion of an Egyptian bourgeoisie by converting public into private resources— as if anticipating Sadat’s partial liberalization of the economy. Though this class analysis depends less on the social origins of bureaucrats than on the interests that they allegedly implement,2 the “bourgeois” social background of the engineers also deserves analysis and provides a useful starting point.

110

Engineers and Social Change

In Search of a Bourgeoisie An Egyptian class structure based on private ownership of the means of pro¬ duction integrated into an international capitalist economy developed only in the mid-nineteenth century, with the weakening of the khedivial state. Earlier, families had made fortunes, but their survival depended on patrimonial polit¬ ical relationships. Only with the development of a cash cotton crop coupled with judicial guarantees of private property could an indigenous agrarian bourgeoisie take shape. It flourished under British protection and, even be¬ fore 1930, branched out into new industries. The nascent industrial bourgeoi¬ sie remained weak primarily because of foreign competition; and though its interested conflicted, in theory, with those of the landowners, there was con¬ siderable overlapping of membership in the two classes. Both segments of the bourgeoisie were severely hit by Nasser’s revolution. Land reform, begun modestly in 1952, by 1969 limited nuclear families to the possession of no more than 100 feddans. The socialist decrees of 1961 culminated in the na¬ tionalization of virtually all modem enterprises by 1964. Consequently own¬ ership of the means of production no longer seemed a useful indicator of social class. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Marxist critics of the regime were hard pressed to locate a bourgeoisie. Apart from very marginal increases in the share of the private sector in certain industries, the main evidence of its continuing existence seemed to be the increasing consumption of luxury goods by the middle classes.3 Income distribution was heavily skewed; but economic inequality, even if it is increasing, does not necessarily indicate class inequality. As Frank Par¬ kin explains, “stratification implies not simply inequality, but a set of insti¬ tutional arrangements which guarantee a fairly high degree of social conti¬ nuity in the reward position of family units through the generations. Without the long-term continuity provided by the kinship link it would still be possible for inequality to persist, but not class stratification in the conventional mean¬ ing of that term.”4 Obviously Nasser had seriously upset the institutional ar¬ rangements devised in the nineteenth century. It was still possible, however, to nominally define the bourgeoisie (and aristocracy). An analysis of income distribution conducted by Samir Amin in the late 1950s provides the neces¬ sary parameters. Whether the strata actually constituted a class would then depend on the capacity of its families to transfer their socioeconomic status, under changing institutional arrangements, to their children. According to Amin, the bourgeoisie and aristocracy consisted in 1958 of

The Reproduction of a Bourgeoisie?

Ill

no more than 75,000 families, or just under 1 percent of the population (240,000 out of 27 million). By definition it included higher civil servants, managers, wealthy professionals, modem industrial entrepreneurs and busi¬ nessmen, shareholders, owners of urban real estate, and large absentee landowners. Altogether they were estimated to be receiving 22 percent of the national income.5 Now obviously in the subsequent fifteen-year period Egyp¬ tian income distribution was substantially modified. Mabro estimates, for in¬ stance, that higher civil servants lost between 10 and 20 percent of their real per capita income between 1952 and 1966.6 Occupational distributions within Amin’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy had also changed. He had counted nine thousand higher civil servants, for instance, but by 1973 their number had more than doubled.7 However, the ranks of his thirty thousand or so idle rich rentiers had been depleted, so that in aggregate, the occupational categories that defined these strata probably still represented little more than 1 percent of the population. Just below them, the middle-level cadres calculated by Amin to comprise between 2 and 3 percent of the population in 1958 had probably expanded more rapidly than the total population, but it would be hard to imagine that this occupational category constituted more than 4 per¬ cent in 1973. In the intervening years membership in these elites must have been fairly continuous, for there were no widespread purges. No more than six hundred or so families were directly affected by the socialization decrees, and virtually all the higher and middle-grade civil servants and managers retained their positions. Inevitably there was some turnover, or circulation, within these elite strata, but not of the drastic sort associated with a successful revolution against a colonial settler state. Thus it is presumed that Amin’s analysis provides a reasonable set of parameters for assessing the socioeco¬ nomic status of the fathers of the students and most engineers surveyed in 1973.8 The samples could be expected to exhibit considerable class bias, for “where formal qualifications are a passport to privileged occupations, the educational system is almost bound to confer an advantage on well-born chil¬ dren.”9 Within the system, too, it could be expected that engineering students were “better bom” than those in law or criminology, since engineering had the greater prestige and required higher scores on the thanawiya al-camma examinations. The results, summarized in table 6.1 dramatically confirm the hypotheses. Even excluding the female students, who tended to be more up¬ per class, 43 percent came from those bourgeois and aristocratic strata cal¬ culated as representing only 1 percent of the population. Differences between

Engineers and Social Change

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