Youth and Education in the Middle East: Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan 9781350989917, 9780857727336

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Daniele Cantini is a social anthropologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Graduate School for Society and Culture in Motion at the University of Halle, Germany. He holds a PhD from the Department of Cultural and Language Sciences at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. He has conducted extensive research in Jordan and Egypt, and published articles on questions related to youth and university, migration and religious minorities, among others. He is co-editor of Subjectivity and Islam: Ethnographic Perspectives, and is also editing Rethinking Politics of Private Higher Education. His current research project is on knowledge production at Egyptian universities.

‘A fresh and theoretically sophisticated ethnography of a Middle East university and its contradictions. Skilfully interweaving accounts of global policy initiatives, student lives, campus activism and the gendered challenges of the local labour market, Cantini makes an important contribution to the anthropology of higher education.’ David Mills, Lecturer in Pedagogy and Social Sciences, Oxford University ‘Cantini’s book is a notable contribution to the small but growing literature on the history and ethnography of higher education in the Middle East. Examining the University of Jordan as an institution, a space, an experience and a vector of socio-economic and political currents, Cantini’s study presents a view of Jordanian society missing from more traditional ethnographies – one where young people are constructing their lives and identities while contesting, resisting or railing against their contexts, even when they are “stuck” in them. These complexities are nicely contextualised within an institutional analysis of the university as a site for modernity, state power, legitimacy and globalisation.’ Seteney Shami, Director General, Arab Council for the Social Sciences and Programme Director, Social Science Research Council

YOUTH AND EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST Shaping Identity and Politics in Jordan

DANIELE CANTINI

To Federica and Marta

Published in 2016 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2016 Daniele Cantini The right of Daniele Cantini to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. Library of Modern Middle East Studies 177 ISBN: 978 1 78453 247 5 eISBN: 978 0 85772 937 8 ePDF: 978 0 85772 733 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Garamond Three by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Notes on Transliteration of Arabic Terms List of Arabic Terms

vi x xi

Introduction Youth and Education in Jordan 1. The University of Jordan 2. University Reforms 3. Living the University 4. Political Activism on Campus 5. The University and the Labour Market

1 23 59 81 113 133

Notes Bibliography Index

155 177 189

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My greatest thanks are due to the students and friends who have agreed to share long hours of their time with me, talking about their lives and expectations, and helping me in endless ways, from language support to counselling at moments of crisis. For their privacy I do not mention them by name, other than those who appear in the book itself, but without their immense generosity my research would not have been possible, and this book would not exist. The months spent in Amman have been a truly formative part of my life in many ways, and I am grateful to all those who shared their time with me. During my fieldwork I received support from many people, usually in the form of time and information. In this respect I would like to mention the professors and researchers who have helped me at various critical junctures, particularly, though not exclusively, Mahmoud Al-Shafi’i, Jihad Al-Shu’aibi, Rula Quwwas, Waleed Gharaybeh, Mohamed El-Masry, Baha Abu Hasna, Sarah Ababneh, Zaid Eyadat and Abdelhakim al-Husban. This book is based primarily on the research that I carried out for my PhD, funded by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, and supervised and structured at the University of Milano Bicocca. I thank first those in Modena who allowed for such a strange configuration, which enabled me to be part of two endeavours at one time, particularly Gualtiero Harrison and Antonello La Vergata, and Ugo Fabietti in Milano for having welcomed me. My deepest thanks go to my supervisor Setrag Manoukian, who spent hours with me each time I returned from the field, providing detailed supervision, and carefully reading my chapters; his insights were always acute, and our encounters enriching.

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While I was in Amman, Domenico Copertino, a fellow PhD student at Bicocca, was in Damascus, and we shared a number of weekends, readings and enjoyable times. Above all I thank my family for having instilled in me the curiosity to meet other worlds and people, and for having always supported me in doing so. My interest in Jordan began when I was undertaking voluntary work in the West Bank, and my first encounter with the country came through the Piccola Famiglia dell’Annunziata in the village of Ma’in, and particularly Caterina and Tommaso, who made possible my first encounters, most importantly the two months spent at the house of the Al-Husary family, an experience that enabled me to access Jordan in a domestic way. Their support has continued throughout, gentle and discreet, and has been instrumental in making me consider Jordan a second home, despite my complete lack of contact with it before I started my fieldwork. The fieldwork for this study was funded by my scholarship at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2003– 5 and by the MartinLuther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2012. On both occasions I was affiliated with the Ifpo (Institut Franc¸ais du Proche Orient/French Near East Institute), first as an affiliated PhD student (I owe thanks to Ugo Fabietti for having suggested this, and to Jean-Franc
ois Salles for having welcomed me despite my terrible French) and then as an affiliated researcher, due to the kind interest in my research taken by Elizabeth Longuenesse. At the Ifpo I enjoyed scholarly discussions and a friendly atmosphere, as well as its library; I owe thanks to those who welcomed me, in particular Myriam Ababsa, Jalal Al-Hussein, Ve´ronique Bontemps, Carmen Elias, Alessandra Peruzzetto, Cyril Roussel, and Mohammed AlKhalaf. On my second stay, I was invited to deliver a paper at the Ifpo, and this gave me the opportunity to hear critical remarks from an audience most of whom were much more knowledgeable than me, in particular Mona Taji and Abel Piqueras. Along the way I received the help and support of many scholars and friends, who in different ways all confirmed the validity of my research interest, and supported me in pursuing it; without them this book would not have seen the light. In Modena, Fabio Viti encouraged me to think about the issue of entry into the labour market, and has been a source of support throughout. Upon completing my PhD, I was lucky enough to end up in Cairo, following my wife’s career, and was welcomed at the

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CEDEJ by the late Alain Roussillon, whose company I would have liked to have enjoyed much longer, and by Iman Farag, through whom I came to know Vincent Romani and Nefissa Dessouqi, they all helped me in refining my understanding of the university in the Arab world. Iman in particular has in effect been a second supervisor, and I am lucky to benefit from her comments and her friendship. I am also grateful to Paola Abenante, Luigi Achilli, Julie Billaud, Stefano Boni, Susanne Dahlgren, Baudouin Dupret, Moushira Elgeziri, Sebastian Elsa¨sser, Corinne Fortier, ¨ nder Ku¨c¸u¨kural, Florian Kohstall, Aymon Kreil, Jonathan Kriener, O Irene Maffi, Nassar Massadeh, Gu¨nter Meyer, David Mills, Elizabeth Picard, Thomas Pierret, Paulo Pinto, Armando Salvatore, Samuli Schielke, Etrit Shkreli, Steffen Strohmenger, Kathryn Spellman, Mauro Van Aken, as well as to Ala Al-Hamarneh, a friend, a gifted interlocutor and a great companion for conference-going. My sincere apologies to all those whom I have wrongfully forgotten. A fundamental step in my understanding of the relevance of the university has been my participation in the Social Science Research Council project University Governance and Autonomy in the Changing Landscape of Higher Education in the Arab World. Through this project I came in contact with a number of scholars, some of whom have decidedly improved my understanding of the university. I am particularly indebted to Seteney Shami, for her constant support and challenging of my ideas, to Lucine Taminian and to Fida Adely. A particular mention is due to the late Nabiha Jerad, for her enthusiasm and commitment. In Halle I benefited from insights from colleagues, in particular at the Graduate School ‘Society and Culture in Motion’ and at the LOST research colloquium. Special thanks to my colleagues James Thompson and Ralph Buchenhorst for daily discussions, and to Richard Rottenburg and Matthias Kaufmann for having welcomed me, and given much food for thought. The proposal for this book was first presented at a LOST colloquium, which is also where much of the theoretical framework was developed. Since 2012, I have continued my research on the university in Egypt thanks to the support of the Orient Institut Beirut and of its director, Stefan Leder, and to the patience of Thomas Scheffler. This manuscript has greatly benefited from this new research, and I am indebted for all the support I received. The completion of the manuscript was made possible thanks to the continual support of the Graduate School, and the amount of time for

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research and freedom that I have enjoyed here is unparalleled. I also benefited from the assistance of Oliver-Pierre Rudolph in the last stages of manuscript preparation. Without this time in Halle, the second session of fieldwork, and above all the theoretical discussions enjoyed on a weekly basis, this book would have never been written. I have presented sections of the book on various occasions, and I thank all the audiences that had the patience to listen to me and to engage with my research, in particular those in Aix-en-Provence, Amman, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Beirut, Berlin, Bonn, Bristol, Cairo, Istanbul, Lausanne, Milan, Oberwesel, Oxford and Tallinn. Parts of the book have been published elsewhere, particularly sections from Chapters 1, 3 and 5, and I thank the editors of the different publications as well as the precious insights offered by anonimous peer-reviewer. I am particularly thankful to Iman Farag, Lucine Taminian and Ala Al-Hamarneh for reading and commenting on parts of this manuscript. Their comments and proposed revisions have enabled me to eliminate mistakes and misunderstandings; any that remain are my fault alone. Nick James carefully edited the manuscript, and provided the index; thanks are also due to my editors at I.B.Tauris, Maria Marsh, Azmina Siddique, and Sophie Campbell for their support throughout. This book could not have been written if it weren’t for my companion, intimate friend and wife Federica, whom I encountered in Amman and who has been with me ever since, gifting me with her joy, curiosity and interest in new adventures. I owe her for her endless support, care and intellectual companionship. She has kept me believing in this project at times when I doubted it myself, accompanying me in the process of conceiving it. The book is dedicated to her, as well as to our wonderful daughter Marta, who makes all days new.

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATION OF ARABIC TERMS

Arabic words and names have been transliterated into the Latin alphabet according to a simplified system based on the International Journal of Middle East Studies. To facilitate reading for the non-specialist, all diacritical marks have been omitted except for the ‘ayn (‘) and Hamza (’), and long vowels are not highlighted. Arabic words in common usage in English, such as names of persons and of organisations, are used in their own English common usage. All translation from French and Arabic, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

LIST OF ARABIC TERMS

‘abaya: a long mantle that covers the whole body (female) al-t’asib al-qabili: tribal intolerance ‘ammiyya: dialect da’rat sh’un al-talaba: Department of Students’ Affairs hatta: traditional headgear or scarf, it could be black and white, red and white or simply white hijab: veil that covers head and chest hizbal-wahdah al-sha’biyya al-dimuqraty al-‘urduni: Jordanian Democratic Popular Unity Party iftar: time of breaking the fast during Ramadan Ittihad al-watani li-l-talabat al-urdun: National Union of Jordanian Students (communist student organisation) jalabiyya: long vest (male) kalam al-nas: gossip khimar: a longer hijab, with face usually covered kutlat al-tajdid al-‘arabiyya: Arab renewal bloc makrumat: exceptions (privileges), in determining access to the university muhajaba(t): woman covered with hijab mukhabarat: security services mukhamara: woman covered with khimar munaqqabat: woman covered with niqab mutaddayyn: ‘the religious ones’ saha al-ʽilm: science square sakan al-talabat: the university female dormitory shabab: guys, young people

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shahadat: the university degree Shariʿa: Islamic law shariʿa al-gypsy: gypsy’s street shariʿa al-nas: people’s street tajammu al-watan: National Rassemblemen (nationalist student movement) tawjihi: exam at the end of secondary school wasta: connection maker, ‘the string puller’

INTRODUCTION YOUTH AND EDUCATION IN JORDAN

Having arrived armed with only a few vague ideas on how to pursue my proposed research topic, the relationship between youth and sociopolitical change, it was not long before I started to realise that the Jordanian public university in which I was studying Arabic could conveniently provide me with all the materials I needed. An impressive and highly visible sign of state presence, modernity and development in Amman, the campus of the University of Jordan is attended by thousands of students, and features constantly in the national media. For several decades, the success of Jordan’s education system has been celebrated both inside and outside the country; primary education is virtually universal, and a high proportion of the population receives some sort of higher education. At the same time, however, there is an ongoing discourse of crisis, heavily centred on the country’s youth. Jordan has rampant unemployment, especially among university graduates, and a political system that does not encourage or facilitate real participation. Nevertheless, the number of universities continues to increase, international programmes are being established, and despite a few major problems, education remains a relatively vibrant sector. The link between youth and education seemed worth exploring, and recent developments across the region seem only to confirm the increased centrality of educated youth. Jordan has one of the best education systems in the region, particularly at the university level, and young people constitute a very

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high proportion of its population, at a time in which educated youth is positioned, both figuratively and literally, at the forefront of debates and protests throughout the region. In my research I combine an analysis of the education system with an interest in educated youth. As Adely points out: The study of educational institutions in the region has been dominated by technical and policy-oriented research, leaving a major arena in the lives of contemporary young people unexplored. In recent years, research on the politics of education and the political contests surrounding appropriate knowledge for young people has been more prevalent. However, given the centrality of educational spaces – schools, universities, community colleges, trade schools, and so forth – in the everyday lives of young people, the dearth of research in these spaces is surprising. (Adely 2009a: 373) In this study I combine two essential interests, an institutional analysis of the university as a central site for the project of modernity, and a discussion of the impact of education on young people’s lives. I contend that an ethnographic understanding of how the university works in practice is crucial in order to situate discussions on state power, legitimacy building, and social and economic reforms, particularly with regard to how all these impact on young people’s lives. Regional demographics make it impossible to overestimate the importance of youth, and Jordan, with almost 70 per cent of the population below 30 years of age, is no exception. Moreover, throughout the region youth is becoming increasingly urbanised, thus enabling it to be studied as a coherent whole, since as Bayat points out, youth as a social category is both a modern and an urban phenomenon (Bayat 2010). More policy oriented studies, such as those that discuss the ‘youth bulge’, are confronted by studies that more classically address ‘youth cultures’ (Bucholtz 2002), but there seems to be little to no specific attention to youth in educational spaces. Young people in Jordan are the subject of much discourse and programming, with the Ministry of Youth and Sport, as well as other national and international agencies, regularly sponsoring events and campaigns. State institutions are preoccupied primarily with promoting patriotism and good citizenship, for example in the campaign ‘we are all Jordan’, while developmental agencies are more concerned with

INTRODUCTION

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issues such as environmental awareness and conservation, entrepreneurship, tourism and traffic safety (Adely 2012: 22). Both occasionally use the university as a space for organising activities. The interest in youth has also been fostered by the recent political developments in the region, where uprisings have largely been driven by educated youth (Hanafi 2012); this underlines the importance of reconceptualising youth (see for example Cultural Anthropology 2011). The importance of educated youth in fostering protests has been assessed for Tunisia and Egypt, and Jordan can be seen in the same light, at least in terms of the significance of university students (and unemployed graduates), despite the fact that the regime has so far successfully contained protests. Of course, not all young people belong in the category of ‘educated youth’, even in a country where access to education is quite significant, and this implies limitations. The main reason for my interest in this category, however, lies in its relevance for internal Jordanian discourses on development, prestige, social advancement, and in more recent years on crisis, unemployment and instability. If the category of youth has until recently been used mostly in ‘expert’ literature, with anthropologists working in the region maintaining a critical stance toward the construction of youth as a category in scholarly and political discourses and projects, it has been noted that studies on ‘Islam, education and emotion’ increasingly take into account youth and its ‘interpellation as a category’ (Deeb and Winegar 2012). There is a growing literature on youth in the Arab world and their experiences of globalisation (Bayat and Herrera 2010), especially with regard to the notions of ‘crisis of the youth’ (Bennani-Chraibi and Farag 2007), on the loss of perspectives (Schielke 2008), on the impact of unemployment, especially of university graduates (Tourne´ 2005), and on the potential threat to the existing order posed by educated subjectivities in the region (Hanafi 2012). Focusing on my ethnographic materials, I examine students’ lives on campus, both their socialisation patterns and their political activities, and after graduation upon entrance into the labour market. If education is relevant for discussions on youth, universities are a central feature of both the project of modernity, state-sponsored or global in scope, and of the construction of citizenship, as a gate institution granting access to professional life. I describe in the first

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chapter why Jordan is a particularly apt case study, for both the relevance of universities in the public discourse and for its success story in promoting access to education; this in a regional context has seen a veritable boom in universities in the past two decades, largely owing to a wave of privatisation that is discussed in the second chapter (Cantini 2016, Mazawi 2010, Romani 2009, Sultana 1999). Studies on single universities exist, but tend to be more historical in scope (Reid 1990 on Cairo University, Anderson 2011 on the American University of Beirut and Lawrence 1987 on the American University in Cairo). The Arab Human Development Report published in 2003 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) draws a rather sombre picture of knowledge production and higher education in the Arab World. This report has been widely criticised, its undeniable strengths notwithstanding (Bayat 2006, Destremau 2005), and I concur with many of these reservations. There is an urgent need to understand the actual conditions and the context that shape what the universities can be, and what they can contribute to. International agencies have produced an abundance of working papers and documents that discuss a range of issues in Jordanian higher education, especially in connection with the overt goal of establishing a ‘knowledge society’ (a goal shared by the king and his governments, as well as by international actors and donors).1 Issues dealt with in this kind of literature include expansion of the system, financial constraints, and their impact on quality and equity; the system has evolved rapidly but not fast enough to meet the rising demand for university education, and it is burdened by financial cuts that are leading to a perceived decrease in quality and in affordability of higher education (World Bank 2009). In this book I will deal with the issue of higher education in Jordan from a more socially conscious perspective, situating policies and reform attempts in the context of Jordanian society, discussing some of the impacts of these on students and on the ways in which citizenry is created, community bonds reinforced or weakened, and spheres of the possible and the conceivable redefined. The goal is to arrive at an ethnographic understanding of the implications of the university in Jordan, thereby making a contribution to a deeper understanding of both institutional theory – structure, politics, reforms, internal discourses – and the more ethnographic perspective of the everyday lives

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of those working in it – mostly students, also after graduating, paying particular attention to how their subjectivities come to be formed within this prominent institution. The contention is that the university is integral to the building and maintenance of society as a whole, and as such socialisation patterns within the campus in some ways reflect societal distinctions of class, geographical origin, gender and educational level (see Cantini 2012b). Thus the university is a microcosm in which to see broader social mechanisms at play, and I show how this manifests itself in students and professors alike. In particular, I am interested in exploring the ways in which the university as an institution works within its context, being at the same time an agent of social reproduction and legitimacy and a motor of change and critique. But before digging deeper into the theoretical implications of my study, it is necessary to briefly describe some of the conditions of the Jordanian context.

Jordan and the stability paradigm While a detailed review of social science studies concerning Jordan would be excessive for my purposes here, it is nonetheless interesting to identify the major interests in recent literature, as they reveal much about the image of the country abroad, and doing so also enables greater reflexivity in the study. A reviewer of an edited collection on Jordan, published more than half a century ago, stated clearly the main points of interest back then: the country has no visible means of support; Jordan has no strong political ties in the Arab world since the collapse of the Arab Federation of Iraq and Jordan; its population tripled with the absorption of the West Bank of the Jordan River after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The liberal West Bank Palestinian Arabs and refugees, more than 56% of the population, are regarded by the conservative East Bank villagers, nomads and semi-nomads with suspicion. Both groups vie for power in and out of the government hierarchy. (Dupree 1960: 716) Over 50 years later, little seems to have changed when it comes to scholarly interests in the country; the absence of resources that could justify the existence of the country is still a major preoccupation,

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and in recent years this has been expressed through the concept of ‘rentier state’ (Bank and Schlumberger 2004, Peters and Moore 2009). Regional and international relations are still quite central in explanations for the resilience of the regime, with the Hashemite dynasty being the only successful power in the entire Mashreq since its inception little less than a century ago (Susser 2000, Wilson 1987), and some studies also refer to the ongoing ‘transition’ to democracy (Joffe 2001). In particular, recent studies have pointed to the liberalised autocratic character of the Jordanian regime, beginning to unpack the complex ways in which liberal democratic practices have been selectively adopted by authoritarian regimes. Regimes may be willing to liberalise on some issues, such as women’s rights, and these reforms are certainly genuine; but in no case do they compromise the authority of the regime, and this leads to a sense of perennial reforms leading nowhere, intended to satisfy international audiences while taming domestic opposition (Schwedler 2012). The efforts at building the nation, at imagining the community that should populate this colonial creation under perennial threat, are well represented in the literature (Brand 2006, Maffi 2004, Massad 2001, Shryock 1997, Van Aken 2003). The ethnic and national composition of the population has been subject to dramatic change, and increases, due to the regular crises in neighbouring countries (Palestine first and foremost, joined by Iraq and Syria during the last decade). This is a frequent subject of scholarly debate (Anderson 2005, Brand 1988, Layne 1994), and a stream of studies deal with refugee camps (Al-Hamarneh 2004, Bocco and Al Husseini 2010, Destremau 1994). Recently, this trend has been revived by a new interest in transnational flows of people and their effects on politics and social issues (De Bel-Air 2003, Brand 2006). From a contemporary perspective, what is less in evidence from the 1960 review is the issue of Islam, a sustained subject of scholarly interest since the late 1980s, largely as a result of the Islamic revival and the growing public presence of Islamic organisations at various levels of Jordanian life. Jordan is a particularly appropriate case to highlight the complex intermingling, indeed co-creation, of state bureaucracies and religious establishments (Antoun 2006), particularly when it comes to the role of civil society and welfare in the context of neo-liberal reforms (Baylouni 2008). There has been a consistent flow of studies on Islamist performances at elections, the last of which was in 2013 (Auge´ 1998,

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Valbjørn 2013). Another important element in the literature that was missing from the 1960 picture is the impact of globalisation, something that has become apparent in Amman in the last three decades, with a consequent rise in inequalities (Hannoyer and Shami 1996, Ababsa and Daher 2011). Schools have been studied as a central part of the nation building project, with regard to their aim of sustaining a link between the monarchy and the people of this colonial creation (Anderson 2005), and also as a propeller of social developments, particularly along the gender/Islam nexus, or the making of gender through education (Adely 2009a,b,c, 2012, Droeber 2005, Jansen 2006). This latter perspective moves away from treating schools as opaque state institutions that operate in favour of a simple reproduction of the status quo, with textbooks as sources par excellence, in favour of a more complicated theory of social reproduction, by showing young people finding ways of resisting or transforming the tendency of schools to reproduce particular power relations. More recent studies tend to shift attention away from regime survival and toward the impact of reforms on ordinary citizens. The past decade of reforms in Jordan should not be viewed as a return to authoritarianism but rather as a deepening of commitment to certain kinds of liberal reforms and a de-emphasising of others, with the country becoming more liberal and more autocratic (Schwedler 2012).2 This perspective allows us to see the ways in which policies affect different segments of Jordan’s citizenry, in a similar way to other regions of the world (Ong 2006). Rights that effectively reach only certain portions of the population are expanded while (often political) freedoms, that only portions of the population are striving to utilise, are constrained. These varied reform projects entail legal reforms aimed at democratisation and ‘good governance’, the reorganisation of public space, changes in the practices and visibility of security services, the construction of particular kinds of commercial zones (free trade zones as well as shopping centres), and the refusal to recognise certain expressions of political dissent (Schwedler 2012: 261). Economics is advanced at the expense of political rights, there is a new cosmopolitan elite that is replacing Jordan’s traditional and conservative landholding elite families, and rights increasingly mapped onto neo-liberal spaces that mark an economically fragmented population (Ibid.: 269). All of these are at play within the

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university, including the increased visibility of security services, an integral mechanism for the advancement of a particular kind of liberal reform project, and this study discusses the complex ways in which legitimacy is built in this context, and how education plays a pivotal role in this. Studying an institution such as the university might seem futile in this context of ongoing political and humanitarian crises; Jordan has wars and ongoing tensions around almost all of its borders, has seen a rise in US military influence (not simply in terms of aid but also in more direct ways), and a huge inflow of refugees, from Iraq and since 2012, from Syria, which is altering the social and economic landscape of the kingdom, and the effects of which are perhaps yet to be understood in their entirety (but see Chatelard 2010 and Sassoon 2011). Yet I argue that it is precisely in such a burdened context that we might understand correctly the double functions of the institution, that of perpetuating power and that of being fragile, a possible venue for expressing critique.

Shaping identity and politics: The university as an institution I understand the university as a global form, as a superb example of a travelling model (Behrends, Park and Rottenburg 2014), as a relatively new, at least in social anthropology, object of study that could help to cross disciplinary and regional boundaries, and to foster a more nuanced understanding of global affairs, the impact of neo-liberalism on different areas of the world, and the role of local conceptions of authoritative knowledge in shaping this global institution. Questions remain about the extent to which higher education should be appraised as a coherent global phenomenon or a nationally variable one. Higher education systems function in all contemporary societies, but with significant national variations in their structure arising from the different systems of power and management of inequalities in place (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008). As I make clear in Chapter 2, the expansion of higher education and its consequences for stratification are truly global, even while their expressions tend to remain nationally specific. Despite its crucial importance for sociology and social anthropology, there is no intellectually coherent theorisation of higher education. (Ibid.) Recent anthropological studies discuss the impact of reforms

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inspired by neo-liberal policies, which have spread massively in the Western world over the past two decades (Wright and Rabo 2010). Here, anthropology can contribute by combining a critical examination of the keywords, policy discourses and rationalities of governance, with an exploration of how political technologies such as accountability mechanisms, performance measurement and customer satisfaction surveys work in practice, with accounts of students’, academics’ and sometimes managers’ diverse ideas of the university and how they act to shape their institution in their daily life. Moreover, anthropological studies of universities provide an international, comparative perspective on what reforms are taking place and how discourses are being deployed, as well as how other actors, notably academics and students, are making sense of, and responding to, these changes (Ibid.: 11 – 12). Despite the recognition that universities are sites for much wider processes of social, political and economic change,3 they tend to be taken for granted, a given in our contemporary world, not in need of comprehensive theorisation. A recent review article suggested three possible metaphors invoked or implied by sociologists when describing universities, ‘sieves for regulating the mobility processes underlying the allocation of privileged positions in the society, incubators for the development of competent social actors, and temples for the legitimation of official knowledge’ (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 128).4 These metaphors pursue three basic problems: social stratification, social reproduction, and the legitimation of knowledge, with stratification being ‘the field’s main business’ and enormously productive not only for the sociology of higher education but for the discipline as a whole, because it has demonstrated the central role of formal schooling, and the state policies that produce and regulate it, in the hierarchical organization of modern societies. (Ibid.: 141) To these they add a fourth metaphor, which enables us to appreciate the plurality of institutional domains in which higher education is implicated: the labor market and the larger economy, the professions and the sciences, the philanthropic sector, the family, and

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the nation state. The peculiar location of higher education at the intersection of multiple institutions encourages us to argue that higher education should also be seen as a hub, connecting multiple social processes that often are regarded as distinct. (Ibid.: 128) It is frequently pointed out that formal secular education is an essential component of nation building, through which the state produces competent citizens and workers – this has been one of the pillars of the Stanford school. But social scientists have only begun to explore the empirical relationships between the stratification, knowledge production and legitimation functions of higher education. ‘In modern societies, much of the work of class stratification, knowledge production, and legitimation is relegated to the same organizations, universities’ (Ibid.: 135), and thus higher education occupies a privileged place in the broader institutional order. Ultimately our guiding image of the hub is not merely a rhetorical device but a theory about the sociological significance of universities: They are central to the infrastructure of modernity, connecting modern societies’ major institutions even while they remain officially independent and intermittently critical of them. (Ibid.: 142) As I pointed out in the previous section, in the anthropology of the Middle East there is a growing interest in the effects of mass schooling, but this has mainly generated studies focusing on the intersection between Islam, gender and development (Starret 1998, Adely 2012, Deeb and Winegar 2012), with limited interest in the effects of the institution on broader issues such as religious imagination, the topic of Eickelman’s pioneering article (1992). In this study I am particularly interested in looking at the ways in which the university as a hub connects different institutional systems such as the labour market and the family, entrance into the professions and the sciences, the larger economy, the nation state and the global world. Higher education, despite its institutional strength, constitutes a paradox: ‘as a mechanism for the production of valuable credentials and official knowledge, it is simultaneously a powerful and a fragile social institution’ (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 137), an object of

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contestation with regard to its policies granting status and legitimising knowledge, to its workers as objects (and subjects) of political conflict and ideological controversy, and to its sources of revenue. While the recognition that the university is a contested field is of the utmost importance, the fragility of the university as an institution could be more productively linked to the notion of the essential fragility of social orders, as this opens up new ways of looking at the function of education in non-liberal societies, as well as at Jordanian stability. Starting from the recognition that institutions, despite being one of the trickiest problems in sociology, are rarely the object of attempts at definition or even specification, and especially in the pragmatic paradigm developed in France in the past 20 years have been either ignored or connoted negatively due to their ascribed dominating character (Boltanski 2011).5 Luc Boltanski recently attempted to discuss them as a fundamental way of creating order which, at the same time as providing the possibility of order, also provide the possibility of critique. In his words, such an approach involves abandoning the idea of an implicit agreement, which would somehow be immanent in the functioning of social life, to put dispute and, with it, the divergence of points of view, interpretations and usages at the heart of social bonds, so as to return from this position to the issue of agreement, to examine its problematic, fragile and possibly exceptional character. (Ibid.: 61, emphasis in the original) A focus on their dominating effect downplays the fact that institutions, although bodiless, are far from being unequivocal, stable and neutral. They are highly ambiguous things, ‘at once necessary and fragile, beneficial and abusive’ (Ibid.: 84, quoted in Calkins, Ille and Rottenburg 2015). Institutions for Boltanski have above all semantic functions to confirm and re-confirm certain orders or states of affair and to establish the reference for their evaluation; in his words, they have the ‘task of stating the whatness of what it is’,6 and of ‘sorting out what is to be respected from what cannot be’, by fixing reference, ‘especially when it bears on objects whose value is important and whose predicates must be

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stabilized by definitions’ (Ibid.: 75 – 6, emphasis in the original). By attempting to make a seemingly universal and timeless statement, institutions must disregard the contexts of actions (Ibid.: 79). Institutions then consolidate ‘what is’ and ‘what is valuable’ as true and valid for all circumstances in a public discourse and thereby construct reality, with ways of operating and rules, by way of institutional acts. Such reality allows for the establishment of a common language and identification, of shared goals, the very idea of a possible social order, the normative dimension of social life (Calkins, Ille and Rottenburg 2015). Such acts are always arbitrary, and institutions spend a great deal of effort in creating justifications for them – but such justifications are seldom beyond dispute, and always subject to critique. ‘Reality’ figures as an institutional product, organised by arrangements of explicit regulations and norms, and oriented towards the permanence and stability of orders. It is distinguished from the ‘world’, which is immanence and incessant change (far from being social in kind), the immersion in the flux of life. [The] arrangements that constitute and organise reality are fragile because critique can always draw events from the world that contradict its logic and furnish ingredients for unmasking its ‘arbitrary’ or ‘hypocritical character’, or for ‘deconstructing’ them – something that paves the way for making arrangements of a new kind. (Boltanski 2011: 59) It is in this sense that the possibility of critique is inscribed in the tensions contained in the very functioning of institutions, which uses the double register of confirmation and critique, two ‘mutually interdefined functions that only exist through one another’ (Ibid.: 99). Critique only becomes meaningful with regards to the order it challenges, and the mechanism working to preserve an order only becomes meaningful against a background where critique is possible. Thus, Boltanski argues, wherever institutions emerge, so inexorably does the possibility of critique. One of the main goals of this book is to study the university as a crucial institution in the creation and maintenance of normative orders, at the same time being the very condition through which citizens are

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made, by being socialised into a network of rules necessary to live as subject, and through which critique emerges and new possibilities are created, in a variety of ways that range from the actual structure of the university, the changes in policies, social and political lives of students, and the entrance into the labour market.

Contents of the book The first two chapters deal most directly with the university as an institution, the first focusing on its structure and functioning while the second deals with ongoing reforms. Chapters 3 and 4 deal more directly with students’ experiences of socialisation on campus and on their political activities or lack thereof, while the fifth and final chapter takes the entrance into the labour market as a way of uniting the two parts of the book, and at the same time of moving on from the university. Each chapter discusses a different understanding of the emergence of critique within the university as an institution, hinting at possible new developments. Chapter 1 explores higher education in Jordan, its birth and development, its philosophical foundations, and discusses its political and social relevance before turning to the specific case study, the University of Jordan, the oldest institution of this kind in the country; the largest and most prestigious public university, and the one where I carried out my fieldwork. My aim here is to show how such an institution, a globally travelling technology, concretely works in its context, by discussing issues of adaptation and of appropriation of a seemingly neutral and coherent institution into a truly local endeavour. While the first part of the chapter has a more historical and general outlook, the second part is devoted to an ethnographic discussion of how the University of Jordan concretely functions in two particularly relevant ways, admission policies and differences between teaching methodologies in different faculties. In order to track shifting power relations it is necessary to trace changing institutional forms. The seemingly stable features of public institutions have become increasingly contested as the boundaries between public and private have become porous and multilayered. My contention is that the university contributes to the creation of differences between groups of citizens which are integral to the regime’s survival strategy, and that these differences are changing

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as a result of ongoing privatisation and commodification within the public university. Chapter 2 discusses the crisis of the university in Jordan, describing some of the main reforms that have taken place during the last 25 years, such as privatisation, internationalisation and budget cuts, as well as the language in which these reforms are wrapped. Interestingly, while some of the reforms are indeed transnational, and could well be taken to be part of the university as a ‘global assemblage’, others are rather context-specific. This section explicitly addresses what Iman Farag (2009) identifies as a necessary anthropology of university reforms. Following Collier and Ong, this phenomenon can be interpreted as belonging to the category of ‘global forms’ in modern institutions. In this chapter I focus on these forms, governmental discourses and technologies, while highlighting their ‘displacement and reappropriation’, concurring with the recognition that such global forms ‘interact with other elements [. . .] in contingent, uneasy and unstable relationships’ (Collier and Ong 2005: 12). Like global assemblages, the university in Jordan contains inherent tensions, and I argue that an ethnographic understanding enables us to account for its heterogeneous, contingent, unstable and situated character. The second part of the chapter deals more specifically with policies, including an in-depth analysis of the HERfKE (Higher Educational Reform for Knowledge Economy) programme, sponsored by the World Bank. The programme started in 2007, to be completed in 2012, but by the time of my last fieldwork visit (February 2012) one of the professors involved in its design told me that it had been definitively aborted. University reforms display a high degree of worldwide isomorphism, emerging primarily from the intersection of finance and education in the form of the increasingly pressing demands of the ‘global knowledge economy’. However, the reforms, despite being granted a status beyond critique, at least officially, are not being implemented without contradictions and restraints, and at times are not implemented at all. The final section of this chapter deals with yet another kind of policies, those enacted by international agencies such as the European Union and its TEMPUS programme. The aim of this section is to highlight the international forces at play in a country that is usually described as being rather heavily dependent on international aid and support for its existence. Yet these forces do not operate

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undisturbed, they learn from past experiences and are constantly confronted by local realities. Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which young people’s lives are shaped by the years they spend in educational institutions. I contend that the university offers a vantage point from which to view the ways in which society is structured and managed, and a particular focus on students and their everyday practices assists in the study of political continuity and the perpetuation of institutions. Education is central to understanding what choices and dilemmas youth face today, and I argue that the university provides a unique space in which to investigate changing notions of education, citizenship, social and gender roles, religious and friendship ties (Cantini 2014). Students experience contrasting feelings that push them toward different moral projects – personal realisation, familial expectations, pressure from peers and from the dominant culture on campus, religious ideals and career plans. My aim is to show ordinary students’ lives, trying to represent their everyday experiences in the context of attendance at university as a foundational moment in their lives. In this chapter I present the bodily practices and the production of difference among students, which are to some degree constituted by, and contribute to the constitution of, the social order within the university as I have described it in Chapter 1. In Boltanski’s terms, ‘reality’ would be the apparent order of things, privileged faculties, social strata, neighbourhoods in Amman all sustaining each other within the university as an institution. ‘World’ would be the political and social vicissitudes, the lived knowledge of the fragility of the system – an acute awareness, given the instability of almost all neighbouring countries, heightened by the civil war in Syria that is regarded in Jordan as an internal affair likely to produce serious consequences. Resulting from this is critique, which in the case of the University of Jordan (and indeed of Jordan at large) does not imply a political opposition (I will enlarge on this in the following chapter) but leads to a diffused scepticism (especially when it comes to proposed reforms ‘to assure quality of education and freedom of thought’ and the like), to a retreat into the private sphere of families, and to a widespread desire to emigrate. A prime example of critique emanating from within the institution is that of the student movements that, while accepting the impossibility of opposing the regime politically, try to use the language of quality and knowledge to put forward certain

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demands for change within the institution; Chapter 4 is devoted to such movements. In Chapter 4, I deal with the contradictory character of universities as organised spaces of political dissent. In one sense they are highly disciplined institutions, where state authority manifests itself in various ways, yet at the same time they are, at least potentially, foci of dissent, not just because they contain a unique concentration of young minds and bodies, but also because of their very nature, of stimulating discussion and encouraging highly reflexive consciousness, all the more so in the present context of globalisation. As Andre´ Mazawi noted, ‘the expansion of schooling is closely associated with a rise in political contestation of the established order’ (2002: 60, quoted in Adely 2012: 82). I contend that universities are also integral parts of this ongoing trend, not just because they are ‘arenas’ that provide space and material that draw attention to some of the conflicts surrounding national identity – from the philosophical foundations of education to its material organisation, from admission criteria to teaching methodologies, from the ongoing discourse on reforms to actual socialisation practices on campus – but because of the very reflexive nature of institutions, which create their own reality that is nonetheless always embedded in the world, and which creates discrepancies that enable the possibility of critique (Boltanski 2011). I show these entanglements in the context of political activities on and around the campus as one of the ways in which such a critique emerges, along with the social practices described in Chapter 3 and the entrance into the labour market that constitutes the topic of the concluding chapter. I first present a description of two scenes that I witnessed in 2004, and these set the tone for an analysis of how power differentiates between different threats. I then briefly discuss the history of student movements in Jordan, and how they integrate with the political developments in the country, before describing the main clashes that occurred on different campuses in 2012– 13, which I argue are a consequence of past political choices. Lastly, I conclude by pointing to some recent changes in student activism, from being mainly political to being mostly concerned with internal demands and the denunciation of university inconsistencies. My contention is that such movements could be the sign of a new consciousness, which has the ability to resist phases of harsh political repression, as is becoming increasingly evident in at least one neighbouring country.

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The concluding chapter investigates the relationship between the university and the labour market. Again following Boltanski’s analysis of the possibilities of the emergence of critique, this relationship involves a double challenge to the stability of the university as an institution; at the level of its world – what is valuable education, what constitutes the goal of a university – and at the reality level, when the external context provides a testing moment. The University of Jordan is the foremost example in Jordan because of its prominence, and among the official goals listed in its website is ‘graduating outstanding students who can excel in public competitions, job markets and postgraduate programmes, in light of pluralism and the change of environmental and technological requirements’. At the same time Jordan has among the highest youth unemployment levels in the Arab region, and the situation appears particularly dire for graduates – a concern that has been leading to headlines and expert studies for well over a decade (Kanaan 2009).7 The first part of the chapter analyses official and expert discourses on the so-called school-to-work transition, complementing the discussion in Chapter 2, with particular emphasis on the gender dimension. The chapter discusses the concept of ‘waithood’ (Singerman 2007), of being excluded from adult life, and some of its implications in the Jordanian social context, where it could more aptly be described as ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009). I then turn to my ethnographic material and introduce some former students and their experiences in entering the labour market, something enabled by the relative longue dure´e of my presence in the field – the students of 2003–5 were young adults in 2012, with years-long working experience, and an interest in their initial careers came quite spontaneously to the fore in our 2012 conversations. The labour market thus emerges as a fundamental aspect of an analysis of the university as an institution, since it contributes to an authentic definition of the aims and scope of the institution, as well as its relevance in the broader context. This chapter combines an analysis of official discourses, the world of the institution and discussion of the reality of entering the job market as it is experienced by some former university students.

Methodology The case study on which this study is based is that of the University of Jordan, the oldest institution of this kind in the kingdom (established in

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1962), a public university that is currently the biggest and most prestigious university in the country, and which I posit as representative of the changes that the higher education system is facing. I started attending the university as a student of Arabic language at the Language Centre in the summer semester 2003; I returned in spring 2004 and left a year later, having attended four semesters in total as a student, being also an affiliated PhD student at the French Near East Institute (Ifpo). Apart from a few short visits, to attend conferences or to visit friends, I came back for five weeks in the winter of 2012 for a more specific follow-up research phase, with this book in mind. Most of the data presented was gathered during my PhD fieldwork, especially that concerning students’ voices and representation, although I have of course updated some of the relevant information, particularly that regarding political and religious subjectivities – while most of the general data on the university, on its structure and on the latest reforms, as well as on the role of international agencies, is updated to the present, due to my participation at conferences and research projects that addressed these and other similar issues, and also to the last fieldwork that I carried out in January and February 2012. While the first semester in 2003 was primarily a way of getting to the field, when I came back I rented a flat in Tla’a al-Ali, not far from the university’s main gate, and started focusing my research on the university and on the everyday lives of its students. I would attend my own classes in the morning, and then spend the afternoon on campus, with students, at the beginning mostly around the Faculty of Arts since our administration was located there, and since most of them had interest in meeting foreigners. These contacts came almost effortlessly, as not only was I a student there myself, but I was only slightly older than students in their last year, and the age difference was not impeding contacts. In this phase, the dilemma between being personally involved (as insider, albeit slightly off centre) and of being reflexively critical (as outsider, with skills necessary to self-critique) was not really an issue, as my being a student was the simple way of making contact with fellow students, and the scope of my research was still not completely determined. As months passed by I extended my circles of acquaintances, assisted by my improved knowledge of Arabic, and started meeting some students off campus as well, in their houses with or without families, and

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meeting with recent graduates encountered on different occasions. As my exposure to the field grew, as well as my language skills, I had to explain more and more often why I was so interested in Jordan, in the university and its students; conversations then went on as usual, with hours of chatting and gossiping and a few moments in which my interlocutors thought that I was finally obtaining some valuable information. With them I never resorted to interviews, neither structured nor semi-structured; instead, I relied on what Olivier De Sardan calls impre´gnation: The researcher on the field observes and interacts even without paying attention, without having the impression of being working, and thus without taking notes [. . .] Living, he observes, and such observations are ‘registered’ in his unconscious, in his subconscious, in his subjectivity, in his ‘ego’, or in what you want [. . .] They do not become a corpus and are not written in a notebook [. . .] They nonetheless play an indirect but important role in familiarising the anthropologist with the local culture, and in his capacity of decoding others’ deeds and gestures. (Olivier De Sardan 1995: 79)8 Along with this method however, I kept taking notes, usually upon returning home at the end of the day. But the information I gathered was largely out of focus, especially during the initial stages, and involved my presence much more than I would have desired – perceived as a peer, students willing to spend their time with me were interested in my experience as much as I was interested in theirs, and so conversation on interests, past experiences, future plans, love, religion, war and peace were usually exchanged.9 This exchange went so far that some of the students became regular acquaintances during my stay in Jordan, and a few of them became friends with whom I remain in contact. Naturally, the information on which the last three chapters are built represents only a tiny fraction of our actual encounters, more of which I have tried to convey elsewhere (Cantini 2012b, 2014, forthcoming).10 At the same time, I became interested in the functioning of the university itself, leading to the first chapter of this book (the material that better survived the years after the defence of my PhD in 2006). In the last two semesters of my stay I also started interviewing professors

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of various faculties, looking for references at the university library, and attending classes given by professors who would accept my presence for a class or two. In total I attended a couple of dozen classes, in the Faculties of Arts and Biology, in Shariʽa and in social sciences, in education and in the Faculty of Advanced Studies; in addition, I attended several conferences on and off campus. During my main fieldwork, contacts with university administration were almost totally absent, possibly due to my being a student, and my age militating against my attempts at accrediting myself with research credentials, rather than as the result of a lack of focus. The 2012 follow-up showed clearly that some of the material conditions that had helped me in gathering so much data were no longer present. Not only was my access to the university campus more hazardous, for my lack of a student ID and my attire clearly distinguished me from the usual flow of students, encouraging guards to question me quite often, but the situation on campus was becoming more tense, as I explain in Chapter 4, and controls were becoming more frequent. On the other hand, I had a clearer set of questions in mind, thanks also to the research that I had carried out in recent years in Egypt, and could access faculty staff and administrators more easily. A lecture I gave at the Ifpo in February 2012 helped me gain access to quite a few university professors and officials interested in education, and this turned my attention to European Union sponsored initiatives as well as to the World Bank initiated university reform, as discussed in Chapter 2. This aspect of my research reveals most clearly how such a situated and seemingly concrete field (conveniently adorned with fences and gates) does not escape the need to understand larger systems and peoples’ articulated awareness of these other forces in their lives, nor the multisited character of contemporary ethnographies, necessary to gain insight into how global and local dimensions of higher education reform connect, and the way these elements are assembled and translated in different contexts. Marcus (1995) outlined a range of objects that one might ‘follow’ to construct a multi-sited ethnography: people, material objects, symbols or metaphors, stories, biographies and conflicts. The anthropology of policy developed by Shore and Wright (1997) drew upon this approach in proposing to ‘follow the policy’ in the sense of its development, implementation, contestation and movement across what they later

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termed ‘policy worlds’ (2011). This approach views policies as ‘assemblages’ in which cultural meanings and social relations congeal, sometimes dissolve, and often migrate into new settings, with an agency of their own. In this sense, my ethnography falls within what has been termed ‘global ethnography’ (Burawoy et al. 2000). The focus on the university, a truly global form despite its national and regional specificities, enables an extension of the representation of a local setting beyond national and cultural borders, grounding it both in local histories and in the changes that have been and continue to be wrought by processes of globalisation. In a parallel way, the focus on university students, another global category, encourages the uncovering of shared global imaginaries that people employ in different ways to make sense of their worlds, as well as of the external forces that shape their subjectivities in their everyday lives.

Youth and education in Jordan In the context of widespread insecurity throughout the region, exacerbated by the ongoing Syrian and Iraqi crises and by the protracted economic crisis, Jordan looks forever on the brink, on a perilous path. The already fragile compromises that produce social order in the kingdom are strained even more than usual, and these tensions play themselves out in university life. The country’s university system has long played an important role in the political socialisation of Jordanians. Universities are places where knowledge is produced and transmitted, and where society reproduces itself in complex and tension-ridden ways, and in this book I suggest that this stability still rests on precarious grounds for a variety of reasons – the changing nature of the public university, the reforms that aim at transforming it, the ways in which students inhabit it from a social and a political point of view, and the ways in which the labour market is taken as an evaluation of the quality of education. One of the most important pillars of social stability in Jordan is the prospect of upward mobility, a goal that structures family lives and individual expectations; such social mobility is under threat, not unlike in other parts of the world, due in part to a changing notion of what the university is. Students’ protests over increased fees have been mounting, and culminated in various protests, for example in November 2014 –

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fees were increased by 100 to 140 per cent in June, and students are increasingly selected for the parallel programme rather than the competitive one (see Chapter 1). Indeed, ideological and material dimensions go hand in hand in co-creating the meaning, and the effects, of education. The everyday lives of students reveal discourses on the state and on religion, on career and marriage, on the meaning of modernity and of progress, and state, religion and families interact and at times compete to define the meaning of such discourses (Adely 2012). Moreover, their lives are shaped not only by the disciplinary aspects of the university as an institution, but increasingly by global discourses on value and worth, manifested in reform packages that alter the meaning of education. In this sense, the book is also a hidden plea for the public university, the idea that establishing and maintaining a space where a diverse population of students and teachers can interact might simply be a good idea if a certain degree of national unity is to be preserved, something that class-based division induced by the privatisations will not help accomplish (Cantini 2016). Boltanski indicates that the difference between reality and world also relates to two regimes of action – practical moments and moments of reflexivity. In practical moments reflexivity is low, the reality of reality is not questioned and action is approached pragmatically, such as when there is a sort of tacit agreement among the actors to avoid creating unease and to ‘close one’s eyes’ to diverging interpretations and contradictions, refraining from disputes for the sake of the action in common (Boltanski 2011: 61–5, quoted in Calkins, Ille and Rottenburg 2015). In moments of dispute, when the meaning of the institution is contested, reflexivity is quite high, and new agreements have to be formed to reinstate the reality of the institution – these moments could also be understood as potentially positive, for they require an increased awareness of the actual meaning of the university. Movements that defend an open idea of education could become a new catalyst for imagining a diverse and inclusive citizenship.

CHAPTER 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF JORDAN

The education sector, higher education in particular, plays a fundamental role in Jordanian public life. The king and the government consider it to be one of the main resources of the country (which is a small one when compared to bigger, resource rich neighbouring countries), and it is the object of investments, reforms and special care. It is a source of pride for the regime in the ongoing comparison with neighbours, and a means of building up the human capital that is one of Jordan’s main exports. At the same time it is one of the principal loci in which some form of opposition to the regime might emerge, and therefore it is simultaneously sponsored and censored, developed and yet kept under tight control. As I described in the introduction, sociologists have long recognised that schooling is central to stratification in modern societies, as the allocation of occupational positions is done largely on the basis of educational attainment. Nevertheless formal education has been less of a ladder than a ‘social sieve’, regulating access to privileged social positions. Max Weber’s core insight that education has a dual character – both facilitating and constraining social opportunity – has informed most subsequent stratification scholarship (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008). Bourdieu’s (1988, 1989) studies of higher education, which explore correspondences and affinities among status, authority and the ‘ways of knowing’ inculcated by various educational institutions, can serve as a point of departure for understanding the dramatic transformations that are occurring in Jordan (as elsewhere in the region) today. Bourdieu is most effective in suggesting how the complex practices of educational institutions reproduce unequal relations of wealth and authority in society,

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but less so in showing how even repressive political systems leave room for contestation (Comaroff 1985, quoted in Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008). In this respect, as noted by Eickelman (1992), Gramsci (1971) serves as a useful complement to Bourdieu, who emphasises the reproduction of existing social arrangements. Gramsci suggests that intellectuals and their discourses, although constrained by the established social order, never just reproduce it but create, even if inadvertently, the seeds of resistance and contestation. I propose to look at the university as an institution; institutions have above all semantic functions to confirm and re-confirm certain orders or states of affair and to establish the reference for their evaluation. Institutions consolidate ‘what is’ and ‘what is valuable’ as true and valid for all circumstances in a public discourse, and thereby construct reality. But institutions, although bodiless, are far from unequivocal, stable and neutral. They are highly ambiguous things – ‘at once necessary and fragile, beneficial and abusive’ (Boltanski 2011: 84). As Boltanski surmises, ‘it is perhaps precisely their everyday banality which accounts for the lack of attention paid to them’ (Ibid.: 72–3). Moreover, the university is an increasingly global form (Elkana 2012), as I will discuss in Chapter 2. Here suffice to say that I consider it to be a travelling technology, one of the ways through which contemporary notions of worth and development are spread in a hierarchical way. In Jordan the university is a milestone of the regime’s discourse on development, as well as an identity marker for Jordanians in the region. Fida Adely (2012) demonstrates how young women in Jordan do not escape framing of gender, education and development. As they progress through their education, they become increasingly enmeshed in this narrative of education for success and for empowerment. Many young women are conscious of how the world beyond Jordan sees them; their teachers are even more attuned to the ways in which they are viewed and represented by Western experts, non-Muslims and the elite of their own country. Women are both produced by and partake in the making of contemporary Jordan, during an era in which mass public education has transformed popular notions of knowledge and progress, respectability and faith, and marriage and family, albeit not always in predictable ways (Ibid.: 13). In the first part of this chapter, I explore higher education in Jordan, its birth and development, its philosophical foundations, and discuss its

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political and social relevance. In the second part I show how an institution such as the University of Jordan works in its context, through discussion of admission policies and the differences in teaching methodologies between faculties. I contend that the university contributes to the creation of differences among groups of citizens, which are integral to the regime’s survival strategy. As I will discuss in Chapters 3 and 4, these strategies are enacted to some extent by professors and students, who uphold the divisions in their everyday lives, both inside and outside the institution.

Higher education in Jordan Jordan is a small country, with a concise modern history – it was founded under the British mandate in the early 1920s, a mostly desert land that until that time had been subjected to the various regional powers, the last of which was the Ottoman Empire. During this final phase, Jordan had been part of the bilad al-sham, the greater Syria that comprised the present states of Lebanon, Syria, Israel/Palestine and Jordan, and ties with these countries are still strong.1 The kingdom was considered by the British to be a buffer state, from which to control the activities of the French in the north – Syria, Lebanon – and turbulence in the other neighbours, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and, of course, Israel and Palestine. This has continued ever since, ‘Jordan’s geographic location in the Eastern Mediterranean and as a country bordering Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and (nearly) Egypt has given it an importance of which most small and natural resource underendowed states could only dream’ (Brand 1995: 41 – 2). As a result, it has managed over the years to extract financial support of various kinds from concerned states, and this has led to patterns of economic development and decision making that still continue, and Amman is regarded as being something of a crossroads, crucial for anyone with strong interests in the region (from international agencies and NGOs to arms dealers). The process of state formation has been beset with problems – the small, mainly tribal population in contrast with the much larger Palestinian population of the West Bank (which until the 1967 war was annexed by Jordan), all the difficulties in establishing a state where there has almost never been a central authority, and the like.2 Especially in the

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first decades, the main issue was whether Jordan would survive as an autonomous entity rather than the formation of a coherent state. In the early 1950s, higher education in Jordan (which at the time included Cisjordan) was limited to a few junior colleges, in Amman, Howara, Ajloun, Ramallah, Tulkarem and Beit Hanina, and whose function was restricted to the preparation of elementary and preparatory school teachers (Shubbak 1971: 149). The growth of national education was seen in the region as a route out of dependency and the path to development, and the national universities, established by the postindependence governments of the 1950s, opened up education to the masses. The best example is Nasserist Egypt, which provided free university education and promised a government position to every university graduate. Behind the need to establish a national university, there were several factors at play: a sense of national pride, ‘since most Arab countries have their own universities, Jordan feels it should have one too [. . .] as a highly important symbol of national prestige as well as a monument of local culture’ (Ibid.: 134). Moreover, ‘a tidal wave of desire for higher education began when people started to realize that education is not a luxury, but rather a capital asset that one can take with him anywhere he goes’ (Ibid.: 135). Prior to the opening of the University of Jordan, there were some 1,000 Jordanians who sought higher education either in Egypt or Syria, where they paid only nominal fees, or in Europe (2,000 students were in West Germany in 1965) and the USA. This was seen as a problem, as the pursuit of higher education outside one’s community and culture may involve some risks and shortcomings and may result in some problems. One of these is psychological [. . .] in addition, study abroad, especially in the U.S., has become a form of immigration as an escape from the frustration and limited opportunities that result from a chronically unstable economic situation and other constant problems. (Ibid.: 136– 7) Furthermore, the majority of these students were studying at their own expense: As such, the government exercises little, if any, control over their selection or the choice of their field of study. Many talented

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students then stay on in the USA, as the lure of the dollar and of research is greater. (Ibid.: 138)3 For all these reasons, a committee of experts was formed, and advice was provided by consultants from the American Universities of Beirut and Cairo, by a committee of advisors from British universities, and by UNESCO experts. A commission was established to report on the condition of education in Transjordan and to visit institutions of higher learning in countries abroad. All these efforts resulted in Law no. 34 being issued on 1 September 1962, which authorised the establishment of the Jordan State University. The first University Law, no. 17, 1964, granted the university ‘complete freedom and makes it independent from the Ministry of Education’ (Ibid.: 144), although its president was appointed by Royal Decree, as well as its lecturers. ‘The University of Jordan is the only Arab national university completely independent from the government, although it cooperates fully with all government ministries and agencies’ (Ibid.: 150).4 Teaching at the university started on 15 December 1962, with only 167 students (14 female) and eight faculty members, of whom five were part time, and there was only one faculty, that of Arts. The university has grown steadily since its inception; in 2011/12, it comprised 19 faculties, with 83 departments, and a new branch campus in the southern city of Aqaba. During 2011/12 there were 32,131 undergraduate students at the two branches, of whom 65 per cent were female (a truly remarkable proportion),5 and including 2,295 foreign students. There were 3,495 postgraduate students, including those studying for master’s degrees and for doctorates, of whom 787 were foreigners (UJ Facts and Figures). There were 1,097 Faculty members, including 215 females (Department of Statistics 2012: 169).6 As Shami notes, the university was established with a clear set of functions ascribed to it. University education was inseparably linked to the expansion of the public sector, especially the bureaucracy. The emphasis was firmly on the basic and applied sciences, and on fields such as engineering, medicine and agriculture (Zahlan 1979, quoted in Shami 1989). Later economic developments in the region reinforced the emphasis on higher education. Strategically located countries such as Lebanon developed their service economies by the creation of an educated

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population to run banks, commercial companies, hotels and so on. Resource-poor countries such as Jordan developed skilled labour forces for the oil-rich countries, thereby acquiring direct benefits in the form of migrants’ remittances and important economic and political ties. In general, the typical Arab university was a national, public institution designed to cater to ‘national needs’ (Najjar 1981, quoted in Shami 1989).7 The history of the University of Jordan reflects that of public universities throughout the region, including the amazing levels of growth which have occurred since the 1970s (see Eickelman 1992). Although each university is necessarily conditioned by its specific sociopolitical context, there are certain forces that operate in all the universities of the Arab world. There has been a dramatic increase in higher education since the 1950s, though this has been unevenly distributed across the region (Mazawi and Sultana 2009, Romani 2009, 2012). The University of Jordan is no longer alone in the national landscape. Demographic pressures associated with a disproportionately young population, coupled with the response of the private sector in accommodating the rising number of eligible students by creating private higher education institutions, has led to a dramatic increase in the number of universities in Jordan. Today there are several public and private universities in Jordan offering a variety of four-year degree programmes. At the same time, the urgency of developing a vibrant higher education sector, compounded by Jordan’s lack of natural resources and its subsequent reliance on human capital to remain competitive, led Jordan’s leadership to pay significant attention to the sector, and to pursue concrete strategies to support and expand its performance. As a result Jordan has witnessed a large expansion in its educational base, with enrolment rates more than doubling in the last five years. In 2007 there were almost 200,000 university students in Jordan, and this number is expected to rise to 270,000 in the next few years (Kanaan 2009).

The Jordanian success story From the perspective of higher education, Jordan has achieved noticeable progress and distinction at both the Arab and regional levels, despite limited natural and financial resources. Jordan’s record in the field of higher education has proven impressive by international standards, and

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this is fully appreciated in national documents on education and youth.8 Jordan is ranked 18th in the world and first in the Arab world by UNESCO. Education in Jordan has developed steadily over the past two decades in terms of policies, programmes, content and methodology. Jordanian academic institutions have recently begun to take positive and rapid steps to upgrade their educational system at all levels in an attempt to assume a leading role in the expanding global ‘knowledge economy’ (al-Husban and Na’amneh 2010: 194).9 If we consider where Jordan stood in the 1920s, the data regarding levels of education are astonishing, and usually referred to by international actors and by the government in enthusiastic terms. According to the Jordanian Human Development Report 2000, which focused on youth, Jordan is one of the Arab countries with the best literacy rate, 87 per cent (the average for Arab countries is 59 per cent), and illiteracy is confined to the older strata of the population. Among 15 to 30 year olds, the illiteracy rate is only 3 per cent, and there are no significant gender differences. Primary education is virtually universal, and this has continued to be the case in recent years, the substantial year-on-year population growth notwithstanding.10 Much of this is financed by the World Bank and other international donors, which in itself demonstrates the degree of international dependence that contributes to the enormous relevance of education in Jordanian public discourse. In one of his first speeches after his coronation, King Abdallah II declared that ‘the first and more urgent national priority is the reform of the educational system, which should produce graduates able to compete at the highest levels in the global economy, technological and information-based’.11 This strong official emphasis can be read as a true ‘signature of the state’, as a form of regulation that oscillates between a rational mode and a magical mode of being (Das 2004), as discussed in some detail in Chapter 2. The growth and extent of education can be illustrated in terms of sheer numbers. Enrolments in higher education grew at an annual rate of 14 per cent, from 77,841 to 218,900 students, between 2000/1 and 2006/7 (World Bank 2009). The gross tertiary enrolment level of about 40 per cent is higher than the regional average (Batarseh 2011). Jordan, as stated in the Statistical Yearbook 2012, has 28 universities: ten public, 16 private and two regional universities. In addition, there are three university colleges (Kulleyat Jame’ieh) and 50 community colleges

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(Kulleyat al-Mujtama’): 18 established by the government, affiliated to and supervised by Al-Balqa Applied University, two run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees, four run by the Ministry of Health, five run by the Jordan Armed Forces and 21 private colleges. As of 2012, 245,884 students were registered for bachelor’s degree programmes in all universities in Jordan, of whom 126,363 (51 per cent) were female. There were about 162,000 students registered in public universities, and about 68,000 at private universities, so public universities accounted for about 70 per cent of all students registered for bachelor’s degrees. The total number of graduate students in Jordan in 2012 was about 14,390, including 8,390 females, about 58 per cent. There were 9,972 graduate students studying for master’s degrees, 1,892 were studying for a doctorate and 2,526 were studying for a higher diploma. There were 29,028 foreign students in Jordan in 2011; of these 9,907 were female, about 34 per cent (Department of Statistics, Jordan Statistical Yearbook 2012: 161–2).12 These figures give an idea of the strains on the education system in Jordan arising from population growth and the ever-increasing proportion of young people wishing to attend higher education, even though it is well-known that young graduates encounter difficulties in obtaining jobs which reflect their level of education (see Chapter 5). So, as in other Arab countries, Jordan has witnessed an impressive surge in the youth population, and has pursued mass education policies which, since the 1970s, have led to the development of mass higher education (Mazawi and Sultana 2009). Jordan has thus been part of the global trend in the last quarter of the twentieth century of rapid and broad expansion of higher education (Scott 1998). The size of the higher education sector is quite impressive, especially if we bear in mind that most of the growth in the number of universities and students has occurred only in the last 15 years (Romani 2009). The massive inflow of university graduates into the labour market has resulted in a high unemployment rate, and in some cases threatened the rupture of the social contract that linked public education and state provision of jobs. In the Jordanian context, this has resulted in attempts at reforming the university sector (discussed in Chapter 2), and one of the main targets of this has been to raise the profile of the community colleges. The main goal behind establishing these community colleges, running two-year courses, was to

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provide society and the labour market with the skilled labour needed for middle class professions, as seen in their mission statement: to educate the lesser privileged student population throughout the country and to prepare them thoroughly for business careers, which should give them a solid grounding in the latest technology with both practical experience and theoretical knowledge, especially specialised knowledge, which is needed in a modern society. (Massadeh 2012a: 10) As Massadeh notes, while the Jordanian people consider this kind of study to be of a low standard, for most of their students, community colleges have become a stepping stone towards a place at the university [. . .] Presently, however, community colleges are just used by a high percentage of students as a bridging programme before admission to a university. Unfortunately, these community colleges suffer from a lack of funding, poor quality teaching and a weak curriculum, which leads to a lower number of participants. (Ibid.: 10)

Recent changes in structure and organisation of universities in Jordan Another set of responses to the extraordinary pressure that the higher education system is facing are the processes of privatisation and of internationalisation (Altbach 2006). The Jordanian case is particularly extreme because of the heavy impact of refugees and displaced people. The first Gulf War brought a number of Palestinians holding Jordanian citizenship back to Amman, and this relates to the development of the first private universities in the country (Van Hear 1994, Reiter 2002). The impact of Iraqi and Syrian refugees was acutely felt in the education sector, but has still to be measured (Sassoon 2011: 40 –2).13 The private universities now outnumber the public ones in Jordan, though most students still attend public universities (some parts of which are semi-privatised, as I discuss in the second part of this chapter). These arose as the result of a reform which was initiated in the early 1990s, with no little resistance from the establishment, both

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political and academic. As Bader (1994) notes, however, the final decision to admit private universities into the larger educational game was neither really a ‘liberal’ nor a purely economic decision. In 1990, as an effect of the first Gulf War and the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi army, around 300,000 Jordanians, mainly of Palestinian origin, came back ‘home’. The majority of them were teachers or other highly qualified workers, for whom there was little space in the Jordanian workforce. The creation of private universities has to be seen in this context, and in the broader demand for more education that I briefly introduced above (Reiter 2002). Nowadays almost one third of the university students in the kingdom are enrolled in private universities, with enrolment having grown by about 18 per cent annually from 36,642 to 55,744 between 2000/1 and 2006/7 (World Bank 2009). However, enrolment numbers in community colleges declined from 30,000 to 26,215. This decrease in enrolment rates reflects a preference for a four year university education and also the fact that the quality and level of training given in these colleges is not what is in demand in the labour market of a knowledge based economy. The projection for the number of students entering university is 92,000 per year by 2013, up from 50,469 in 2005; the actual figure for 2012 was 61,990, much lower than the projection (as is commonly the case with predictions) but still a steep increase in just a few years (Department of Statistics 2012: 167). As well as the quantitative dimension of the need for private universities, there is also the political dimension. Almost all the 300,000 Jordanians who returned from Kuwait and the Gulf in 1990 were of Palestinian descent, and since the events of Black September in 1970 Palestinian professors have been less welcome in higher education, losing the prominence they enjoyed in the 1960s. Eleven of the 13 private universities that existed in 2002 are owned by Palestinian entrepreneurs, and the proportion of Palestinian professors and students is significantly higher than the average in the public universities (Reiter 2002).14 Another distinctive feature of the growth of the higher education system in Jordan is the wide geographical spread all over the country of public universities. While both public and private institutions have been mushrooming, the latter are concentrated in Amman and its surroundings, where the majority of Palestinians reside. The consequence of this is that although it has helped in achieving high

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literacy levels, education has lost some of its quality, since very often, especially in the underdeveloped south of the country, a university is a way of employing more people in what has been rightly described as a rentier economy (Bank and Schlumberger 2004). However, what is more significant for a discussion of the nature of higher education in contemporary Jordan is the internationalisation of the university. There has been a mushrooming of international institutions within the campus of the University of Jordan, but all over the country there are foreign institutions installing branches. I will deal with this interesting phenomenon in the next chapter, in the context of an analysis of the reforms that are taking place within the Jordanian higher education sector.

Governance of higher education and its philosophy The main decision-making body for higher education in Jordan is the Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MoHESR), an institution with a complicated history. It evolved as follows, ‘in answer to the country’s needs’ (Batarseh 2011): in 1980 the Law of Higher Education was passed, and consequently in 1982 the Higher Education Council was established to supervise higher education institutions. The Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research was established in 1985 (more than 20 years after the foundation of the University of Jordan), to be replaced in 1998 by the Council of Higher Education. However, the MoHESR was re-established in 2001 by King Abdullah II, and given a sweeping mandate (Ibid.), another example of strong state control over the education sector. The Quality Assurance and Accreditation system in Jordan evolved as a result of the rapid expansion in the higher education sector: in 1990 the accreditation system was introduced by the Council of Higher Education, recognising the need for regulatory steps for academic and administrative supervision of higher education. The Accreditation Council was established in 1999 to formulate criteria for the establishment of public and private universities, to set up quality assurance measures and a monitoring system to ensure compliance to criteria. In 2007 the Higher Education Accreditation Commission (HEAC) was established, followed in 2011 by a specific committee for the ranking system. The HEAC enjoys administrative and financial

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autonomy. Its mandate includes overseeing the development and maintenance of quality in higher education institutions (Ibid.). Despite the ministry, however, the king and certain other members of the royal family are still involved in the process of determining the evolution of this strategic resource. For example, in 2004 the removal of the head of the University of Jordan was decided upon by the king in person, and announced and implemented in just one day, surrounded by many rumours but with no official explanation. Officially, the appointment of deans of faculties and even of senior faculty members has to be approved by the ministry, and involves clearance from the security services.15 It is in this context, that of a small non-liberal state governed by a regime which is attentive to anything that might challenge the delicate status quo, that the policies of liberalisation and internationalisation are to be understood. It is worth stressing that the Ministry of Education was established only in 1985 – before that date the need for such a ministry was not felt, since it was the state and more precisely the king himself who took care of the main aspects of the governance of the higher education sector. It has been argued that from the start of state education in Jordan until 1964 there was no sign of what might be called an ‘educational philosophy’: There are two reasons why this was the case: firstly, the absence of any clear shared philosophy in Jordan’s society from which an educational philosophy could emanate; secondly, the state of dependency left behind by British colonialism, and the fact that the state was in the process of being formed, something which made the creation of a clear general and educational philosophy extremely difficult. For this reason education continued to lack a philosophy that could guide its progress. (Omayrah 1977, quoted in Abbas 2012: 63) In 2012 the situation was different, as the Education Law no. 3 of 1994 makes clear. Jordan’s educational philosophy is rooted in the Jordanian Constitution, Arab-Islamic civilisation, the principles of the Great Arab Revolt and the national experience, as laid down in Education Law no. 3 of 1994 (Abbas 2012). The monarchs of Jordan claim direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad, being noble descendants of the inhabitants of Mecca during the Prophet’s life. They have always based

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their authority on the claim of being Muslim, morally responsible for the Arab people as a whole and for the Muslim holy places in Jerusalem (Wilson 1987). Therefore they claim to have a special role in ensuring the preservation of Muslim ‘traditions’ at home, while at the same time they are promoting an image of a ‘moderate’ Arab Muslim country, allied to the USA and with a strong public rhetoric on development of citizenship and of the economy. This ambivalence is reflected in the higher education system as well, in the way the university is organised but also in its teaching methodologies, and is one of the factors behind the articulation of world and reality in this pivotal institution. This philosophy is evident in a set of five foundations: The first of these, the intellectual foundations, includes faith in God and in the ideals of the Arab Nation. Islam is seen as an intellectual, behavioural system that demands respect for humankind, promotes the importance of intellectual activity and encourages learning, work and creative activity. It is also defined as a comprehensive value system that provides the values and sound foundations that form the conscience of the individual and the community and the fact that there is an organic relationship between Islam and Arabism. (Abu al-Shaikh and AlKhalailah 2012: 157– 8) The next category is that of the social foundations, according to which Jordanians share equal political, social and economic rights and duties (what differentiates between them is what they offer their society and the degree to which they participate in it), and individual freedom and dignity are respected. The basic foundations of society are social justice, the balancing of the needs of the individual and those of society, the cooperation and shared responsibility of individuals for the greater good, and the assumption of individual and social responsibilities. Finally, access to education is declared a social necessity and the right of everyone (Ibid.). The national foundations of educational philosophy state that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is an Arab state and that the Jordanian people are an integral entity, within which there is no place for ethnic-, regional-, sectarian-, clan- or family-based intolerance or partisanship. If the difficult and perilous grounding of the Hashemite Kingdom, with

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demographic and geographical variations amidst well-established historical entities (Syria, Iraq, Arabia, Palestine), is duly taken into account, it is not difficult to understand why the political education of Jordanian pupils is anchored to ‘the unity of the Jordanian people’ and of its ‘indissolubility’ (Nasr 2007: 16). According to the ethnic foundations, the Arabic language is a fundamental pillar of the Arab community, and one of the factors that contributes to its unity and renaissance. The humanitarian foundations focus on the need for balance between elements of national, ethnic and Islamic identity on the one hand, and on the other, openness towards global cultures. It also focuses on the need to adapt to modern developments and to enable individuals to meet the demands of the modern world (Ibid.). These foundations provide a clear understanding of the goals of education, as Marle`ne Nasr argues. If the postulate enunciated by Durkheim, according to whom ‘society can only live if it exists, among its members, a sufficient homogeneity that education perpetuates and reinforces through a methodical socialization of the young generations’ is far from being unanimously accepted among sociologists of education, ‘it appears that modern states, by imposing a uniform content of education on those who resort to it, implicitly share this point of view’ (Nasr 2007: 7). Since the Hashemite Kingdom ensured free and compulsory access to education from the early 1960s, and subsequently imposed a unique school manual in both public and private establishments,16 it followed all other states in the region (with the exception of Lebanon) in the pursuit of a political and cultural socialisation of young generations, with the aim of harmonising what Durkheim defines as ‘their social being’. The ‘good citizen’ created by the education system is thus a believer in God and in spiritual values; respects laws and order; cares for the stability and security of the homeland; exercises a responsible freedom; proud of his homeland and nation; proud and loyal to the Arab and Islamic ideals; [. . .] capable of undertaking initiatives and creative; a productive citizen. (Nasr 2007: 19) Education Law no. 3 of 1994 clearly posits three elements as determining the political socialisation of Jordanian pupils, namely Islam, the Arab nation and its unity, and universalism and globalisation.

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The vision statement of the National Youth Strategy of Jordan captures the qualities desired in Jordanian young people, who are aware of themselves and their abilities, loyal to their country and proactively take part in its progress and development, able to deal with the variables and developments of this age in a confident, aware and steadfast manner, within a secure and supporting environment. (Jordanian National Youth Strategy 2005 – 9)17 The Islamic dimension of socialisation is central, not just as a component of identity and of belonging. It is given first place among the foundational ideals of education policy, and its rationality, modernity and openness are highlighted. ‘The pupils should become, thanks to the formation received, citizens able to assimilate Islam as a doctrine and as law and to consciously adopt its values and orientations’ (Nasr 2007: 27). Despite the royal insistence on openness to world culture, this imperative is not among the foundations of education policy. ‘The relationship with the universal is posed in a univocal sense: Islam (contributes to) the universal, but not the contrary’ (Ibid.: 21).18 Belonging to the Arab nation is anchored to its Islamic character, as the Hashemite dynasty descends from the Prophet Muhammad and has Arab unity as an essential goal. The openness to world culture and ‘universal civilisation’ is present among the ideals of education, and it is a constant feature of Jordanian economic, cultural, strategic and diplomatic policies. Jordan is set to contribute to world civilisation, and its education policy should forge an individual able to ‘take an active part in world civilization and contribute to its progress, adapting to the changes of his time’ (Ibid.: 31), with the goal of ‘reinforc[ing] in the citizen formation the values deriving from the Arab, Islamic and universal civilization. Form a citizen who knows the history of the Jordanian people, in its Arab Islamic and human dimensions’ (Ibid.). Secondary objectives of educational policies are national unity (despite the remarkable religious and linguistic homogeneity of its population), patriotism and citizenship (God, homeland, king), and democracy.

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Rhetoric of modernisation I mentioned before that there is a marked self-consciousness within the Jordanian government about the attainments of its education system, as a constitutive element of self-representation at home and abroad, a true signature of the state. One government report declared that: Jordan has achieved noticeable progress and distinction at the pan Arab and regional levels. At present, it is seeking to achieve the same at the international level, especially with respect to development of human resources, despite limited natural and financial resources. The Jordanian society has, for some time, started taking positive and rapid steps in order to upgrade itself with the aim of reaching the level that societies of knowledge, affected largely by the revolutions of information technology and digital communication, have reached. Jordan believes in the significance of developing its capacities and human resources in order to engage in and deal with the knowledge economy challenge by launching and implementing programs on both the general and higher education levels. The Ministry of Higher Education aims, in particular, at raising the level of higher education in Jordan to enable it to reach the best of levels reached by global education, making it possible to play an essential role in the process of transformation to the knowledge economy. Such an objective can be achieved by having a high-quality education system, one able to qualify people knowledge-wise, morally and intellectually, thus meeting the need of society, at the present and in the future, in a manner conducive to achieving a solid national economic development, and the ability to compete on both regional and international levels. Curricula at different faculties and departments have been upgraded or reformed over the past several years to achieve these objectives and principles. (Ministry of Higher Education) The same rhetoric is to be found at almost every level in the higher education sector in Jordan. A professor of the University of Jordan, Abd Al-Hadi, affirms that

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education understood in its wider sense is the main element in the process of the formation of the self, in the construction of thought and in the definition of behaviours, and it [education] is the main sustenance of every society, the differences in natures and levels notwithstanding. (Al-Hadi, 2003: 113) More than this, the topic is widely treated in the local debates on education in the kingdom in quite a surprising way because of the violence with which everything that might be deemed ‘traditional’ is regarded, at least officially. Here I quote at length a passage from a chapter entitled ‘University for the new millennium’ in a book on the University of Jordan produced by the university itself: The quality of the teaching/learning and the relationship between the professor and the students is one of the highly recommendable results. The current administration of the UJ is making clear to everybody that the traditional teaching/learning methodologies are simply not acceptable. We refuse the idea that professors are knowledge-givers, lecturers that dictate information to the students from old sheets, authoritarian figures that want attention and total obedience from the students. Professors, like good school teachers, must necessarily handle the modern art of managing the classroom: enhance their knowledge, work on their communicative skills with the students, let them think and allow them to ask, and differentiate their teaching and evaluation methodologies. It is however to be noticed that UJ is one of the very few universities in the region that takes seriously into consideration the evaluations of the professors made by the students [. . .] UJ is determined to make the time spent in class more liberal, more updated, more student-oriented, and more significant both for students and for instructors [. . .] With few exceptions, professors had lectured and spoken, while the students listened, copied or answered to questions in limited ways. This cannot happen anymore. All classes will be based on a communicative approach. Curricula, exams, textbooks, evaluations and the managing of the classroom will be radically modified in order to allow students to a) learn in multiple ways b)

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take a more active role in the learning process c) study, analyse, ask questions on everything that is presented to them. There will be a great emphasis on presentations made by the students, debates, free analyses on information and specific issues, freedom of expression – other than the pursuing of specific facts [. . .] UJ performed well in the past, as for the teaching/learning processes, but it is determined to make even better. (University of Jordan: 2003) Statements such as these reflect the form in which criticisms are formulated by experts, for example in the Human Development Report: In the Arab learning institutions, curricula and teaching and evaluation methodologies tend to be based on dictation and tend to instil an attitude to be submitted. They do not allow for a free and active dialogue, nor the exploratory learning and consequently they do not open the door for freedom of thought and of critics [sic]. On the contrary, they undermine the capacity of keeping opposite points of view and of thinking with one’s own mind. Their role in society is finalized to the reproduction of the control in the Arab societies. (United Nations Development Programme 2004: 147) Remarkably, it seems that these worries have been consistent over time: in his introduction to the university catalogue, Dr Abd el-Karim Khalifa, the acting president, states, ‘our main concern should always be for originality and creativity. Blind imitation, whether it is of Arab or foreign models, results in monstrous creations devoid of any true identity.’ (Shubbak 1971: 151) However, rather than the form in which these statements are made, I’d like to focus my analysis on the way in which the project of modernity is understood in Jordan, and how much the education sector is perceived to be central to reaching the intended goal of modernising society and of catching up with the developed countries. This rhetoric on the necessity of modernisation is constitutive of the represented identity of the Jordanian state, its clear signature.

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The same rhetoric is to be found at the level of research. As Shami notes: the primary aim of the newly created Arab national universities was ‘the training of qualified personnel for particular sectors of the regional economy [. . .] Research took second place to the rapid production of set numbers of graduates. Only private and Western-established universities were able to develop slightly different mandates. (Shami 1989: 650) Such priorities subordinated research to teaching, since the necessities of development [. . .] require that the duties of teaching and general service be given precedence over research [. . .] Scientific branches must be encouraged over other branches of education, and teaching and technical training and applied research must be favored over free theoretical research. (Najjar 1981: 148, quoted in Shami 1989: 651) I will briefly discuss this in the next chapter, but it is interesting to note, following Seteney Shami, that a similar logic applies to the social sciences, largely seen as luxuries, research in which can only be justified if it solves social problems. ‘The result is that social science comes to be seen as a “human technology” which attempts to refine techniques of social control’ (Quansuh 1981: 227, quoted in Shami 1989: 652).

The crisis in education and youth19 Like so many other aspects of Jordanian life, education seems to have entered a severe crisis. I must stress again the extreme pressure to which Jordan is subjected, and especially its out-of-the-reflectors, or less high profile, institutions such as the educational ones that are seldom taken into account when discussing refugee issues. It was noted quite some time ago (Rabo 1992) that Jordanians held education in high value, and families are still willing to make extreme efforts in order for their offspring to receive a good education and the subsequent prestige. Higher education has an inherent value of its own, irrespective of its functional value, and this leads to stress on parents who hope that their

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children achieve a successful result in the final secondary school examination. It is the dream of every Jordanian family to see their son or daughter holding a university degree, so every Jordanian family gives higher education special priority (Massadeh 2012a: 4). Education is seen as the key to increasing the chances of gaining employment and obtaining one of the better-paid jobs. The establishment of private universities is based on these parental hopes, and their will to sacrifice. Sarayrah observed that Jordanian people for decades have had an enthusiasm for higher education (Sarayrah, 2003: 5 –6, quoted in Massadeh 2012a). This enthusiasm for education, viewing it as a status symbol, has a historical background: during the establishment of the country, education was primarily attainable for families of the elite, the wealthy and the highly positioned bureaucrats in the country’s institutions. As a result, education transformed itself into a product with a high social value implying higher status and prestige (Massadeh 2012a). Others have pointed to the fact that desire for education is explained by many Jordanian families ‘very explicitly in terms of their long-term security in a time of great economic and sociocultural uncertainty’ (Adely 2009c: 115), primarily in terms of marriage, but not exclusively.20 This mechanism, though, has been under strain for several years, and many reasons have been given for this – the steep increase in quantity, decrease of funds and quality, new private universities supposedly not guaranteeing quality, and the like. As noted by other scholars as well, it is the state that is held responsible for guaranteeing quality, but its efficacy is increasingly questioned by students and families alike, as I will discuss in Chapter 3. One of the main theses of this book is that the everyday functioning of a crucial public institution such as the university is likely to bring ongoing conflicts and rifts to the surface in a society undergoing rapid social change. From a quantitative perspective, the increased burden on higher education is a phenomenon that has affected all countries in the Mediterranean region since the late 1970s, and it has led to similar policies aimed at containing its potentially devastating effects. As Sultana shows, these similar policies have included: the raising of the pass marks at the pre-university level examinations, to the opening up of regional universities, the off-loading of

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responsibilities for training and research onto private universities, the diversification of higher education through the establishment of community colleges and the increase of post-secondary vocational institutions and tracks. (Sultana 1999: 20) These policies have caused some uproar among academics21 and in broader society, where there are fears that the period of limited social advancement might simply be over. A number of researchers deal with some of these policies from an ‘expert’ perspective, either focusing on the changing financial conditions of the universities, on the admission criteria, on quality control and accreditation, and/or on a general lack of coherent long-term strategy. Some criticise the highly centralised control operated by the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, which results in very little autonomy for universities in deciding their own admission criteria and funding strategies, while others complain, on the contrary, of the slow implementation of quality assurance criteria and of the long-term strategic plans. I deal with these issues in the next chapter, which is entirely dedicated to the policies of university reform in Jordan. Another set of complaints is more specific to the concrete functioning of the university, regarding the ways in which admission criteria are altering the composition of the student body and the structure of the faculties, on the low priority given to scientific research versus teaching, and on the actual teaching conditions under quantitative burdens. It is to these latter critiques that I turn now, by discussing my case study, the University of Jordan and the impact of some of these changes on its everyday functioning. The discourse on crisis stems from the high value placed on education by the Jordanian people, and has a multi-layered character, meaning different things to different people. For administrators and reformers, it is increasingly about making the universities capable of financial independence (or reducing its dependence on the public), for most students it is about rising costs and admission policies that are altering the composition of the student body, as well as diminished certainties about the actual value of the education they receive. While the discourse of crisis operates, though, the university continues to function, re-stating the ‘whatness of what it is’ even while this is increasingly contested. Thus this final section, by describing some

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of the concrete ways in which the university functions – essentially the admission procedures and the differences among faculties, which result in different teaching methodologies – sets the stage for understanding the university as an institution in which the two metapragmatic registers of confirmation and critique are ‘mutually-inter-defined functions, which only exist through one another’ (Boltanski 2011: 99). The second chapter deals with the ‘grand re´cit’ of the reforms, while the third examines the ways in which students inhabit the campus and embody some of the distinctions that I will discuss now.

The University of Jordan I will briefly introduce here some ways in which the reforms, the rhetoric of modernisation, privatisation and internationalisation, work in the oldest and more prestigious institution of learning in the country, the University of Jordan. The understanding of how such a complex institution functions on an everyday basis, as well as the different forces at play, constitutes the first part of my ethnographic fieldwork. This ethnography of a university should incorporate a discussion of its spatial dimension, something that I refer to in Chapter 3 when I start the second part of my ethnography, devoted to the everyday life of students. In this section, I limit myself to a discussion of two crucial aspects of the institution, namely the means of accessing it and the ways in which teaching, one of its core objectives, is organised. Admission policies have been consistently at the core of sociological reflections on higher education as a social sieve (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 130), with enduring debates on the fairness of college admissions. In what follows I show that the Jordanian case is no exception, with fierce debates taking place on admission policies and their consequences for the role of the university as an inclusive institution. However, taking the university as simply a sieve, reproducing stratification within society, would be overly simplistic, since the university performs a variety of other functions, and stratification begins earlier, with private schools catering for the rich and preparing for admission exams abroad.22 The aim of this brief discussion is to show ways in which the extraordinary burden on the university is altering some of its characteristics, something that is rather evident in admission policies.

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The discussion of the hierarchy among faculties and of the differences in teaching methodologies introduces the main core of the ethnography, namely the way in which this institution functions and reproduces its own ‘world’ (Boltanski). The goal, I claim, is to create or engineer ‘valuable citizens’, competitive on a global scale and adaptable to neoliberal norms of entrepreneurialism, creative thinking and individualism, similar to what had already been noted by Ong in Singapore, implying a ‘complex reorganization of ethical norms’ (Ong 2006: 180), which in the Jordanian case is still in a latent form, but can already be detected in the admission policies and in the teaching methodologies.23

Admission to the university Despite the growth in public and regional universities, the state is unable to meet the growing demand for higher education. Therefore, competition for a place in one of the public universities, deemed to offer better education with lower costs, is quite fierce. Admittance is based on the average grade obtained in national secondary exams (tawjihi), which are generally considered to be highly selective and one of the very few collective moments at which an individual is evaluated in a way considered ‘objective’ and fair, rather than in the general Jordanian context which is permeated by the social capital one gets from belonging to an important extended family and/or by one’s ability to get a good wasta (intermediary) (Cunningham and Sarayrah, 1993).24 When this exam ends, normally at the beginning of July, Amman is animated by many shabab (guys, young people) who have passed the tawjihi, spending the night partying their success, and for some days after the names of the high performers are listed in the newspapers.25 Application to the university is made through a centralised system known as the Unified Admissions Commission. There are often many qualified applicants for a limited number of university places, as the combination of low fees and strong competition enables state universities to select the best students: their entrance requirements are well above the minimum set by the Higher Education Council. For example, in order to enter the Faculty of Medicine in 2003 the minimum required was 95 out of 100, while to enter Literature 92 was enough. The minimum required to enter the faculties at the bottom of the scale was slightly more than the minimum required to pass the tawjihi itself (Cantini 2012a).

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Faculties are divided into scientific and humanistic specialisms, and they are ranked by the majlis al-jami’i (academic senate). Every year there may be some changes in the hierarchy, but of the scientific faculties, the most highly rated faculties are normally medicine and engineering (followed by pharmacy, the newly established Information Technology school, sciences, agricultural sciences) while within the humanities, literature is in first place, followed by business administration, social sciences, law, educational sciences, Shariʽa and finally physical education. In parallel to the competition list, there is another method of making one’s way into the most sought after public universities, that of the ‘privileges of the king’ (makrumat al-malakiyya) or list of exceptions. As I have discussed elsewhere (Cantini 2012a), the exact percentage of students admitted this way is unknown; some scholars put it as high as 60 per cent (Reiter 2002), others at 40 per cent (Massadeh 2012a). A professor of International Studies once told me that they account for 20 per cent, but then stated that this 20 per cent only applies to the sons and daughters of those serving in the army (makrumat al-jeish), while the total number of students admitted through privileges might be as high as 80 per cent, at least in his faculty. The last Thabahtoona report indicates that only 21 per cent are admitted through normal competition, although this figure adds the parallel system admissions to the makrumat ones (Thabahtoona 2014: 15). Students of Palestinian origin contend that these categories are mostly reserved for Jordanians, and they would agree with a higher estimate. Regularly admitted students do not regard the privileged ones favourably, as the latter are admitted with grades that are considerably lower, and in addition to having their tuition fees paid for, they also used to receive a monthly grant. Debates over unknown numbers aside, it seems safe to conclude that this second way of being admitted to public universities is at least as relevant as the ‘regular’, competitive one.26 The mechanism works as for ‘normal’ students, thus access to the different faculties is not free but, since the students of the makrumat are fewer in number, the competition is less intense: for example, in 2001 the daughter of a teacher could be admitted to study literature even if her grade in the tawjihi was just 69 (the minimum for ‘normal’ students was 92). The grants can be obtained by submitting an application to the Royal Court. These grants have to be approved by the King himself:

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positions, relationships and connections play a large role in obtaining this funding. It is no surprise that in Jordan the sons of higher positioned people study in the United States and Europe, and the sons of large tribal Sheikhs study at Jordanian universities with this scholarship at the cost of the Royal Court, although having no real financial need for it. (Massadeh 2012a: 12) These advantages are dependent on the general attitude of the Jordanian state towards its employees (about half the total workforce), guaranteeing them easy access to services such as schools, hospitals, supermarkets with prices lower than the average and other benefits in return for low salaries. As Massad (2001) noted, this is one of the ways in which the state attempts to maintain control over its population, by giving them work and means of sustenance – an approach which in recent years has been somewhat weakened by massive interventions by the IMF following the huge economic crisis of the late 1980s, but it still retains a strong role in contributing to social cohesion and political stability in a state that can be well described as neo-patriarchal and having a rentier economy (see Bank and Schlumberger 2004). The government also reacted to its shortage of funds for education by allowing the establishment of private universities as part of a more general liberalisation policy, and by promoting the self-funding of public institutions (Auge´, 1997: 129). State universities could increase their annual fees, and were allowed to institute a ‘Parallel System’, meaning that they could accept students on a private basis for much higher fees, usually up to four times those of regular students.27 Point 9 of the directives for admission of students clearly states that ‘under any condition, the percentage of students admitted in the parallel (mowaziyya) programme can’t exceed 30 per cent of those admitted regularly (‘adiyya). This provision is meant to counter rising concerns about the increase in privatisation of the university, without adequate discussions and in a context in which universities have a pressing need to improve their financial situation.28 And yet many people are worried that this trend might prove to be here to stay, amidst budget cuts, rising demand and the need to obtain extra funds. Thabahtoona has been campaigning since late 2014 against what they see as a trend toward university education for the rich only; they complain that of the 400

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students in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Jordan, only 40 were admitted on a competitive basis. The former Minister of Higher Education, Dr Waleed Almaani, criticised this programme on the grounds that it is not only contrary to the recognised strategy for higher education but also contrary to the Jordanian Constitution, which incorporates equal educational opportunities for all Jordanian citizens. The minister stated that this is true but that it is unavoidable because of the substantial financial deficit of Jordanian public universities (Almaani, 2010b, quoted in Massadeh 2012a). Another source of tension, especially among students, is that universities place limits on the number of seats assigned through competition, while the capacity for welcoming parallel programme students seems unlimited. This is confirmed by the University of Jordan’s own statistics, according to which in 2011 –12 in all the most highly rated faculties the proportion of parallel programme students is well above 30 per cent. In the Pharmacy Faculty and the King Abdullah II School for Information Technology, it is above 50 per cent, and not much lower in all the more highly sought after faculties such as engineering, dentistry, foreign languages and business administration, with the numbers in medicine and arts also being well above the 30 per cent threshold. The case of the Aqaba branch is extreme, with 1,102 students admitted to the parallel programme and only 47 to the regular one, but the proportion is also quite high at the University of Jordan in Amman; of the 30,982 BA students, 13,367 were admitted to the parallel programme, and this proportion is much higher in the most highly rated faculties. These categories exemplify the politics of the state in years of economic reforms (Bank and Schlumberger 2004). The makrumat are seen as ‘prote´ge´s’ by the state, at least as far as education is concerned, while the parallel programme students are the category that is arising from the regime’s new liberalising policies, sometimes against its own wishes.29 The ‘normal’ students are those who more overtly denounce this trend, as elsewhere in the world. Many students fear that the university is likely to become ‘something for the wealthy’ (Thabahtoona, 2014) in which attention will be given increasingly only to students who are able to pay the rising fees, while all the others will be left behind. If the public university before the advent of the reforms mentioned above could have been conceived of as a place in

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which there was a mixture of the population, during the last couple of decades the situation has changed dramatically. The reforms are heavily affecting the ways in which educated young people are becoming citizens, and indeed the very meaning of citizenship (I deal with this in more detail in Chapter 4). As Foucault noted, ‘the political praxis doesn’t have a thaumaturgic creative role’ (Foucault 1991: 68), so we should take care about generalising the effects. Yet it seems to be apparent that state power in the modern age does not control its citizens through repression but mainly through the production of subjects who submit themselves to the power of the state. Joseph Massad applies this insight in his study (2001) of how the combined effects of law and the army contributed to the formation of the state in Jordan, a process which was consolidated by hegemony (in Antonio Gramsci’s formulation), which he sees as having the function of producing a ‘spontaneous’ consensus among the masses for the policies of the elites. ‘Schools and media, through which education becomes institutionalised, become [. . .] privileged ways to strengthen the disciplined normalization of the population’ (Massad 2001: 4). In this way, the admission policies briefly described above are managed by the state, in order to discipline the population (both the students and their families), so private provision is looked upon much more favourably that in the past, particularly in the context of certain key faculties and disciplines.30

Hierarchy among faculties Hierarchy among faculties depends on several factors, the first of which is obviously the admission policies described in the previous section. A not-so-examined side effect of these policies is that they limit student freedom of choice, as some studies recognise.31 This lack of freedom also has profound consequences on the composition of the student body as well as on socialisation patterns, which will be discussed in Chapter 3, and this somewhat reinforces the societal divisions so instrumental in the maintenance of power. It is necessary to keep in mind, though, that there is an ‘idiom of co-production’ between the norms that rule institutions and the expectations of those inhabiting them. There seems to be an agreement in Jordanian society about what kind of degree really counts, and a career as a medical doctor or an engineer is firmly on top of the

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wish list for the offspring of most Jordanian families. This societal understanding is heavily influenced by official representations of what counts as progress, modernity and the like, but at the same time it contributes to shaping it. The overall preference of the system for the scientific curricula is made clear by a former head of the University of Jordan, at the time of my research Professor in the Faculty of Education, who states that there is an essential difference between the students of the humanities and those studying sciences. According to him, the science student is interested in learning and willing to promote change even at societal level, while the humanities student is less motivated and interested, since the only reason to pursue this course is failure to access the scientific one (Khasawneh 2001). From a social point of view my observations support the notion that the students of the scientific faculties are less differentiated among themselves, coming mainly from the same middle class (broadly defined) and mainly from Amman; in the humanistic faculties, in contrast, there appear to be more discrepancies between students of different faculties, and more geographical diversification. I do not intend to discuss the validity of such a thesis. From a theoretical point of view, this distinction shapes a division between what is new, valuable and noteworthy, and what is old, less interesting and less important.32 This discourse has to be linked to the development rhetoric of the regime, as well as to social expectations. The fact that English is the language of instruction in the scientific faculties, while Arabic is predominant in the humanistic ones, fits well within this cleavage, one that is at the same time ideological, political and social.33 Students coming from the more privileged strata of society are usually to be found only in the better faculties, partly because they tend to perform better in the tawjihi, but mainly because if they fail it they can always enter the university in the parallel programme, or enrol at a private university (there are also those who can afford to pursue their studies abroad). On the other hand, people from more humble origins are also to be found in the better faculties, since the merit system grants access to those who have achieved good marks in the tawjihi. However, they constitute the vast majority of students in the less privileged faculties, and the differences between faculties reflect these overall distinctions. The question of the differences in teaching methodologies (which include how knowledge is transmitted and evaluated, which is of

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the highest importance in order to understand how the education system enforces and perpetuates differences in society) is to be linked to social differentiation among students.34 Students in the better faculties enjoy different treatment from those in less sought after faculties in a number of ways. In the former case, teaching and exams are designed to stimulate students, in accord with the mission of the University of Jordan described above, while in the less privileged faculties they resemble more the ‘traditional modes of transmission of knowledge’ described by some scholars35 and so much despised by the Arab Human Development Report. The 2004 report, summarising the results of the previous, states that in Arab educational institutions, curricula, teaching and evaluation methods tend to rely on dictating and instil submissiveness. They do not permit free dialogue and active, exploratory learning and consequently do not open the doors to freedom of thought and criticism [. . .] Their societal role focuses on the reproduction of control in Arab societies. (Arab Human Development Report 2004: 147)36 All the critics notwithstanding, there is a certain consensus in support of this evaluation, especially from professors who are also part of the same control chain. Similar distinctions also frame socialisation patterns, which are rather more conservative in less privileged faculties than in the more prestigious ones, where boys and girls mix with little consideration for the social norms that guide the lives of the vast majority of the Jordanian population. These socialisation patterns are reflected in teaching processes as well, in interactions between students and professors.37 Such differences are not primarily a matter of social status, they are more a matter of different policies applied to segments of the population which are considered to be best kept separated. As Bourdieu observed, the transmission of knowledge, the ‘right culture and the right way of relating to it’ (1967: 350), does not only pass through official teaching but also through the everyday functions of the institution – making sure, to quote Sari Hanafi, that ‘the rule of law does not hinder the law of rules’. The third metaphor that Stevens, Armstrong and Arum discuss is that of the temple, which represents the university as the place where

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legitimisation of knowledge takes place. For Talcott Parsons, the primary purpose of higher education was to preserve, promote and inculcate the modern ‘cognitive complex’, a rational, universalistic mode of thinking (Parsons and Platt 1973, quoted in Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 134). In this approach, ‘formal education not only certifies social capacities, it produces a distinctive kind of social actor: the legally and normatively autonomous, rights-bearing, rationally cognizant citizen of Enlightenment modernity’ (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 134). The Jordanian case seems to be somewhat different.

Teaching methodologies The differences between better and lower-grade faculties, and students, are to be understood as poles, as tendencies, with exceptions – relying only on an ethnographic method I could not claim any sort of statistical ‘validity’, and the complex reality of an institution such as the University of Jordan offers no easy interpretative scheme. Yet during my semesters at the university I attended a few classes in various faculties,38 as well as absorbing students’ and professors’ ideas about the ‘whatness’ of the university, and the issues I have briefly discussed above were common knowledge at the time of my stay. Moreover, this is the language in which international studies and reports as well as domestic documents express the sense of a growing polarisation in Jordanian society.39 In what follows, I present two extreme cases, both from humanistic faculties, which, as well as being specific events, can serve as illustrations of the polarising tendencies. I will show this in more detail when examining certain classes – one concerning the lower grade faculties, and Islamic studies in particular, and the other the most highly rated humanistic faculty, arts. As Adely noted, most of the educational research on Jordan has dealt with textbooks, yet textbooks ‘provide us with a limited view of what happens in schools, what teachers and students do with official texts, and how they interpret them’ (Adely 2012: 89). Speaking of a single state vision for education, or of a coherent one, would be misleading as state bureaucrats hold divergent perspectives on the goals of education, religious and otherwise (see also Antoun 2006). For this reason an ethnography of interactions in and out of classrooms is necessary, despite the limited nature of my observations.

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At present an analysis of the evaluation systems reveals that the teaching methodologies used in the lower grade faculties are designed for the production of knowledge which adheres to the positions taken by professors and the books read in classes. In Jordan students are not supposed to be examined on an oral basis, not even at the tawjihi level. The official explanation for this refers to the objectivity of a written exam in comparison to an oral one. The exams – two in the course of the semester – are thus entirely written, usually with short questions that are to be answered using the words contained in the textbooks or following what the professor said in class. Therefore another important aspect of education, developing students’ capacity to produce what is labelled ‘critical writing’, is not included, since there is no requirement that they should present papers or produce any kind of original work. Only in the better faculties is there the requirement to produce papers, and in these faculties there are usually also open questions in the exams that are designed to let the student express his/her views on the topics studied. The studies are completed when a student finishes his/her BA exams. The end of the curriculum is marked by an elaborate ceremony, usually held in the university stadium, which constitutes one of the most evident signs of the university as a temple. It is normally attended by the king, the queen or other members of the royal family, another sign of the importance of such an institution in the public life of the country, and has a markedly celebratory character.40 Students, grouped according to their faculties, are given their shahadat (the university degree), being called by name and presenting themselves in front of the royal representative, the head of the university and the dean of their faculty, while their relatives and friends applaud them loudly.41 The main exceptions to the lack of opportunity for critical expression in the lower grade faculties are the courses, compulsory for the students of all faculties, in the Arabic and English languages (and of national education), which involve the students presenting a self-chosen topic. The choice is free, but cannot include politics or religion, nor matters that fall within the category of ‘eib (shame), such as sexual relationships and the like. Unsurprisingly, the students find this task – speaking for 15 minutes in a foreign language42 – extremely challenging, since not only are they not used to expressing themselves in public, but more strikingly they have never had previous experience of being asked to

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present a self-chosen topic, as I could see by attending several such classes. Some young professors who obtained their PhDs in foreign (Western) universities and who try to apply some new methodologies represent the other main exception. All of those I had the opportunity to meet, however, complained about the difficulties that they faced within their faculties when trying to change the system. Conversely, complaints are to be heard from almost every student in the better faculties, who would rather be examined in the old way, which many find more comfortable, while in the lower grade ones it is rare to have a conversation on these issues. If there are complaints, it is because the students are not comfortable in expressing their views. Indeed I believe that one of the aims of this system is to discourage them from open criticism, not only within the university but in their daily lives outside as well. It should be evident, therefore, that the ‘reality’ of the university system in Jordan is internally differentiated and highly contested, and my aim is to describe it according to my observations alongside reflections shared with me by professors and students alike. It is a common understanding, at least among students, that the better faculties have the benefit of professors who are usually more qualified, and it is a common saying among professors of the low grade faculties that their students are not interested in studying but only in getting their shahadat. To ground some of these reflections in the local context, I will now analyse two lessons, in the faculties of Shariʽa and literature. In both there is an attempt at changing the teaching system by professors who earned their PhDs in Europe, which I have chosen to describe since they allow me to illustrate something more about the specific context of the two faculties but also about the difference between more and less privileged faculties.

Shariʽa The Faculty of Islamic Law is among those of lower grade in the humanities. The students are mostly female, mainly daughters of pious families who see religious education as the best choice for a Muslim girl who wants to get married in a ‘proper’ way. The male students are usually the imam-to-be, that is to say that their future jobs will be within

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the ministry of awqaf (pious endowments) as imam or sheikh of the staterun mosques (Antoun 2006). They will be paid by the government as public officials, as is the case in most modern Arab nations, in an attempt to prevent mosques from becoming centres of political activism against the regimes. In the context of the campus of the University of Jordan, the Faculty of Shariʽa represents quite a different world, as many students of other faculties kept mentioning to me (Cantini 2012b). Contact between the sexes is strictly forbidden, and professors and other university employees are expected to prevent any such contact from taking place. As I discovered by taking the wrong one, male and female students have separate stairs that lead to the upper floors of the building, where most of the classes are held. The ground floor is almost entirely devoted to a large room which serves as a mosque, the fact that the university has an official one notwithstanding. In the corridors male and female students don’t mix at all. The girls all wear the ‘abaya, and some of them are completely covered from head to toe by a black robe that also covers their eyes, while almost all the boys wear the jalabiyya, the long dress for men that is rare in Amman, except among those from the Gulf and the poorer people. Classes are held in semi-circular rooms, with male students sitting in the first row and female ones, roughly seven times more, sitting behind them – something designed to prevent male students’ gazes. The professor who agreed to my presence is a young man who obtained his PhD from a British university, and leads the lessons sitting in front of the class.43 In the classes there are normally posters on religious topics, such as one depicting life after death, with pictures showing the destiny of the unfaithful and portraying paradise as a place for the believer full of attractive women, luxurious cars and US dollars. All clearly mark out the space as a religious one. During classes, when the professor says the name of the Prophet, all the students recite after his name the phrase ‘salla allahu ‘aleihi wa sallam’ (may God honour him and grant him peace), which is what a Muslim is expected to say after Muhammed’s name. One of the more interesting classes I attended was on the first companions of the Prophet, and therefore on the early years of the Muslim community. All the students have the textbook, which is uncommon in Jordan, since photocopies are much cheaper and many students do not hold their books in very high regard. Students do not

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normally carry a bag, nor books or notebooks, and when they do they use them as seats in the long hours they spend sitting with friends in the green alleys of the campus. The lesson consists of the professor reading from the book, occasionally stopping to make some comments or to explain difficult words. The book contains numerous quotes from the Qur’an and the ahadith (the sayings of the Prophet), which are recited by the professor and usually, in a lower tone of voice, by many students. All the classes I attended in this faculty were quiet, with no discussion, but this time the topic was too interesting and many students, mainly girls, from time to time interrupted the lesson asking for explanations or offering their insights into how much present society differs from the idealised one of the beginnings of Islam. While the students speak, the professor kept silent, and stopped them only when he thought their arguments had gone too far. The discussion included alcohol, movies and dresses that are supposedly against the teachings of Islam, and students kept adding their arguments against them and those who misbehave, and from time to time when the speeches got too heated the professor would stop them and go back to the book. To the condition of sinfulness is often opposed that of the right doer, and the professor was emphatic about this, even though there was virtually no sign of any opposition or disagreement. Thus there was no proper debate, since what was discussed was only the gravity of the misbehaviours, and all the students, at least those who spoke, agreed on the same key points. The lessons ended when the professor claimed that the true believers believe in the Islam of those days, which he opposed to ‘American Islam’, and at his words the students uttered their approval. There is some form of interaction among students, but the professor does not take part in it, and it is not possible to characterise it as proper debate since there is no opposition, only differences in scale. Some of the students who kept silent later expressed to me their dissatisfaction with these courses, in which any form of dissent is discouraged and which they attend only in order to pass the exam. Thus, even if there are some attempts by the professor to animate his class, the structure of the teaching adheres to the standard of the less privileged faculties, and the students appear content with this. Exams are of the kind I described above as typical for lower grade faculties, and the book constitutes almost the only source the students will have to answer the questions.

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Arts The environment of this faculty is representative of the better faculties. Even if the lesson that I will describe here is not representative of the average lessons that are held in the faculty, I see it as particularly important since it represents an attempt at an innovative teaching methodology. Even in this faculty such a methodology represents a rare innovation, and the students are fully aware of this; some of them left the classes after they discovered that the exams would be much more focused on students’ active participation, while others expressed their satisfaction. The average courses are taught with little innovation and a plain adherence to textbooks by teachers, and exams require merely knowledge of what the textbooks say. The department concerned is Italian language, and the professor, of Palestinian origin, had obtained his PhD in Italy. He often told me that he is not supported by senior members of his department, and he claims to have been excluded from important positions because he doesn’t have anyone to back him.44 This is not only about political issues but extends to his teaching methodologies, which was met with resistance within the department itself, and from some students.45 The course is on conversation skills, and therefore requires students to actively participate during classes, simulating situations given by the professor. In these activities the professor sits in one of the chairs left by one student who is acting, or stands at the bottom of the room leaving the scene to the students. There are about 30 students, slightly more girls than boys; dress is quite fashionable, all the boys are in jeans and t-shirts or shirts while the girls are dressed in Western fashion, other than two who wear the ‘abaya, and a handful of muhajabat. In the first part of the lessons the students divide into groups which had been established in previous lessons where they had been given a part taken from Italian theatre pieces, which they are required to act. The situation is quite well defined, and as students have to perform something which has been given to them, some of them rely on learning by heart what they have to say, sometimes without a full understanding of the text. According to the professor, learning by heart is the way of learning, at least at school level, that is necessary to perform well in the tawjihi. In the second part of the lesson, the professor reads some quotations about highly debated issues – the relationship between man and woman, censorship

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and the like – and students are required to voice their opinions.46 Without discussing the contents of these debates in detail here, the crucial point is that the students are quite explicitly told to express themselves freely, even if there is always a certain degree of control from the professor himself, who carefully avoids any talk about Jordanian politics. Even more importantly, many of them are aware of the significance of this, share their teacher’s efforts, and willingly follow this path. This desire for a change is all the more important if we consider the fact that, even in this privileged faculty, the majority of the courses are taught in quite a traditional manner, and the exams are performed accordingly. The relationship between the professor and his students is entirely different from the one described in the Shariʽa class, and one might say that this difference reflects the different realities students experience.

Conclusion This chapter shows the relevance of the university system in a developing country such as Jordan, its central position in the national discourse and in the shaping of its international standing. The second part of the chapter features a discussion of its concrete functioning and the way in which this is coherent with Jordanian society at large. I have argued that the system is designed to divide the students between those who have access to better standards of education (and who, at least partially due to the old admission procedures, even if this is going to change, have a higher degree of personal freedom in society as well) and those who have more humble origins, and who are kept under tighter control both within the university and outside, as I will elaborate in Chapters 3 and 4. The analysis of the different emphasis put on the scientific and the humanistic curricula, of the hierarchy between faculties and of the differences in teaching methodologies all contribute to a better understanding of the local context of the university and its coherence with the power structure. At the same time, the institution provides ways of establishing reality that are far from the world, thereby creating the conditions for the emergence of critique (Boltanski 2011). The next chapter examines the reforms that are changing the university sector in Jordan, and some of the main efforts at international academic cooperation, continuing the discussion of the university’s reality and of its uneasy encounter with the world.

CHAPTER 2 UNIVERSITY REFORMS

A frenzy of university reforms is sweeping round the globe. International organisations, national governments and university managements endow such policies with momentum and an aura of inevitability (Wright and Rabo 2010: 1). Public universities everywhere are facing similar sets of reforms that aim to make them more efficient, economical and competitive, and more responsive to the needs of governments and labour markets. The shared assumption among many researchers dealing with these reforms is that they are changing the ways in which the state conceptualises the public, and the right to education (Farag 2009). Whether these developments are actually evidence of a globally structured agenda of university reform (Amit 2012, Dale 2000) or are more a case of convergence around a loosely shared set of international norms is debated, as is their homogenising effects on universities. While different institutions try to respond to these challenges in their own particular ways, which are far from homogeneous, what we are witnessing is an increasing set of convergences or ‘mimetic isomorphisms’ (Shore and Davidson 2013).1 Moreover, the current wave of reforms anchors both the global north and south in the so-called global knowledge economy in which higher education is universally perceived as increasingly crucial for economic development. In the current political discourse, less emphasis is placed on higher education as a public right and a means to liberate and cultivate citizens. Higher education occupies centre stage in the discourse on the global knowledge economy because ‘knowledge is treated as a raw material’ (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004:17). Universities

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are thus sites for both the mining and the refining of this resource (Wright and Rabo 2010: 2). In the Arab world, similar notions of ‘knowledge society’, or the notion of the value of education for the labour market, have spread (Mazawi 2010). The vision of education as being crucial for development, and especially for economic improvements, is quite overtly stated in the Arab Human Development Reports, as some studies rightly criticise (Bayat 2006, Adely 2009c, Mazawi 2010). In recent years there has been a shift in recommended policies for youth in the Arab world from an emphasis on the provision of education and health to the need to create work opportunities (Mazawi 2007), in the belief (somewhat reinforced by the Arab uprisings) that youth could pose a threat to stability, as I will discuss in Chapter 5. The link between education and development in Jordan has been explored by Adely (2012) and Jansen (2006), but always at the school level, and with a marked interest in the link between gender and development. The few studies on universities are normally shaped by ‘expert’ knowledge, and there is no comprehensive study of the university as a global form, embedded in the local context, as a fragile institution animated by different logics. Obviously, even while higher education is similarly implicated globally in modern stratification regimes, visible forms of national organisational and cultural distinctiveness remain. This received eloquent expression in Turner’s classic essay contrasting the ‘sponsored’ and ‘contest mobility’ educational logics in mid-century Britain and America (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 141). Yet the remarkable simultaneity of higher education’s universal diffusion and particularistic expression remains largely unexplored by sociologists and anthropologists, and this chapter aims to contribute to filling this lacuna from the perspective of reforms. Following some recent developments in anthropology, I propose to discuss these reforms as being part of a ‘travelling technology’ of governance. The travelling models concept enables one to ‘emphasise how things and ideas move from one place to the other, which suspends the contradiction between local specificities and global abstractions’ (Behrends, Park and Rottenburg 2014: 9). Anthropologists needed to develop a scientific understanding of global problems, in order to go beyond purely local critiques of the influence of global phenomena. Over the last two decades, myriad studies have contributed to deciphering how

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aspects of ‘the global’ have caused processes of change through adaptation, appropriation, mixing, rejection or resistance at the local level. Following Collier and Ong, these phenomena can be interpreted as assemblages, belonging to the same category as ‘global forms’ in modern institutions. In this chapter I focus on these forms, governmental discourses and technologies, while highlighting their ‘displacement and reappropriation’, concurring with the recognition that such global forms ‘interact with other elements [. . .] in contingent, uneasy and unstable relationships’ (Collier and Ong 2005: 12). Like global assemblages, the university in Jordan suggests inherent tensions, and an ethnographic understanding allows us to account for its ‘heterogeneous, contingent, unstable and situated character’. (Ibid.) One of the main criticisms of studies that deal with higher education is that of ‘methodological nationalism’. This refers to the tendency to analyse societies in terms of the nation states that are seen to contain them, limiting statistical analysis to national descriptions (Shore and Davidson 2013). While obviously focusing on Jordan, my study tries to show all the points of contact between what is happening in Amman and other neighbouring countries, as well as linking them with global trends. The aim is to provide a solid ethnographic understanding of the ways in which global discourses, reforms and policies are enacted and resisted at a local level, which I take as being paradigmatic in the sense of being imbued in global discourses while at the same time being quite specific. Another criticism is that the new ways in which the higher education sector is being shaped by global and regional processes make it increasingly difficult to address ‘the university’ as a unitary, bounded or autonomous actor (Ibid.). While I fully concur with this, I contend that using one as a case study (in this case the University of Jordan) offers the possibility of highlighting these trends, grounding them in the experiences of people who actually live the university as an institution. The first section of this chapter discusses the crisis of the university in Jordan (outlined in Chapter 1), describing some of the main reforms of the past 25 years. The second part deals more specifically with policies, including an in-depth analysis of the HERfKE programme, sponsored by the World Bank. Studies of higher education have dovetailed with the anthropology of policy approach from its beginnings (Shore and Wright 1997, 1999). However, attention to policy transfer, or what we can more accurately

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term ‘translation’ (Callon 1986), is perhaps now more essential than ever, as studies on regionalisation and globalisation of higher education reform reveal (Dale and Robertson 2009). Policy in the higher education sector appears to be particularly mobile, traversing national and local boundaries with ease, as universities’ mission statements and strategic directives appear to take on an ‘uncanny genericity’ (Robertson et al. 2012). These isomorphisms emerge largely from the intersection of finance and education in the increasingly pressing demands of the ‘global knowledge economy’, as already mentioned. At the same time, the reforms, despite being granted a status beyond critique at least officially, are not being implemented without contradictions and restraints, and at times are not implemented at all. This highlights well-known problems in the literature that deals with the effects of developmental policies, namely the contrasts between different codes, which result in ‘far-fetched facts’ (Rottenburg 2009). The final section of this chapter deals with the policies enacted by international agencies such as the European Union through its TEMPUS programme. Experts on local development are ‘brokers’ who actively influence local arenas by making use of internationally acquired knowledge, and this is yet another way in which boundaries are constantly blurred and reworked by global institutions. The travelling technologies approach enables reflection on social and cultural change in a world that is characterised by sophisticated economic, communicational and legal integration that results in an exchange of ontological, epistemic, normative and material orders with far-reaching consequences. Boltanski’s (2011) recent analysis of that slippery sociological object, the institution, concludes that the ambiguity he identifies as its chief characteristic can be attributed to the fact that it exists in a perpetual oscillation between instantiation and reification, and at the same time, this oscillation constitutes the very definition of what an institution is. This chapter shows how the context of the university in Jordan is changing, the nature of the projected reforms and the international interventions, in order to show the pressure that the university is now under. Moreover, such an approach offers an explanation for the ambivalences and contradictions that accompany all these reforms, proposed or enacted. This, combined with the already mentioned political and economic context, contributes to the understanding of the university as a crucial institution in questions of modernity and

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development, regime stability and social change, national interests and international pressures.

The need for reform, the signature of the state Despite the undeniable success, or perhaps partly due to this very success, the university system in Jordan appears to be undergoing a deep crisis, involving issues of quality assurance and relevance of the curriculum to the needs of the labour market, but more deeply involving the relation between state, education and employment (Mazawi 2010), the social contract on which the entire topography of legitimisation is built. I outlined some of the implications of the impending sense of crisis in the previous chapter. Here, I focus on a few select issues that are usually mentioned in conversations about education, its crisis and the necessary reforms in Jordan. The first point concerns the language in which these reforms are framed, the developmental understanding of education and the importance that the state places on it for economic and security reasons. In this first part I therefore embark on a description of the signature of the state, and will then turn to the actual reforms that have been discussed and (partly) implemented. The leadership of Jordan has expressed commitment to the modernization of Jordanian society and to developing the Jordanian economy into a knowledge-based economy. Reform of higher education is central to meeting these commitments. (Kanaan 2009: 36) The necessity of adopting policies and programmes for the development of higher education, commensurate with the best international standards and practices. These policies and programmes should also contribute to enhancing the competiveness of our educational sector in the region as well as the world, in addition to the importance of adopting advanced educational policies that would be reference to admission bases to our universities, and that would aim at modernizing curricula and teaching methods, with a view to improving the quality of higher education outputs in Jordan, and graduating specialized competencies that are capable of catering for the needs of the local, regional and international markets.

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We hope that this conference will come up with strategies and funding sources that will constitute alternatives to formal universities with a view to maintaining high quality education and ensuring its ongoing development. We also hope that a wellestablished educational environment will be secured to ensure essential principles such as equal educational opportunities to the Jordanian youth. (From His Majesty King Abdullah P Bin Al-Hussein’s letter on the development of higher education, quoted in Batarseh 2011) Over the past decade, since higher education is one of King Abdullah II’s national priorities, the Jordanian government has been working towards reforming the sector by instituting policies aimed at improving the quality of education and ensuring that students have the relevant labour market skills needed to effectively compete for domestic, regional and international employment. To this end, curricula at different faculties and departments have been upgraded or reformed during the past few years (Kanaan 2009). In response to royal directives to put together a comprehensive strategy for developing the higher education and scientific research sector, the government conducted the Higher Education Reform Forum at the Dead Sea, in February 2007. It was attended by a large number of senior officials, including several ex-prime ministers, current and most ex-ministers of Higher Education in Jordan, presidents, vice-presidents, and a number of deans of Jordanian universities, higher education reform experts, and others. The participants came up with the following five-year, seven-point focus for reform: governance and university administration; admission principles; accreditation and quality assurance; scientific research; technical and technological education; university financing; and university environment (Batarseh 2011). The fact that reforms of crucial sectors tend to go hand in hand with political considerations has already been widely noted. The higher education sector is no exception, with crucial reforms being announced, implemented or delayed indefinitely without direct link to their actual functions. In 2009 it seemed that the momentum of change had accelerated remarkably, with fundamental amendments in higher education laws, deriving from the renewed interest in higher education and resulting in a substantial restructuring of the sector. The new laws

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passed in 2009 include the law of higher education and scientific research (no. 23), the law of Jordanian universities (no. 20) and an amendment to the Higher Education Accreditation Commission law. These laws provide, in principle, more autonomy to higher education institutions in administrative management, and more involvement of enterprises in university structures, although in reality they are subject to fairly severe constraints imposed by the Higher Education Council and the Higher Education Accreditation Commission (Kanaan 2009). Official documents stress that university autonomy has been significantly augmented, with each university having an independent board of trustees which, for the first time in the history of the sector, chooses the university president (who had always been appointed) through a selection committee, and ratifies the appointment of vice presidents and deans.2 The board, which includes both academics and representatives of civil society, also draws up university strategies and plans, and is responsible for much of the thinking pertaining to the boosting of the university’s finances and quality drives. At the same time, these laws grant the Ministry of Higher Education new supervisory structures, such as the Policy Analysis and Planning Unit and the Unified Admission Coordination Unit.3 The rationale behind this is that higher education, as one of the national priorities, needs strategy to be constantly evaluated and monitored. The ‘key performance indicators’ include, among others, the percentages of male and female students’ enrolment into regular and parallel admission programmes, and the increase in faculty members; the level of governmental financial support, as well as the number of private universities that ‘participate in shouldering the burden and responsibilities of education with the public sector’; the HEAC, which assures ‘quality’.4 The 2007 Law of the Accreditation Commission was amended in 2009 to make the commission report to the Prime Minister instead of the Minister of Higher Education. The commission aims at enhancing the quality of higher education, provides quality control, and encourages higher education institutions to be open and interact with international institutes and organisations in charge of accreditation and quality control. It also aims at the development of higher education using international norms and standards. Both public and private universities fall within its mandate (EU Commission 2010).

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These laws are presented, in the official discourse, as achievements that help in moving the process of comprehensive development forward [. . . by] providing an academic, psychological and social environment supportive for creativity, excellence, innovation and talent development in order for Jordan to assume a prominent position that is consistent with its status and strategic location, if compared with its capabilities and limited financial resources. (Ministry of Higher Education) It has already been noted that such government-promoted policies use terms that many academics hold dear, notably ‘freedom’, ‘university’ and ‘autonomy’. Even the words used to describe and measure performance – accountability, quality and excellence – are not ones that academics would wish to oppose (Shore and Wright 1999). Yet academics often ‘misrecognise’ these words, assuming that governments are giving them the same meaning as they do themselves, and not seeing how they are shifting in meaning as they become used to express a new rationality of governance (Ibid.). In the Jordanian context, this is further complicated by two issues. First, most ‘experts’ are themselves university professors who climbed the political ladder, and keep their positions at the universities. This fits with what Strathern notes, that ‘auditors are not aliens; they are a version of ourselves’ (1997: 319). ‘Audit culture’ is supposed to be built on an ethos of impartiality and professionalism, but the Jordanian context offers an extreme proximity that can make critical distance difficult, especially when the power dynamics within the departments are not really challenged by these discourses, as often lamented by junior staff. The second issue emerges from this proximity of governance, as well as from the discrepancies between the professed goals and the actual practices that sustain the institution – what Hanafi (2012) has termed the law of rules, as opposed to the rule of law. Quantitative measurements and evaluations are seen in the context of decreasing academic quality and integrity, amidst the overall lack of research (Al-Husban and Na’amneh 2010). The professional principle of peer review is understood in quite a different way in Jordan, compared to what Wright and Rabo lament, where it ‘made many academics largely complicit with the increasingly commercial approach of scholarly

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journals, and in the UK allowed the reification of research within successive research assessment exercises’ (Wright and Rabo 2010: 6).5 In such a climate, complaints about the effects of reforms on academic standards, collegiality and freedom of research are seen as self-serving. This raises perhaps the greatest problem: that of finding a suitable language for protest. For example, the OECD’s policy discourses present the move towards marketisation as inevitable and inexorable (Wright and Rabo 2010: 8).6 In the Jordanian case, this difficulty is exacerbated by the fact that most ‘experts’ busy with designing reforms are themselves professors at key universities, who in some cases have been critical of the conditions of education in the country. Their involvement in the reform process is doubly hedged, since they get a say in the process but at the same time their potential for forming a critical stance is decreased. In the first chapter I discussed the impulse for modernisation, accompanied by an overall preference of the system for the scientific curricula, and referred to the claim by the former head of the University of Jordan that science students are interested in learning and willing to promote change, while humanities students are less motivated, and only pursuing this course because they have failed to access a scientific one (Khasawneh 2001). This view is upheld by ‘expert’ papers that deal with the ‘challenge for the higher education system in Jordan’, speaking for example of the saturation of students in certain disciplines, particularly in social sciences and humanities. The proportion of university enrolment in science and engineering versus humanities and social sciences could be viewed as an index of the ‘quality’ of human capital at the level of higher education. The underlying assumption here is that scientists and engineers are likely to contribute more to economic growth than are social scientists and students of humanity because of the increasing importance of technological innovation and adaptation in the development process (Kanaan 2009: 34). The King’s letter also emphasises two fundamental aspects of the struggle over higher education in Jordan, namely the necessity of finding alternative sources of funding as well as the continued stress on equality of access, both of which are part of the World Bank recommendation to ensure ‘quality’ from a customer’s perspective, treating ‘client power’ as a short route to accountability (Barsoum and Mryyan 2014). This tension is one among the many that intersect within the educational realm, and

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in this chapter I deal with a couple of others, external influence versus local balances, and the difference between the rule of law and that of the law of rules.7 The socio-economic context of this ‘reformation’ period started with the economic crisis of the 1980s, and deepened following the return of many educated migrants during the Gulf War, which also led to an opening up of the economy at the end of the decade, with more room for private initiatives and less dependency on the state and remittances (Auge´, 1998: 130). This had a double effect. Firstly, it increased recognition of the value of schooling and heightened demand. Students believe that higher education will reduce their risks of unemployment. Secondly, it led to a new perspective on education, as a field appropriate for business initiatives. This view is in line with the neo-liberal theories of the World Bank which, in exchange for education reform, is supporting Jordan with a $US 300 million loan package agreed in 2003 (Jansen 2006: 478).

Changes in the funding of the university Up until the end of the 1980s, higher education in Jordan was entirely public sector owned and operated, and heavily subsidised by taxpayers (Kanaan 2009). The universities in Jordan were financed by the state, which thereby retained control over this potentially subversive institution, paying close attention to what was taught and how, who had access to the professorship, even, to a certain extent, who could enter the university as a student and who could not, and so on. The massive growth of private universities in the last two decades is due to pressure from the IMF to ease state control over all sectors of the economy, but privatisations have been only partly implemented (currently, almost one third of the total workforce in Jordan is hired by the state) and, especially in the education sector, the state retains its control, through mechanisms such as accreditation. Nevertheless, in recent years there have been substantial cuts in the state budget for education, including higher education generally. The Council of Higher Education has also started financing the private universities, in a context of general cuts in the budget (Rashdan and Hamshri, 2003: 380), and even the first university of the country, the University of Jordan, has been targeted.

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According to an early study, government planners progressively worked on making Jordan the centre for technology production and for service industries in the Middle East, taking into account their anticipated revitalised oil economy to boost demand for technically qualified specialists. For this purpose, at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, government planners reallocated and redirected public financial support away from academic and towards more pragmatic fields of advancement. This was a sign from the government to the public that the public would have to find their own resources to finance higher education as the government was unwilling, and could no longer afford, to finance the abnormally high demand, which was described by one official as ‘the insatiable appetite for education to achieve social status’. This governmental act was the starting signal for the beginning of a new era for higher education in the country; the privatisation and launching of private universities by the end of the 1980s (Roy and Irelan, 1992: 179). Despite the fact that Jordan spends 3.2 per cent of its GDP on higher education,8 around 2.5 times the average of the European Union and also above the USA’s 2.7 per cent, financing higher education is becoming increasingly difficult under the current economic conditions of increasing scarcity of government resources relative to the increasing demand and relative to other claims on these resources (Al-Charaa 2009). This is because this 3.2 per cent breaks down into only 0.62 per cent public expenditure, while the remaining 2.58 per cent is covered by private sources. The government in recent years has had to resort to gradually reducing its subsidies to public universities. Today the higher education sector is plagued with funding shortages and limited resources, and this problem is likely to intensify in the future, as Jordan attempts to meet the expected increase in demand for better quality higher education in the context of demographic pressure and the emphasis on knowledge as a key factor in development (Ibid.). As new universities were being established, the government financial subsidy to higher education was declining, from JD 71 million in 2002 to just over JD 65 million in 2007. Since public expenditure on higher education in Jordan is relatively low, Jordanian universities do not rely to any substantial degree on government funding. Instead they earn significant amounts of their income from elsewhere. This in large part comes from the tuition fees they charge their students, and the even

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higher fees they charge international and parallel students. Regular, parallel and international students all pay tuition fees per credit hour, which vary according to field of specialisation and type of enrolment. Tuition fees represent a much higher proportion of income than is the case in the majority of other countries in the region, having increased from less than 50 per cent of public universities revenue in 2001 to more than 65 per cent in 2007, and their value exceeded the government subsidy to the universities more than threefold (Jalal and Kanaan 2012).9 Although expenditures on university education have been steadily increasing over time, they hardly kept pace with the volume of enrolled students except by compromising quality; this is indicated by the stagnant, if not declining, expenditure per student. The high studentto-teacher and faculty-to-non-faculty ratios also reflect internal inefficiency in Jordanian universities (Kanaan 2009). The creation of privately owned universities was the response of the market to the mounting demand from students whose qualifications were not competitive enough to secure subsidised seats in the public universities. After a while, public universities in turn responded with similar market incentives, and some of them decided to increase the number of seats they offered by creating the so-called ‘parallel programmes’, detailed in Chapter 1. Along with this, the University of Jordan organises some marketing and commercial activities, such as a ‘student village’, in which university knick-knacks are sold such as t-shirts, cups and caps, but in which ‘traditional’ handicraft products are also displayed, and two new buildings just outside the campus in which ‘university’ supermarkets and other shops are hosted, although I am not aware of the actual impact of these activities on the general budget.10 The other consequence has been the steadily increasing presence of private universities, to which I turn in the next section. The serious qualitative and financial decline of public-sector universities arising from the mounting number of students and the rigidity of both tuition fees and government subsidies provided an opportunity for private entrepreneurs to profit by setting up private universities, relieving the pressure of numbers at the public universities. Demographic pressures associated with a disproportionately young population, coupled with the response of the private sector in accommodating the rising number of eligible students by creating private higher education institutions, led to a dramatic increase in the number of universities in Jordan (Kanaan 2009).

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The demand for improved quality generates additional pressures to increase current levels of spending on education together with the need to improve its efficiency. Higher education institutions now have to reconsider their financing structures and explore alternative strategies (Ibid.). Experts’ language is only partially different: the steady shift of the status of, and approach to education from being predominantly a social service reflecting mainly individual needs and human rights, and thus is mostly supply driven, to a balanced socioeconomic activity that incorporates the necessary aspects of a social service and economic investment has been a common phenomenon in Arab countries. One of the major developments in this respect is the growing privatization and globalization of educational services, especially in higher education. Modern technologies helped to support such developments and enhance a commodity approach. (Masri 2009)

Processes of liberalisation and internationalisation As discussed earlier, the decision to allow the creation of the private universities which began to appear in the 1990s, despite resistance from many within the establishment, was associated with the return from the Gulf of around 300,000 Jordanian passport-holders, mainly of Palestinian descent, due to the first Iraqi war. Many of them were quite well educated, with university degrees, and had gone to the Gulf to teach; they were therefore expecting to find some similar form of job at home, but there were none. The creation of private universities has to be seen in this context, and that of the broader demand for more education that I briefly introduced above. In these universities the percentage of staff of Palestinian origin is high, around 70 per cent, and this may be connected with the fact that 11 out of the 13 private universities (as of 2002) were owned by Palestinian entrepreneurs (Reiter 2002: 143). Private universities so far have received little scholarly attention, apart from Massadeh 2012b and Cantini 2016, despite their political significance and the changes that they have contributed to in the context of reforms, which is more significant than can simply be measured by the number of students enrolled in them.

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As for political control over the university, which has been an important factor in Jordan, one should be careful about considering the establishment of many private universities as a form of (even if simply academic) freedom. The Higher Education Council has significant power over private universities, as Burke and Al-Waked (1997) note. The council must approve the types of studies and fields of specialisation at various levels; set admissions criteria; approve acceptance of donations, gifts and grants; review performance through examination of budgets and reports, and approve any cultural or technical cooperation agreements the university may wish to make with other institutions and bodies. Regulations are issued for licensing and accreditation with specific criteria regarding the proper student/faculty ratio, the minimum (80 per cent) proportion of full-time academic staff, the maximum teaching load for each academic rank, and the maximum number of credit hours a student may take per semester (Ibid.). The establishment of private higher education institutions needs the approval of the Board of Higher Education. There is a well-defined procedure concerning the application form and documents that should be submitted for this purpose. In general, the application should be well justified to secure approval of the board, especially now that there are about 14 private universities in Jordan, they exist in all geographic areas, and equivalent programmes of study are covered by private and/or public universities (Abu-El-Haija et al. 2011). It has been noted, however, that in Jordan it is clear that public institutions perform better than private ones in terms of pedagogy, accountability and perceptions. ‘In Jordan it tends to be public selective institutions that perform better. This may be because there is more flexibility and better incentives built in to the governance of public institutions in Jordan’ (Assaad et al. 2014: 11), though the authors of this report themselves call for caution in their own interpretation, given a substantial lack of quantitative information on these topics.11 Another important factor in the growth of the higher education system in Jordan is the spread of public universities all over the country. These have been mushrooming as well as the private ones, though the latter are concentrated in Amman and its surroundings, where most Palestinians reside. One of the most eloquent examples is the opening of a branch of the University of Jordan in Aqaba, the only port city in Jordan and one of the ‘special economic zones’ that were designed to attract more

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investments (Moore 2003). The Aqaba branch contains only a limited number of faculties (information technology, languages, management and finance, marine sciences and tourism), those evidently deemed to be most appropriate to such an enterprise. As mentioned in the previous chapter, almost all the students are enrolled on the parallel programme, which renders this branch more akin to a private university.12 Another important new development in Jordanian higher education is its internationalisation, and especially its dependency on external support, materially in terms of loans but also in terms of policies and the language applied to their implementation.13 In the 1990s, when martial laws in Jordan were lifted, there was a remarkable improvement in the relationship with Western countries, notably the USA and the EU.14 Non-governmental organisations started operating in the country (despite heavy state influence), and this also changed the research agenda at universities, with the appearance of topics such as human rights, freedom of speech, democracy and privatisation. It is clear that, as AlHusban and Na’amneh observe, the issue of funding determines in many ways the research types and priorities. Funding for these nongovernmental organizations does not come from local Jordanian agencies but rather from foreign ones such as the EU, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or the Japanese International Cooperation Agencies (JICA). Thus most of these nongovernmental organizations do not function, in terms of the scientific research, in accordance with the Jordanian national agenda. (Al-Husban and Na’amneh 2010: 200) Keeping in mind that it is not always that easy to differentiate between the ‘Jordanian national agenda’ and the Western one, this insight can be usefully transported to university research, notably the influence of foreign research centres and funds that influence the orientation of research topics, although it could also be argued that political and social constraints work in the opposite direction too, inhibiting some researchers and at least indirectly encouraging others. The Columbia University Middle East Research Center (CUMERC) was launched in March 2009 under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah as one of the first in a series of Columbia Global

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Centers that the university is opening around the world, and it claims to be having a marked impact on scholarship in and around the region, despite the fact that most of its fellows complain about lack of research and of academic activities in general. Other foreign institutions of higher learning or research include old establishments, such as the Ifpo (Institut Franc¸ais du Proche Orient) and the British Institute in Amman, which do mostly archeological research but focus also on social sciences.

The Higher Education Reform for Knowledge Economy (HERfKE) project I will now turn to analysis of the most ambitious proposal for a reform package in recent years, one which provides an excellent case study of the context in which reforms are supposed to take place. In 2003, the government, with the financial support of the World Bank, began its five-year Jordan Higher Education Development Project. This was closed down in 2007, having been rated as marginally unsatisfactory. The 2008 World Bank Development Report on Education in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), recommended revisiting the legislation governing higher education, guaranteeing financial, administrative and academic independence for the country’s institutes of higher learning, revisiting admission criteria and implementing accreditation criteria. This is not the only international programme the Ministry of Higher Education is working on, the other two main projects being the Trans European Mobility Programme for University Students (TEMPUS) and a project with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on ‘Bridging the Gap between Higher Education outputs and the Labor Market in Jordan’ (MoHE website). But the project that seems to me most relevant to this discussion is the HERfKE, which was established with the World Bank as partner. The project, officially approved in 2009, aims to support the development of a higher education system that is financially sustainable, with incentives to improve equity, quality and relevance for tertiary education students. The project supports policy reforms that are intended to improve the government’s capacity to diversify and improve financing mechanisms to universities as a means of creating incentives to promote a culture of quality and innovation in universities; modernise the governance and management efficacy of the sector by aligning the roles, missions and responsibilities of various

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governance bodies to the new strategy objectives; and strengthen quality assurance and accreditation mechanisms. In terms of expected results, the project should increase the efficiency of public higher education institutions; diversify the resource base of state universities as a means to create incentives to promote a culture of quality and innovation in universities; link government financing to national priorities to improve programme relevance and strengthen accountability mechanisms (World Bank 2009). Planned clusters include ‘financing higher education for quality’, ‘moderniz[ing] governance, accountability and management systems’ (this includes making universities more autonomous, as well as accountable), ‘improving accreditation and quality assurance’, ‘strengthening the student admission process’ (to channel students to ‘demonstrated areas of national need’), as well as a focus on restructuring the community colleges system.15 Interestingly, the project tries to keep seemingly opposing principles together – ‘rational management’ and an ‘innovative’ higher education system that is ‘financially and institutionally sustainable’, with incentives to improve the ‘equity, quality, relevance, and student life/campus culture’. Efficiency and accountability are among the most commonly expressed Jordanian desires following recent scandals and the increased perception of corruption, and ‘culture of quality and innovation’ is among the most used reformist catchphrases worldwide. The project is also intended to support the activities of the HEAC (Ibid.). Officially due to budget constraints, the cabinet decided in July 2009 to freeze the project until further notice. Most people I spoke with regarded this as an apt example of what happens in Jordan whenever reforms are concerned (see Schwedler 2010 for a different context), and considered that the distance between what is on paper and what happens on the ground is significant. In this vein, Sari Hanafi (2012) speaks about the difference between the rule of law and the law of rules, the latter invariably having the upper hand. But it is nonetheless interesting to look at the actual document, to see which priorities are included, how problems are framed, and which balances would have been altered by its approval (which could still happen in the future). The rationale behind the reforms is not surprising in the context of the discussion in the previous section. It involves improving the quality of education and ensuring that students have the relevant labour market skills needed to effectively compete for domestic, regional and

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international employment. The alignment of the tertiary education system with the needs of the economy in order to increase Jordan’s competitiveness is clearly a major preoccupation of the World Bank: The World Bank’s involvement is supporting Government of Jordan’s integrated and comprehensive human resource development policy, particularly given ongoing reforms in the vocational sector (through the Employer Driven Skills Development Project), general education (through the Education Reform for Knowledge Economy Projects), and in social safety nets (through the Social Protection Enhancement Project). The effectiveness of these programmes is diminished without corresponding reforms in higher education. (World Bank 2009: 48) Even before being suspended, the project faced criticism – regional differences in access and quality, the poor reputation of the teaching profession, unpreparedness of graduates to enter the labour market, as well as the need to teach practical skills, critical thinking and individual initiative, among others. The International Leadership Academy stated that students ought to be encouraged to be self-reliant and to have confidence in their ability to develop and to influence change by giving feedback to policy makers. The interviews conducted by the Academy revealed criticism of teaching methods and curricula, and this is reinforced by the findings of the 2004 Jordan Human Development Report. This criticised the fact that the main emphasis of teaching was on students accumulating knowledge, rather than on encouraging critical thinking or creativity and fostering the development of citizenship, responsibility and action. Teaching was said to be teacher-centred instead of student-centred. The main criticism, though, is that ‘higher education reforms advanced by the World Bank should not be seen in terms of knowledge constructions, nor as objective truisms, but as formed deliberately according to neoliberal inspired methodological rules and criteria to promote globalization’ (Taji 2004: 70). The HERfKE project has not (yet) seen the light, and the reasons for its suspension lie in the Jordanian way of managing its pivotal role between different, often contrasting, imperatives. From the point of view of institutional theory, it is quite clear that this tension, between local needs and international pressures, between liberalisation and

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control, is part of its internal dynamic, in fact quite constitutive of it. The HERfKE is not a single project, nor is it disconnected from other international enterprises all seeking to reform the Jordanian knowledge economy. It is to this international influence that I now turn my analysis.

International donors and the European influence Among active donors in the educational landscape in Jordan, usually associated with entrance into the labour market and with the need for stability, are the Canadian International Development Agency (active since 1996), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (focusing on strengthening the training management of the Vocational Colleges, and on technical education in general), USAID (also working on developing training skills in the vocational track, among many other things, such as designing an education assessment for the Jordan National Strategy 2004–9), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), the International Labour Organisation and the European Commission.16 I will concentrate on analysing European influence since this is markedly on the rise as a consequence of policy changes in the last 20 years. With the adoption of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) in November 1995, the promotion of political reform became a declared objective within the policies of the European Union (EU) vis-a`-vis its ‘neighbourhood’ in North Africa and the Middle East. In contrast to previous approaches towards the region which focused purely on trade and economic cooperation, the EMP – or Barcelona Process – committed the governing elites of all southern partner countries to develop democracy and the rule of law in their political systems and to act in respect of the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Del Sarto and Schumacher 2011: 932– 3) This is not the place for tracing in detail recent developments in European policies in the region, from the European neighbourhood policy, developed in 2002–3, which envisaged the creation of a ‘ring of friends’ east and south of the EU, to the ‘rather apolitical and projectbased Union for the Mediterranean – the latest incarnation of the Barcelona Process’ (Ibid.: 934). For the sake of a discussion on European

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influence on higher education, it is sufficient to say that this is part of a broader set of policies, and that the trend is somewhat changing, from the first openings to recent disillusion, exacerbated by the outcomes of the Arab revolutions. Also from an organisational point of view, the Jordanian higher education system is currently modelled on the European one, after ‘long decades of adoption of the American model in education’ (AlHusban and Na’amneh 2010: 195). The current model is labelled the ‘three circles system’. The general framework for higher education at Jordanian universities consist of three cycles that lead to three degrees: Bachelor of Science (BSc) or Bachelor of Arts (BA), Master of Science or Arts (MSc or MA), and Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). In most disciplines, about four years of study are needed for the BSc or BA, one and a half to two years of study for the MSc or MA, and about three years to obtain the PhD (Ibid.). This process can be explained in many ways, especially from the perspective of a greater institutional isomorphism across the Mediterranean. Europe is not alone in having an interest in educational reform in the kingdom, as should be obvious given the enormous role Jordan has played in the last two decades, following the peace treaty with Israel and the ongoing crises in the region. The influence of the USA is still rather evident, though, and this is mainly explained by the USAID programme designed for the Jordanian education sector. It seems that there is some degree of cooperation among international donors, for example a World Bank document indicated that, although public universities in Jordan have no previous experience in dealing with projects like the HERfKE, they have accumulated experience in dealing with TEMPUS projects, and this renders the overall risk of the project only ‘moderate’. Moreover, what is striking is the essential coherence of the various cooperation packages, as they all tend towards greater quality, more integration between education and the labour market, reducing regional differences, and improving teacher training.17 The European Commission has long established cooperative ties with Jordan, not only in the field of education,18 and here I detail some of its interventions in the field of higher education, especially its TEMPUS programme. There are other academic exchange programmes, such as the ERASMUS Mundus and projects associated with the EMP, and because Jordan is one of the countries covered by EU Neighbourhood policy,

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these programmes are better funded (and the budget for 2012 doubled that of 2011). TEMPUS is a programme promoting cooperation in higher education between the European Union and 29 partner countries19 (since 2002 including Jordan and other Mediterranean countries in the framework of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership). It aims to modernise and develop their education systems through projects that are directed at improving educational management or creating specific academic programmes. In 2012 there were 14 ongoing TEMPUS projects involving Jordanian universities, and the University of Jordan was the second, after Yarmouk, to receive a grant (in 2011). Approved projects mainly focus on technological and scientific transfer, in line with the priorities set by the government in 2007 of curricula development and modernisation, especially in engineering, technology and health sciences, together with governance reforms through the introduction of quality assurance and the development of international relations. When I interviewed Professor Abu El-Haija, Director of the National TEMPUS Office in Amman, he confirmed my impression that the priorities were established by the Jordanian government, and were limited to technology transfer and selected training (for example in nursing), and that these actions were also regarded by the European side as being the most effective. Moreover, he stressed that academic cooperation functions on both sides, citing the example of European partners being willing to understand Jordanian culture and its values. On the other hand, there is a certain disillusionment about the actual effects of the planned political, economic and cultural cooperation, as it did not generate processes of political reform, at the end of which democratic rule and good governance would supersede authoritarianism.

Conclusion Not only is the presence of reform in Jordanian public discourse undeniable, so is its symbolic strength in demonstrating the state’s support for development, ensuring better quality and access, and the well-known catchwords that are increasingly the norm in discussions of neo-liberal reforms worldwide. In this chapter I have shown how they are presented as being necessary, and I have argued that the strength of support from the state is a means of signalling its will to cooperate in

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working towards a better future. I have then briefly presented the changes in the funding of the university, as well as its privatisation and internationalisation, the usual processes also operating in other contexts through which the stage for reforms is prepared. In the second part of the chapter, I presented a few contrasting images, of reforms never implemented such as the HERfKE, and the somewhat downplayed impact of cooperative projects sponsored by international donors, taking the EU TEMPUS programme as an example. This ambivalence reflects a tension that has been analysed in other realms of Jordanian policy, for example in the promotion of democracy, and it is a fundamental feature of the university, as I make clear in the next chapter. Paraphrasing the conclusion reached by Andre´ Mazawi on education for work policies in the Arab region, it seems that the reforms ‘operate [. . .] as a political “spectacle”, largely intended to satisfy demands by competing stakeholders with which the state is embattled to ensure its survival’ (Mazawi 2007: 262). At the same time, however, some of the reforms are being implemented, especially those which are most in line with the regime’s need to maintain close control over the production of legitimacy. In a way this ambivalence is a typical evolution of developmental aid (Rottenburg 2009), and is also due to the fact that ‘reforms’ are usually the precondition, in the language of ‘donors’, for any further funding, and thus operate in a way that is in a sense rhetorical. From the point of view of the university as an institution, a possible conclusion is that, despite the last decades of almost unquestioned neoliberal appropriation of categories such as quality, accountability and values, and despite the global hegemony in shaping policies and setting goals, the debate on the actual reality of the institution is still open. Even before taking into account the resistance of concerned individuals, professors and students alike, which I will address in Chapter 4, we have the ambivalence of the same state that is officially appropriating the very core of the neo-liberal reforms.

CHAPTER 3 LIVING THE UNIVERSITY

The campus of the University of Jordan is quite outstanding in the urban context of Amman, a clear sign of its social significance and political relevance. The campus is a prestigious place, frequently used, both in media and in the national discourse, to portray an image of the kingdom associated with knowledge, innovation and technology. The campus area is on one of the highest hills in the northern part of the ever-expanding capital, in an area that was scarcely populated until a few decades ago and that could now hardly be considered peripheral. The campus is closed, surrounded by walls with gates controlled by unarmed guards, with the recent addition of metal turnstiles intended to prevent unauthorised entrance (this will be discussed in the next chapter). This idea of separateness, of a discontinuity, that distinguishes the green and well-kept area of the campus from the chaotic city, is a marker of the social significance of the university as something different from the outside world. Having entered from the main gate on shariʽa al-jami’a, the road leads to the clock tower, the ideal centre of the campus. On this road are located the main administrative building and the main library, and this is where the small demonstrations allowed on campus normally gather. The humanistic and social sciences faculties are situated on the northern side of the campus, to the left of the clock square (burg al-se’a). Beyond the clock tower, a few buildings are located, such as a small folklore museum and the Faculty of Shariʽa. Scientific faculties are on the southern side of the campus, to the right of the clock tower, mostly grouped around science square (saha al-ʽilm), with the exception of the Faculty of Medicine that is located next to the university

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hospital, south of the main gate, and the Faculty of Engineering. The campus contains a few other centres, including the Language Centre in which I was a student during my main fieldwork, the Centre for Strategic Studies, the Centre for Women’s Studies, the Centre for Local Community Development and Networking, and the Centre for Security Studies, among others. As well as the stadium in which graduation ceremonies are held, the campus has a main restaurant and a few smaller cafeterias, a mosque, a bank, a post office and a computer centre that is among the most frequented closed spaces. So, much like relatively old campuses in capital cities, the campus of the University of Jordan is a prestigious place in the city. It is also quite a pleasant place to spend time in, its alleys mostly surrounded by trees, with benches and steps to sit on, and with limited access for cars, which make some areas of the campus more akin to a park, a rarity in the everextending city of Amman. The campus is replete with indications of a changing social context. While the majority of the buildings date back to the years in which the university was expanding, the presence of international actors is signalled by an increasing number of new ones that host externally funded centres, such as the local branch of the University of the United Nations, and others financed mainly by the USA and Japan.1 The presence of such international founders is particularly marked within certain faculties, such as those of engineering and advanced studies (the latter has programmes in women’s studies, American studies and environment). At this level there is also some form of cooperation with so-called ‘civil society’, with centres such as the Princess Basma Bint Talal Centre for Women’s Issues and the Queen Zein Al-Sharaf Institute for Development. There are programmes of cooperation with well-known international research programmes such as the Fulbright. Due to the circumstances of my fieldwork, I am particularly attached to the Language Centre, which was affected by the increased role of international donors and a growing corporate character. At the time of my main fieldwork the centre lacked a proper building – administration was hosted by the Faculty of Arts, and classes were held at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, one of the less prestigious in the humanistic sector, the student population of which provided foreign students with some quite uncanny encounters (and this feeling was surely mutual). Soon after I left an entire new building, funded by the USA, was inaugurated

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to host the activities of the centre. Apart from the luxuriousness of the building, which is a new source of pride for the administration, with conferences usually held in its auditorium, what struck me when I last visited it in 2006 was the fact that an entire floor was devoted to US students, and that access to the building itself was restricted to students participating in the programme. This obviously impacts negatively on the possibility of Jordanians interacting with foreign students, which is theoretically one of the goals of such language programmes. Officially, for security reasons, no student is allowed in the building if not involved in the teaching/learning process, which is rather a common arrangement in the context of the new understanding of such centres as essentially private enterprises, which from a theoretical point of view belong within the category of gated communities, exclusive places somewhat characteristic of the social and economic developments of recent decades.2 Moreover, some faculties receive more attention than others, and this reflects the changing values attached to education that I mentioned in Chapter 1. Apart from the increased visibility given to international donors and programmes, there is a growing discrepancy between certain faculties which receive funds that allow them to update their structures and laboratories, and others more prone to wear and tear. This division transcends the already mentioned division between scientific and humanistic faculties, as within the sciences some faculties are left behind.3 These differences tend to cohere with the preferences accorded by the Jordanian government and by international agencies to certain disciplines, and point to the changing social significance of education. As I show below, such differences are also to be found at the level of students’ subjectivities, and are one of the main ways in which the production of reality within the university as an institution works. Existing social differences, as expressed in the urban fabric of Amman (Hannoyer and Shami 1996, Ababsa and Daher 2012), are thus inscribed into the geography of the campus as well, in newer ways which accord with societal changes.

Living the university In this chapter I intend to look at the ways in which young people’s lives are shaped by the years they spend in education institutions (Adely

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2009, Eickelman 1992). University offers a vantage point from which to view how society is structured and managed, in order to study political continuity and the perpetuation of institutions, with a particular focus on students and their everyday practices. Education is central to understanding what choices and dilemmas youth face today, and the university provides a unique space in which to investigate changing notions of education, citizenship, social and gender roles, and religious and friendship ties (Cantini 2014). I fully agree with Fida Adely’s insight that the growing interest in youth in the Middle East, fostered by its large numbers, its growing exclusion from active social and economic life and its potential for political change, should concentrate more on educational spaces. As she says, much of the scholarly research focuses on youth oppositional cultures [. . .] The tendency to focus on the most obvious signs of youth resisting dominant cultural norms and creating their own ‘subcultures’ overlooks the ways in which young people are engaged in everyday practices to define desirable and acceptable pathways to adulthood, family, security, and happiness. (Adely 2012: 164) As she acknowledges, educational institutions are a central arena in which to explore such everyday practices. Moreover, contrasting ideologies of education produce contradictions that contribute to the shaping of images of what is possible, and in this chapter I focus on everyday practices of university students in Jordan, the ways in which they produce differences among themselves, but also the ways in which they are shaped by, and at the same time involve criticism of, the university as an institution. In recent years there has been a new interest in exploring youth in the Arab world, usually linked to either its demographic relevance and hence its exclusion from active citizenship, its marginalisation and its potential for achieving change; or linked to the Islamic revival, and to preoccupations with explaining the coherence of their supposed engagement with religion as a way of subverting existing social norms. In my research, I try to move beyond these tropes, especially beyond a focus limited to either youth oppositional cultures or Islamic activism. Being aware of the socio-historical construction of youth, which emerges as a social category in relation to an ideology (nationalism) and a dispositif

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(education) (Bennani-Chraibi and Farag 2007), my aim is to show ordinary students’ trying to represent their everyday experiences, especially in relation to the university as a foundational moment in their lives. In this chapter I present some features of students’ lives on campus, namely the bodily practices and the production of difference among students, in ways that are somewhat constituted by, and contribute to the constitution of, the social order within the university as I described it in Chapter 1. I then turn to a discussion of how students present themselves, and how they operate value judgements among themselves in ways that partially reinforce and at the same time contradict the state projections on them. Finally I introduce the concepts of ‘waithood’ and of ‘stuckedness’, which are helpful in describing the conditions of at least some students. As well as my ethnographic material, I will discuss the distinction, proposed by Boltanski in a different context, between world and reality. The hiatus between reality and world imports the possibility of critique: critique emerges from individuals being immersed in the world, where they make experiences which contradict the institutionally produced reality, making it fragile (Boltanski 2011: 58– 9). The state is keenly aware of the importance of the educational arena for building loyal citizens and creating a shared vision for Jordan, and schools are in many respects ‘disciplinary institutions’. As some recent studies (and previous chapters in this book) show, however, the state never has complete control over its local institutions, and educational institutions and their curricula are among the most contested arenas in society (Adely 2012, Herrera 2004, Mazawi 2002). Moreover, teachers and parents alike conceive of schools as an extension of the family – as an allied social institution that in addition to teaching academic subjects was entrusted with the upbringing or tarbiyya of young women, according to a set of generally shared moral values. (Adely 2012: 112) If this is less true for university students, becoming a university student is still also part of broader familiar deliberations, and this influences the ways in which university years are lived, in addition to often being an obstacle in the way of the developmental dreams of the government.

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The brief description of some of the main features of the University of Jordan campus is a reminder that educational spaces are first and foremost loci, where national and international forces increasingly come into play. At the same time they make sense, become alive, only through the people who inhabit them on a daily basis.

On their way to the university Maha is a student in the prestigious Faculty of Arts, having been admitted thanks to her good grades in the tawjihi (national secondary exams) despite coming from a lower middle class family of Palestinian origin that settled in Aqaba after the nakhba.4 Due to the one-hour-long commute, she gets up early to get prepared for her day on campus; she spends quite some time choosing her outfit, making sure that her veil matches the dress, which is usually chosen to show the care she has towards her body. In her first year as a student, she was accommodated in the sakan al-talabat, the university female dormitory, located on the campus. The following year, her sister started at the same university, and the family decided to allow the two girls to stay together in a small flat in East Amman, in a building in which other people from their extended family lived, therefore ensuring that the girls were not left alone. That was something not only considered to be unsafe and inappropriate but also regarded in the context of a general dislike for unchecked space. The poor neighbourhood in which the flat is located is quite far from the university, more than an hour by bus, and this renders Maha’s days at the campus quite short compared to the average student. She spends her entire day on campus, until an hour before it gets dark, as she has to be safely back home by then, dividing her day between classes, the computer centre where she is an avid chatterer and long hours with friends, mostly from other faculties. She is usually to be found in the vicinity of her faculty, where friends come to see her. Walida is a student in the Faculty of Education, admitted through the parallel programme. Her family is of Palestinian origin, but they still live in Saudi Arabia where her father works; she was sent to Jordan for her university degree because her family felt that it was better for her, but she is subjected to scrupulous surveillance. She is not allowed to live in the flat that her family owns in Amman, as the idea of a young unmarried woman living alone is not considered acceptable by her

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parents, and she could not be hosted by members of her extended family. She thus ended up in the university dorm, but despite this her life on campus is significantly different than for the majority of students. Her interactions on campus are limited to the girls with whom she shares accommodation and a religious lifestyle; she covers her body with a large mantel, and her veil descends well down her back, although she does not wear the gloves and the face cover that are becoming increasingly visible on campus. She hardly ventures outside the gates of the university, and Amman is largely unknown to her. She grew up in Jeddah and Riyadh, and she considers the university years as a clearly defined time-space in her own life. Ahmad is a student of medicine, enrolled in the parallel programme, and is one of the most studious people I met on campus. An Arab Israeli, his family lives in Jaffa and he was sent to Amman to study because of its reputation and because of its relative affordability. He shares a flat with other young students from abroad, not far from the campus, and his days are quite busy with classes and with his study. He is quite fit and usually properly dressed ready for his day on campus and for the occasional stroll with some male friends in one of the main alleys of the campus, the shariʽa al-gypsy that leads to the faculties where the student population is predominantly female. He has some life beyond campus as well, mostly at the gym, and at the internet cafe where he spends his evenings, but he is quite concentrated on his goal of becoming a doctor and going back to his land, where he hopes to be able to positively impact on the life of its people. Nabiha is a student in education, coming from a Jordanian family originally from the south but that has established a branch in Amman. Her days are extraordinarily busy, compared to the majority of students who idly spend their days on campus, as she is involved in multiple networks of extended family business and charitable associations, ranging from handicraft production to assisting disabled children, which also involve frequent travel abroad. She usually gets to campus with her younger sister, also a student in education (a choice for both of them, regularly admitted through the tawjihi), commuting by bus. She does not spend much time on her physical appearance and on her outfit, relying instead on her strong personality to navigate through the different social expectations to which she is subjected. She dons a veil, like her sister, but her dresses are quite casual, and she boldly interacts

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with people of different social extraction. On campus, she moves quite often from her faculty to the places where her, mostly female, friends are, and often goes to the cafes located just outside the campus to drink coffee, freely smoke cigarettes and to practice her talent of making fun of the world surrounding her. Yazid is a student of arts, admitted through the parallel programme after some years spent abroad, when his father and older brothers thought that he might be better staying at the university waiting for a good job to come by. He lives in a poor neighbourhood, originally a Palestinian refugee camp, where his family owns an entire building in which flats are reserved for members of the family (six brothers and two sisters, most of whom live abroad) and he usually commutes to the campus using public transport, occasionally coming by car when his ageing father does not need it. Yazid did not wish to become a university student, has not changed his mind about the uselessness of a university degree in getting a decent job, and dreams about having the chance to go somewhere abroad again. This of course means that studying is one of his lowest priorities, and thus he spends most of his days hanging out with friends both inside and outside (especially when he has the car) the university campus, or in internet cafes, killing time in whatever way he can. While on campus, he is more or less a centre for a number of students of different faculties who gravitate around him, and this creates a constant flow of students coming to the place where he usually spends his days, just behind the faculty building. Surur is a student in the Faculty of Languages, admitted through the parallel programme, coming from a wealthy family of Palestinian origin. She is quite atypical among students, mainly due to her class – she frequently travels abroad, accompanying her father on his business trips all over the world, and is quite cosmopolitan both in her attire and in her orientations. Her course of study is not challenging to her, as her language skills in some cases exceed those of the professors, and her enrolment in a university in Jordan has more to do with the fact that her family did not want her to study abroad rather than with a specific interest in the possibilities offered. She comes to the university driving her own car, stays mainly for her classes, and allows limited time for interactions, strictly restricted to students she knows from her own faculty and from her previous acquaintances. Her social life is mainly

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outward oriented, as she enjoys a great degree of mobility during the daytime, and we usually spent time together outside the campus, in one of the malls that are mushrooming in Amman, catering for the wealthy segment of the population, or in one of the posh neighbourhoods in west Amman. Saeed is a student in the Faculty of Engineering, enrolled in the makruma for the sons of the army. He comes from a well-known Jordanian family, and he did not really have a say in the choice of faculty, since his family expects him to become a successful and respected engineer; he rarely speaks about this, and he prefers to concentrate his activities on other interests, especially related to sport and hiking. He gets to campus in his car, and spends much of his time in the surroundings of his faculty, limiting his interactions to members of his social group; despite being quite attractive, I never saw him spending time in the places where students go to look for casual encounters, as most male students do, and has a rather formal way of dealing with his peers. Far from being a committed student, he nonetheless attends to his student duties with regularity, and reserves the best of his time to activities outside the campus. Wajiha is a student in biology, enrolled in the regular programme there. She would have preferred to study medicine, but her grades were not good enough and her family could not afford to pay for the much higher tuition fees for the parallel programme. She lives with her parents, her older sister and younger brother in the same neighbourhood as Yazid, though she only got to know him through me. She dons the veil, but does not accompany it with a large dress, and like Nabiha, she pretends not to care much about her physical appearance. She commutes to the campus on public transport, and she usually spends a great deal of time there, occasionally getting out of the campus with her friends, including Nabiha, otherwise dividing her time between classes that she finds boring and unchallenging, her time at the saha al-ʽilm and strolls in the shariʽa al-gypsy to see her friends from different faculties. She enjoys a certain degree of freedom, and is able to occasionally get out at night (something quite extraordinary for girls, regardless of social and geographic origin). Despite generally observing the etiquette that is expected from female students on campus – not smoking in public, not spending too much time in gender-mixed groups, just to mention two of the more evident divides that I will

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further elaborate in what follows – she at times departs from them, for example joking loudly, and spending time more or less actively seeking the company of males and of international students. Zeinat is a student of arts, enrolled there in the makruma as a daughter of an employee, and she is somewhat ashamed of this privilege, as her grades in the tawjihi would not have allowed her to enrol there. She lives with her mother, her older sister and her younger brother, while her father is living in Saudi Arabia, and she usually commutes to the campus by car, sharing it with her mother who is a professor at the university. Like Nabiha and Surur she is quite busy with multiple obligations, in her case mostly related to her political activism, so her days on campus are quite erratic, her schedule made busy by participation at social events, mostly in the venues in jebel Amman where this kind of youth gathers. She is not veiled, and she allocates a huge amount of time to taking care of her body, with outfits that signal her being different from the majority of female students; this is reflected also in her way of inhabiting the campus, where she mainly stays in the surroundings of the Faculty of Arts in gendermixed groups, where she debates political and social issues, drinks coffee and smokes in public, and spends a lot of time gossiping – one of the main occupations of students.

Campus life During the semesters, October to January, March to the beginning of June and July to August, the campus is usually bursting with students who enjoy their days in the briefly described conditions. It was apparent to me, as a student, that most students tend to spend time on campus in a way that is not necessarily linked to the amount of class time that they are supposed to undertake in any given semester, normally between six and 12 hours per week. It is usual, especially for students with limited mobility or who live in distant areas of Amman, to spend the entire day on campus, rarely engaged in study-related activities. It is quite rare to spot a student with a book in hand, more often they are engaged in conversations with peers, in walks to neighbouring faculties to meet friends and in ongoing attempts at setting up some flirtatious encounter with members of the opposite sex – this is not really surprising, as in public schools the separation of the sexes is one of the most rigidly upheld social norms (Adely 2012: 114– 16).

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Many places on campus are loaded with significance that only becomes apparent after time, and students take a great care in being seen only in appropriate spaces, as hinted at in the brief descriptions above; the more obvious differences are associated with different buildings and with their prestige, and I will come to this below. Then there are places clearly demarked, such as a spot on one of the main alleyways, next to the university restaurant, where students of Circassian origin usually gather, and almost all the most well represented tribes have similar places where they meet. Lastly, there are spaces that lack a clear inscription, and are therefore regarded negatively by students who share a collective identity, no matter how temporarily (being a student of arts or of engineering is not the same as being a member of a tribe). These places include the main alleyways, the areas surrounding the clock tower, parking spaces and the main streets just outside the university gates; these are labelled differently by different people, but all denominations tend to highlight the lack of specificity in their usage, such as shariʽa al-nas or shariʽa al-gypsy (people’s and gypsy’s street respectively). The latter are notably crowded even on Saturdays and outside class time, and are the places where students take strolls when they want to seek casual encounters.5 The ways in which students inhabit the campus and interact among themselves have to be understood in light of the social norms upheld in most areas in Amman. This is hardly the place for a discussion of the urban fabric of Amman and of its social implications, especially given the abundance of differences between different neighbourhoods (Hannoyer and Shami 1996, Ababsa and Daher 2011). Suffice it to say that west Amman is typically wealthier, while east Amman is considerably poorer; in the former, some neighbourhoods are more lively, such as Shmeisani or Abdoun, while others are primarily residential areas, such as Tila’ al-‘Ali where I lived. In the latter, some neighbourhoods have evolved from refugee camps that were set up to host Palestinian refugees. For the sake of the discussion of youth socialisation practices, it is evident that almost nowhere in town is there such a degree of not-so-regulated interactions in an open space. In most neighbourhoods people tend to know immediately who belongs there and who is an outsider, and this enables a high degree of social control, especially in residential areas. Taking a walk with Yazid in his neighbourhood was always instructive, as he seemed to know each house and the family story behind it.6

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Moreover, this high degree of social control is particularly directed at girls, with frequent cases of verbal harassment aimed at those who happen to be slightly out of place, for example out of home and alone after dusk. In some of the most conservative places, and particularly outside Amman, a policeman can challenge a girl sitting together with a boy in a cafe, calling for more modesty; a taxi driver can ask a male not to sit in the back seat with his female partner; passers-by, also female, can make negative comments about couples simply walking down the street; general moral exhortations can be directed at anyone in the street who happens to be not fully abiding by some moral norms that seem to be agreed upon by the most vocal members of the population. It is difficult to appropriately convey the sense of suffocating control experienced by girls and boys alike. This is further aggravated by the fact that Jordan is a small country, where it is not difficult to understand the social and geographical origin of casual interlocutors – the same applies to students’ interactions on campus. In this context, the visual impressiveness of students sitting on benches or on passageways, or strolling up and down the same alleys for hours on end, is truly remarkable, and one of the main features of university life in Jordan. The university offers a space with less restrictions than almost any other place in town, a place that is at least partly appropriated by students waiting out their time; in this process identities and differences are forged and reinforced, partly following the official discourses and preferences but in many ways departing from these to create new configurations that, despite being temporary (because being a student is a liminal status), in some ways challenge them, especially when it comes to notions of progress and to the overarching discourse of crisis. Sociology has long shown that universities are ‘quintessentially social places, shaping the number, quality, and type of social ties that particular individuals and groups enjoy’ (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 132). This resonates with the second metaphor that the authors elaborate on, namely that of the university as an incubator. Bourdieu viewed social class as constituted not only by occupation, income and wealth but also by cultural dispositions and styles of embodiment. Although Bourdieu argued that most cultural capital is acquired at an early age in the context of the family, scholars have also demonstrated that cultural dispositions continue to evolve throughout the life course (Erickson 1996, quoted in

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Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008). Bourdieu argued that most social sorting occurs prior to college enrolment, ‘as students generally tend to choose the institution that requires and inculcates the (aesthetic, ethical, and political) dispositions most similar to those inculcated by their family’ (Ibid.). In the Jordanian case, this is reinforced by the new admission policies, a superb example of co-production of reality by the institution (unified admission commission, hierarchies, different value statements attached to different courses of study) and by the population (family expectations and material possibilities, peer evaluations, sometimes mixed with personal interests).7 This is one of the fundamental concerns of this book, namely to investigate the material conditions of the production of educated youth in Jordan, and to see how the university as an institution contributes to the shaping of their subjectivities. But before turning to this discussion, I would like to consider the ways in which everyday lives of students on campus produce difference among themselves, given the reforms discussed in the previous chapters and the distinctions between faculties mentioned in Chapter 1.

Bodily practice and the production of difference The education system in Jordan brings together students from very different social and economic backgrounds. By sharing the same campus, they have the opportunity to meet, or at least become aware of (or be exposed to) the existence of the ‘other’. As previously discussed, there are differences within the university, and there are different possibilities for expressing them; these differences, and their social and political implications, are well understood by the majority of the students. The condition of privilege that some experience makes it hard for them to have real contacts with students of other faculties or of other backgrounds, and thus it would be misleading to imagine the campus as a melting pot of mutual exchanges of experience and points of view. At the same time, however, there is a proximity that makes the university an interesting place to conduct research on the differences among the young people. The openness of the ethnographic method used, participant observation, enables the research to account for the complexity of students’ lives, allows time to deepen the comprehension of the situations observed, self-representations and practices evolving

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over time and in specific situations, accounting for differences and complexities with the aim of deepening the comprehension of what being a Muslim means in contemporary Jordan. As the brief introduction to a small number of students shows, their attire is quite diverse, and at least partly points to different lifestyles and orientations. In their review of sociological studies on higher education, Stevens and his colleagues emphasise that having the ‘right’ clothes, body, hygiene practices, hair style, accent, cell phone, and musical tastes can matter. By contrast, students from less affluent families are less comfortable with the dominant campus style of sociability. This Bourdieuian emphasis on the ways in which college peer cultures may reproduce social inequalities stands in sharp contrast to how the field of higher education approaches student experience. Education scholars have focused on the role that social integration plays in college persistence. (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 133) The case of the University of Jordan suggests a different analysis, with students providing an image of how contested and debated certain issues are. Students’ attire tends to be more differentiated for girls than boys, with the obvious distinction between veiled and unveiled students complemented by quite a number of others, including the shape of the dress and mantle (‘abaya or jilbab, that covers the entire body down to the ankles), but also the possibility of movement and the ways of interacting with male students. In Jordan, as elsewhere, the veil has a fundamental iconic role in the contest over women’s bodies and their religiosity, and female students seek to present consistent identities through their clothing (Droeber 2005: 256– 94, Kaya 2010).8 In this context, the question of morality that the veil symbolises so strongly is quite crucial when discussing broader notions of respectability, with the caveat that moral authority is not solely expressed in religious terms; ‘morality also draws on local norms and is closely tied to the family, kin, or tribe and broader notions of tradition. It is shaped by contemporary notions of progress and success’ (Adely 2012). Male students’ dress tends to vary less, because in the context of the campus jalabiyyas and hats are quite uncommon, and were not worn by

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the majority even among Shariʽa students, at least at the time of my main fieldwork. These forms of dress are even more charged than the veil in this context, as they are usually associated with lower status.9 Male students tend to wear jeans or trousers, but never shorts above the knee, and shirts, depending on the season of course, with gymnastic or similarly closed shoes, and invariably without bags (one of the principal clues for spotting a foreigner), the main distinction being expensiveness and fashion.10 Yet dress is just one indicator of different orientations in the everyday lives of young people, as I hinted when introducing Zeinat; differences in group gatherings are as relevant as dress codes, as well as behaviours in public. Here I draw on Elyachar’s characterisation of gesture as dialogic bodily practice. She argues that in the case of bodily practice as significant symbol, people can not only point out the forms of bodily practice involved but can also tell you all about it. In the case of bodily practice as gesture, these regularized bodily practices resonate on some cognitive level as attached to specific meanings and identities, but they are hard to talk about or to articulate as meaningful. As markers of identity and status, I will argue, these bodily practices allow members of a former status group in Cairo to recognize and respond to one another. (Elyachar 2011: 84) Students at the University of Jordan are of course highly reflective about differences among themselves, as these contribute to the constitution of their identities and are inscribed within national and international discourses on development and success. At the same time, however, in their everyday interactions such differences are not an immediate given, but are embodied in gestures as well as in different mobilities (Ghannam 2011). In this section I show how these two understandings of bodily practice contribute to the creation of distinctions among students that are at the same time co-productive and at times resistant to official discourses. On my way to attending a class in Shariʽa, I ran into Asal, a female student of arts who is in many respects quite similar to Zeinat, one of the clearest cases of students with a cosmopolitan orientation, and quite hostile to public forms of religiosity. As soon as I told her where I was

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going, she asked me jokingly whether I was crazy, as people attending this faculty are all crazy. Ignoring my attempts at nuancing her position, she told me that once she was speaking with a male friend in the vicinity of the Faculty of Shariʽa, when a sheikh11 came out shouting at them to leave, saying that they were doing something haram. In her account she confronted the man, arguing with him over his authority, until he left. Regardless of the story’s accuracy,12 this shows clearly how boundaries are made within the campus. Shariʽa is a particular source of contrasts, as a potential locus in which an alternative discourse to state developmental rhetoric could be forged, and more generally points to the heated debate on the place of religion in society and in education, a theme already explored by Starret (1998) and Adely (2009a, 2012), but I return to this later. This is not the only divide on campus, though. Science students are generally quite supportive of the official discourse that wants them to be more productive, in contrast to humanistic students who are typically portrayed as being losers, those who failed to make it into the scientific stream. Differences in bodily practices as significant symbols are highly reflective and are constitutive of the identity of the students. The differences between ‘shariʽa oroba’ (Europe street, the immediate courtyard and the nearby alleys in front of the literature faculty) or the ‘saha al-‘ilm’ (science square) and the courtyards of the lowest grade faculties are immediately recognisable, and some students of the latter faculties, mainly males, go to the former to have some possibility of meeting up with girls. They are not really welcomed inside the groups of students from the best faculties, and thus they end up in liminal spaces that are disregarded by the more privileged students, who call them ‘shariʽa al-gypsy’ or ‘shariʽa al-nas’ (gypsy’s and people’s street, respectively). These spaces are usually overcrowded even on Saturdays and during class time, since going to the university involves more than simply studying or attending classes, of course. My interest in students’ orientations and diverse lifestyles stems from the recognition that their usage of campus reveals a co-production of difference that is at times in harmony with and at times contrasting with official narratives on the goal of education. Not only do university students come from different social backgrounds, but the differences in value ascription and in the relevance granted to some faculties as described in Chapter 1 provide a

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further element of social differentiation. Discrepancies in access, not only due to the makrumat (list of exceptions) but, perhaps more significantly, also to the parallel system, allow wealthy students to access the more prestigious faculties, which in turn find it more profitable to grant more seats to these paying students rather than to those admitted through the competitive system. The student body of the more favoured faculties is thus more urban, middle-class, and reflects more the values and lifestyles of west Amman, while students who attend the less prestigious faculties tend to be from less privileged backgrounds, and this is reflected in the ways in which students interact among each other. Indeed, the most insignificant of gestures are ‘in fact shot through with historically generated systems of privilege and power’ (Elyachar 2011: 84), and in the context of the University of Jordan, with state rhetoric and developmental plans, as well as with broader societal divisions. As I have argued, access to the better faculties is socially selective while the less valued faculties are left to the poorer and less wealthy youth, and the reforms in admission criteria are contributing to this. This results in different treatment of the students and of the courses that I analysed. In the better faculties the teaching standards are quite high, and the relationship between professors and students is almost on a same-level base, while in the less privileged faculties the opposite is true. Thus we can observe a concrete politics of divide et impera ( farriq tasud in Arabic) intended to split the youth into two ideal groups, a scheme that is reproduced also in the city of Amman with the division between a wealthier West and a poorer East. For the more privileged students there are some freedoms (albeit not political, as we will see in the next chapter), both within and outside classes (these are also to be found in broader society, see Ababsa and Daher 2011, Schwedler 2010), designed to forge them into people who reflect the desired outcomes of the education system from the state’s point of view, consumers who enjoy some forms of personal freedom as long as they do not threaten the stability of the regime and of the social order (in this sense they cannot be considered full citizens, they must be regarded as excluded from a full self-conscious public life, marginalised even if the marginalisation is of a golden kind). On the other hand, the less privileged students are kept under tight control, including their patterns of social interaction, even though these students are also something of a privileged category relative to youth in general.

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This difference is highly visible, since students of the most sought after faculties socialise through patterns that are more similar to what Comaroff and Comaroff (2000a) define as the ‘homogenized cultural practices of the global youth’, with the obvious differences dictated by the context (see Bucholtz 2002). Even if muhajabat are present, they are fewer than in other faculties, and they tend either not to socialise at all – refusing, and being refused by, the setting in which they are in – or to socialise in the same way as the other students. The very fact of being in a group of friends, boys and girls alike, chatting and discussing, laughing and flirting, smoking and drinking coffee and soft drinks, is quite peculiar to the best faculties, and students who share similar lifestyles, such as Wajiha or Nabiha, manage to spend part of their days in such settings. The ability to express oneself, not just in clothes but also in words (deeds might be another step), is reinforced by the education these students receive, which somewhat encourages, or at least doesn’t openly contradict, self-expression in class. Moreover, it is generally expected that these students experience some forms of mobility, both in and off campus (they are quite mobile), in town (they drive cars, they have places to go, money to afford it, venues where they can express their interests), and abroad (this portion of the population tend to be rather cosmopolitan, with siblings or relatives abroad, either in the Arab world or somewhere in Europe, the USA or Australia; when they have access to visas, they tend to travel frequently). When Asal labels students from Shariʽa as crazy, she is pointing to the potential political threat, but more directly related to her experience is the denial of behaviour and lifestyle that she considers constitutive of her identity. The contrasting opposite is represented by students in the lower faculties, where social mores are more constrained, both because of a higher level of surveillance by the state (control is far from absent within the university, as I will show in the next chapter) and due to the mix of students of more humble social origin, which limits the possibilities of expression to reflect only those which exist in east Amman, and of an increased religiosity that tends to regulate aspects of social life more minutely. Male and female students tend to remain much more separated, almost all the women are at least muhajabat if not completely veiled – usually wearing an ‘abaya, a long mantle that covers the whole body, as well as the hijab of course. I don’t want to suggest that veiling

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and being of modest origin are always to be found together, nor that there is any kind of relationship between veiling and being less ‘free’ in one’s behaviour; Wahija, Nabiha and Maha show that such simple conclusions are not to be drawn.13 Moreover, religion is not a clear marker of distinction in this context, as I have shown elsewhere (Cantini 2012b, 2014); it is just one among a series of other factors that contribute to the shaping of students’ subjectivities, and hence to their modes of being in the world. Mobility in particular renders this issue more complex; while some students, such as Yazid, did have the chance to go abroad, they seldom have the opportunity to repeat this, both because of material conditions (lack of visa, lack of social capital) and because of growing family constraints. More importantly, as I will argue in the concluding section of this chapter, the decreased mobility affects their relationship with the city and the campus as well. If Walida is an extreme case, at least among the students I met, Maha is a more common one, of being subject to scrupulous surveillance. I have argued elsewhere that Ramadan is a great time to see social differentiation on campus condensed (Cantini 2012b), as groups of students wait for the time of breaking the fast (the iftar) to come, and their ways of being together signals once more the differences in identity and in significant symbols. Those who practice Ramadan and those who do not are sharing the same space within the campus and thus they are physically aware of the existence of differences, and these differences become part of the construction of their selves, as I will show in more detail in what follows. It should be kept in mind that fasting is legally reinforced in Jordan, even within the campus; while in the buildings occupied by foreigners, controls are somewhat loose, university guards patrol the alleys and can report students caught smoking or drinking. Being caught more than once can entail suspension for days or weeks, and students from less privileged faculties always complain that the controls are applied more heavily to them. Bodily practices from time to time stand halfway between being significant symbols and gestures. One day I was speaking with Yazid, and he was complaining that he had not had a proper affair in quite some time, when Samira passed by and stopped to greet me. As a quite attractive student in the same faculty as him, I was surprised that Yazid not only did not make any attempt at making himself noticed, but that on the contrary he effectively retreated from the scene. This behaviour

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was in sharp contrast with what usually happened when someone else entered the conversation, as I will show below. As soon as she left I asked him why he had not tried an approach, given that as far as I knew Samira was not engaged. I was quite shocked by his answer, ‘she’s not for one like me’. With this he pointed to the obvious class distinction between the two of them, something that I was aware of, but that in my view would not necessarily prevent him from approaching her. Apart from an indication of how romantic love is discussed on campus (Cantini forthcoming), this scene points to the uneasy distinction between evident, consciously reflected upon, and less articulated bodily practices, and is quite revealing of the complex nets of interactions among students (and of the ways in which my presence was altering the context, creating possibilities and perhaps inhibiting others). At first glance the two students might not seem to belong to different social strata; Samira is well-dressed and obviously takes care of her body, and the fact that she is not veiled is not uncommon in the faculty setting. The two students hardly know each other, but are immediately aware of the differences between them – some of which are significant symbols, such as the language in which Samira speaks to me (English), but gestures are just as relevant. For example the way she approaches me is indicative of her habit of being in mixed-gender groups, information that reaches Yazid before any word is uttered. Contrary to his normal behaviour when other students came to greet one of us, Yazid does not expect Samira to greet him, and he literally steps back. The fact that this contradicts his usual gestures is a sign that a barrier has been drawn. As gesture, such regularised bodily practices resonate on a cognitive level as being attached to specific meanings and identities, but they are hard to articulate as meaningful. As markers of identity and status, these bodily practices allow members of a status group on campus to recognise and respond to one another. Gestures are a fundamental factor in interactions, and I was often confronted with unexpected responses as I reproduced gestures that were meaningful to me while being hardly intelligible to my interlocutors; the opposite is also true, and I found out upon returning home how much the time spent with these students had modified my own bodily practices.14 Some studies have focused on places and on habits to account for the production of difference among youth (see for example De Koning 2009); this is true also for the students I met, some of whom are used to

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closed places where access is restricted, usually on economic grounds but also depending on one’s dress as well as one’s group. The crucial point is that, beyond the level of conscious difference making, there is another level, that of gestures, which is essential in students’ everyday lives. As I mentioned, studying is not Yazid’s main preoccupation, and his days on campus are usually spent killing time with friends, either in the vicinity of his faculty, or in some of the liminal spaces that define the campus. Yazid is quite an influential person on campus, perhaps due to his slightly older age as well as his personal charisma, and there is a veritable influx of students who pass by to greet him, more or less regularly. Not all of them share his faculty, nor his geographical origin, nor his being Palestinian or Muslim (among his friends are some Christians, at least one Circassian and some Jordanians), and while boys constitute the majority of his acquaintances, some girls, veiled and not, are also occasionally encountered. The series of encounters follows a more or less structured ritual, so when someone new arrives, the conversation normally stops,15 we all stand up, shake hands, introduce ourselves if there is a new face, and start the conversation from scratch, usually from the minutiae of self-presentations. If the newcomers have some time, then somebody goes to the nearest cafeteria and brings back some drinks and snacks, which are then shared. Refusing to accept these offers is not really an option, and thus afternoons in this company are spent in an almost endless stream of coffee and cigarettes, chats, jokes and gossip, sharing a sense of wasted time. Such gatherings are mainly characteristic of the most privileged faculties, but this particular group is different than the group in which students like Samira, Asal or Surur could be found, and this is somewhat indicative of a distinction in identity between students who are oriented to a more cosmopolitan lifestyle and those who are more keen at reproducing a gender-segregated social space.16 There are essentially two main differences, one more related to the issue of gestures as I have discussed it so far, and the other more linked to the norms for selfpresentation and for evaluating others. Gestures in this context are not so spontaneous, but are shaped by a relative degree of formality that is derived from the social worlds that these students inhabit outside the campus, in their houses or in the places where they meet. For example, girls in this group would not smoke in the presence of boys, and this is why students such as Nabiha or Wahija from time to time escape the

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publicity of campus life and go to nearby cafes. Girls in Jordan do not normally smoke in public, nor do they engage in prolonged conversations with boys, and laughing is not considered acceptable for the ‘true’ Muslim girl, at least not in public and with boys around. Gossiping is highly damaging to the reputation of women, not in this context alone of course, although it is widely practiced within the campus and among the students.17

Self-presentation and judgement-making Perhaps implicit in the discussion so far, one of the driving forces that sustain the complex structure that I have tried to account for is the necessity of keeping one’s reputation, in facing others, both on campus and at home, and in presenting oneself in public. Reputation has a double cogency, among one’s peers in the context of the campus, and among one’s family and in the general social context outside it. Some studies have shown that co-educational institutions are not so widespread at the school level in Jordan (Adely 2009c, Jansen 2006, Kaya 2010), and there is quite a serious debate about women attending such institutions and still preserving their propriety. Adely discusses how such debates are conducted at one secondary school outside Amman, and finds that although the official textbook of religious education states that Islam permits attendance at co-educational settings, it emphasises the need for seriousness of purpose as well as modest dress and demeanour. Moreover, in the recent past in Jordan, many families would not allow their daughters to take a public bus to a nearby town for class, let alone to live in a dormitory at a more distant university. According to conventional wisdom at that time, women should stay near home, they should avoid mixed-sex environments, and they should not sleep away from the protection of their male relatives. (Kaya 2010: 527) Despite having been somewhat weakened in recent years, such spatial dictates still carry some weight. They intimately bind concern for women’s safety with issues of reputation (Ghannam 2002, 2011), and they somewhat transcend class boundaries. Walida offers an excellent example, for her limited mobility was already part of a deal in which she

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had obtained something that would be unthinkable a generation before. Her case might lead one to think that this condition applies only to students from the lower strata of society, but in my fieldwork I also encountered many cases among more privileged students in which negotiations over propriety and modesty were the norm. Surur, for instance, enjoyed a great deal of mobility during daytime, but she was almost never allowed out after dusk. Tania, a student of business administration coming from a well-off family and whose mother is British, kept making fun of Wahija’s decision to don the veil, and considered herself to be quite different from the average students on campus (Wahija kept making fun of her snobbishness in return). Yet she, like Surur, was not allowed out in the evening, while Wahija, despite her more humble class and her veil, went out with regularity; when I went out with them and their friends off the campus, Tania invariably left at 8pm, while the others could stay until later.18 Interestingly, neither Surur nor Tania described this in terms of an outright imposition, but pointed to exceptions, usually family occasions, and dismissed evenings out as being cheap and inappropriate. Both cases, however, indicate that considerations of gender propriety are not affected by class, and are among the main preoccupations of students in their everyday lives on campus. Universities provide a new powerful arena for staging differences with regard to gendered norms, much more so than other educational institutions, because the students are entering adulthood. Being educated is inextricably linked to contemporary notions of respectability, and these links are manifest in unexpected ways. Education constructs new forms of respectability with the value accorded to being educated and to particular forms of education and thus creates new forms of hierarchy and exclusion alongside new opportunities. (Adely 2012: 131) The case of Maha demonstrates this ambivalence, the new possibilities and new differences created on campus. In the environment of her faculty, she was quite easily distinguishable from the more affluent students both at the level of significant symbols and at the level of gestures, since she comes from a not particularly well-off family within which she has no great possibilities of expressing herself, as she herself

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admitted. Coming from a rather religious family, moreover, made her attitude and behaviours quite different from other students, as well as her selected topics of conversation. Nonetheless, Maha always tried to be elegant in her attire, even in the simplicity of her clothes. She was quite demanding regarding her physical appearance, and she kept herself fit by going to the gym and sticking to an almost perennial diet. These are characteristics that are usually to be found among the better-off students, females and males alike, and in this sense it could be argued that they are the consequences of a prolonged exposure to a mixed environment. The judgement in her case was constant, from both her group (her male cousin, who regularly passed by her faculty to check on her; her sister, who did not try to move up socially) and from her faculty peers, by whom she was essentially excluded.19 And yet for Maha, as for other female students in the same situation, the university years represented a parenthesis of relative freedom, of possibilities to establish contacts outside the family environment, something that usually ends upon graduating, when the social and traditional constraints close back in again on her life.20 Dress is among the most effective self-presentation tool, especially as a significant symbol. Kaya analyses the different dress codes of female students at Yarmouk University, and comes to the conclusion that the semiotics of consistency is necessary to understand students’ claims of authenticity, much in line with what Mahmood (2005) argues with regard to pious women in Cairo. My experience is that things are more complicated, and students apply different registers when dealing with different situations. It is possible to hear students gossiping about a veiled girl, making various allegations of inconsistency – from a claim to have seen a picture of her without her veil when she was on vacation to accusations of her being ‘easy’ and not consistent with the moral claim implicit in her dress. Consequences could be limited to simply being the object of gossip, to outright ostracism in the more contentious cases – on more than one occasion, I was asked by students, including Yazid, not to spend much time with another student, for the latter had a poor reputation, was reputed to be into drugs, or simply came from a despised social milieu.21 Incidentally, this showed that gendered norms are not only about girls, but also about boys. Becoming a ‘proper man’ involves quite some effort, and crucially a great deal of recognition from others, both on and off the campus. Saeed, for instance, was conscious of

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the expectations placed upon him by his family (as a talented boy he was expected to have a great career) and by his peers at the university, where his behaviours were constantly scrutinised. Being hospitable is among the main points of honour, and this partly explains the constant flow of coffees and cigarettes, but I always sensed that being generous in time and in confidences with me was also part of this game, as well as maintaining proper behaviour with girls (in a context in which harassment is a sad reality). While being less evident than for girls, this pressure is heavy on boys as well; this will become more apparent in the discussion on entrance into the labour market and the necessity of being a breadwinner, but is also part of students’ everyday lives, involving proper dress, proper gestures and self-control, readiness to help friends and to face adversities. In extreme cases, students can be questioned over their dress, their behaviour or simply over rumours about them which are initiated by professors as well as other students, sometimes even during classes, and as I have mentioned, students can be fined for illicit breaking of the fast. The level of control is quite ubiquitous, as it is enacted by students themselves as well as by the disciplinary apparatus typical of educational institutions, such as professors and, in this particular context, university guards.22 It is not uncommon for students highly involved in social circles to take pride in having a great deal of information about other students, as a sign of social competence and ability in acquiring information. At the same time, most students lament this state of affairs, arguing that gossiping is a burden, and this is yet another way in which the inherent ambivalence of educational settings as highly social places comes into play. I have argued elsewhere (Cantini 2012b) that moral judgements are mostly framed in religious (Islamic) terms, although consideration of class and overall propriety are far from being absent. The moral weight that Islam carries today is reflective of an era in which morality and honour are often expressed in an Islamic idiom, whereas in the past they were thought of in more general terms (Abu-Lughod 1986). This assumes a new relevance in the context of higher education (see the discussion in Chapter 1 on the philosophical foundations of education in Jordan). As already noted by Adely (2012), Islam itself becomes a battlefield between state projects, educational dreams, governmental officials (Antoun 2006) and students; moreover, the consequences of

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these debates are felt not just at the level of philosophical foundations or at the level of the everyday lives of students, but at the level of political participation and life choices, as I will explore in the coming two chapters. It is important to note that discussions among students on what is truly Islamic and what is not also take place among students of the better faculties,23 and more importantly, they constitute the basis of the moral judgement that is imposed on others – interestingly, almost all students state that such a judgement is hardly bearable, and yet they contribute actively to shaping it. The behaviour of girls in public is particularly scrutinised by other students (both male and female) who pass judgements on whether the girl is ‘easy’; those who travel more frequently and are able to speak other languages are often the object of hidden prejudices, of having become ‘American’, which usually denotes something imported, distorted, if not fake, and in any case alien, and the like.24 These contests are not solely about religion, though, as much as they are political; acceptable forms of social behaviour ultimately include the possibility of critique, as I will show in the next chapter, and struggles over proper faith that emerge from such conditions. They are also undoubtedly a function of power – the power to define and delimit the parameters of acceptable discourse. In private conversations, many students admit that their behaviour is not in line with the tenets of Islam as understood in present day Jordan. This honest recognition, however, is not resulting in any concrete change in the public setting of the campus, since the common assumption shared by almost all students is that the commandments of Islam, and the everyday rules that inform students’ practices, are not subjects that are open for discussion.

You are wasting your time! On stuckedness Well into my fieldwork, when my habit of spending long afternoons on campus had become apparent, and thus noticed, a junior professor approached me saying that I was wasting my time with hopeless students who spend their days doing nothing, rather than studying or engaging in meaningful activities. In his opinion, I should interact instead with activists, with interesting people who could teach me something about the real challenges that Jordanian youth are facing.

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He had a point, as I was experiencing an ongoing sense of guilt because my notes were full of life stories and of encounters that seemed to say little, or too much, about my own research interests.25 I, although less emphatically, concurred with his assessment, and my notes are replete with indications of boredom and of an overall sense of futility. In this section I turn to these feelings of boredom and of futility, as well as to the general notion of waithood. Interest in Arab youth has been evident in economic and development studies mostly concerned with the so called school-to-work transition (see Chapter 4), as an overall indication of the pressure for Arab states to provide jobs to the increasing cohorts of young people, and I deal with these imperatives in the last chapter. Here I am mostly interested in making sense of the ways in which students experience and describe this sense of having to wait. What I will explore is the combination of the notion of waithood to the one of stuckedness (Hage 2009), in the context of an overall discussion of the sense of marginalisation that many students experience. Waithood refers to the presumed common traits of Arab university graduates, unemployed, marginalised and forced into years of wasted time before being able to obtain a job and marry, and Jordan is a particularly apt example because of the celebrated success of its educational system, the relevance of its youth in the overall population, and the ongoing economic crisis (Singerman 2007). Stuckedness concerns the sense of not moving forward; the perceived crisis of education and the loss of perspective, not just at the economic level but more importantly at that of citizenship, making Jordanian students a good entry point to investigate the nexus between boredom, intimacy and governance.26 Here I examine how Jordanian students wait out their university years, trying to find their way in a political context that is heavily shaped by various crises in almost all neighbouring countries, which have serious consequences in Jordan. Among students feelings of boredom and fears of waithood abound, but within the context of a notion of normalcy, of the endurance necessary to successfully wait out this liminal condition. This creates a sense of shared identity, at least during the years spent on campus, and the second aim is to discuss ways in which students somehow create a community, with quite specific norms and values. The contrast between the emphasis placed on education and development and the actual conditions of teaching and learning on

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campus leads to some bitter irony and a sense of loss of perspective. It is in this sense that being a university student can be characterised as being marginal, perhaps not abjected but surely perceived as being ‘on hold’, waiting out one’s best years. Some Jordanians indeed see the university as a means of postponement, putting off the need to face reality (unemployment) and responsibilities (earning their own living), especially since a degree, particularly in the human or social sciences, is not regarded as providing better job opportunities. Waiting is such a pervasive phenomenon in social life that it can be seen, and indeed has been seen, as almost synonymous with social being. ‘Waiting indicates that we are engaged in, and have expectations from, life; that we are on the lookout for what life is going to throw our way’ (Hage 2009: 1). On campus, waiting is certainly not considered positively, although people do wait most of the time. Moreover, it is linked to discourses of crisis, of a worsening situation, of corruption and of loss of perspective, particularly when education ‘continues to be the only means to class advancement’ (Adely 2012) for a great part of the population, its declared state of crisis notwithstanding. The idea of stuckedness is more apt at describing this situation, in which crisis is no longer felt as an unusual state of affairs that invites the citizen to question the given order. Rather, it is perceived more as a normalcy, or to use what is becoming perhaps an overused concept, crisis is a kind of permanent state of exception. (Hage 2009: 104) Although one can find evidence of people experiencing various forms of stuckedness at all times and in all places, the social and historical conditions of permanent crisis in which Jordanians live have led to a proliferation and intensification of this sense of stuckedness. My contention is that university students are all the more interesting in exploring such feelings, since they are on average quite aware of their condition, of being marginalised and at the same time better off than the majority of youth who start work at a tender age. Moreover, they tend to be quite reflexive, offering suggestions on what I should be interested in, and which directions my fieldwork should take. This becomes even more relevant in the context of the university, as a site in which local and international policies somewhat conflate.

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Having got to know an intern at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office on campus, I arranged for an interview with its then director. The meeting turned out to be fairly uninteresting, but I obtained a printed copy of the UNDP report on Jordanian youth. With the report still in my hands, I ran into some friends, who took an interest in the book, as well as into my having sought ‘expert’ knowledge. Reading the UNDP report on campus proved to be an interesting experience, for some of its parts elicited irony, if not outright sarcasm, especially the points at which Jordan is depicted as being fairly liberal on a regional scale, and where the Jordanian education system is praised. The students were particularly interested in pointing out the numerous events that ran counter to such a narrative, facts of ordinary censorship when not of outright repression, which in their view are more than revealing about the true nature of the Jordanian state. In much of the literature, this is depicted as a tendency to swing between cautious openings and sudden closures, especially when it comes to freedom of expression and the internet, not to mention political oppositional activities (Schwedler 2002). In the next chapter I will show some of the moments in which politics makes its way into campus, and students’ modes of resistance. Here I would simply like to suggest that wasting time on campus can also be seen as a way of resisting the predicament of modernity and development, seen at best as an ambiguous promise in the context of an overall and ongoing crisis that has been hitting the Jordanian social contract at multiple levels. The crisis could be felt mainly at a personal level, such as in the case of Yazid, for whom being a student was more or less an imposition; crisis could be more at the level of political convictions, such as for Zeinat; it could be related to a certain direness of the social context, such as for Maha and Walida, despite the fact that for both of them university years represented an opening up of possibilities. As I have argued elsewhere, the life stories of students are, almost without exception, the representation of the impossibility of belonging to what they commonly perceive as an unjust social order. The world in which they live is portrayed as familiar, and at the same time, as alien and ‘wrong’, for it betrays all the expectations and the aspirations for a full civil life and sometimes even for a decent living (Cantini 2014).

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As a more or less direct consequence, many students wait out their university years, believing that things will not get better and yet being unable to meaningfully act: unlike waiting that can be passive or active, ‘waiting out’ is always passive, yet its passivity is, as I have pointed out, an ambivalent one. It involves both a subjection to the elements or to certain social conditions and at the same time a braving of these conditions. (Hage 2009: 101) I described at some length the ways in which Yazid and the group of students around him spend their days, having created a series of rituals to kill the time. At the same time he felt a certain tiredness regarding the environment in which he found himself, including his university fellows – ‘you cannot talk about anything with them, they are too young and too immature’. He took refuge in the company of his friends from the neighbourhood, with whom he went out almost every night, and with his two nieces, the daughters of his widowed sister. The more time I spent with him, the more I realised that his life was being carried out as if on two parallel paths: on the one hand, the religious sphere, about which he would prefer to talk when we were alone or when we were in the company of a religious friend of his whom he evidently trusted (see Cantini 2014); on the other hand, the worldly sphere, that led him to continue going out (partly because he did not want to spend time at home with his family), to keep finding new small jobs to have some money and free himself (to an extent, monetarily speaking) from his parents’ control, to spend entire nights in internet cafes chatting, and to make use of pornographic materials. University life is spent as an intersection of these two spheres, a liminal space where he tried to have some fun but where ultimately he actively contributed to creating a conservative mood that is essentially contrary to his own idea of fun.

Living the university This chapter presents how university students live their years on campus, on the basis of three different, albeit complementary, concepts; the making of difference though bodily practice as gestures; how selfpresentations and judgements are made; and the waiting out of university

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years. On introducing the chapter, I drew inspiration from Boltanski, and from his distinction between reality and the world, and on the insight that it is the hiatus between reality and world that enables the possibility of critique. In the context of what I have been saying in this chapter, ‘reality’ is the apparent order of things, privileged faculties, societal strata and neighbourhoods in Amman all sustaining each other within the university as an institution. ‘World’ is constituted by the political and social vicissitudes, the lived knowledge of the fragility of the system, the irony engendered by reading the UNDP report, the actual practices of teaching and learning. Moreover, in 2012 I found an acute awareness of an impending disaster, given the instability of almost all neighbouring countries, increased by the civil war in Syria that is regarded in Jordan as an internal affair – many of its consequences are very real for the population, from the presence of refugees to the increased militarisation of Jordanian society and the closing of the border. Resulting from this hiatus is the possibility of critique, which in the case of the University of Jordan (and indeed of Jordan at large) does not imply a political opposition – and I will expand on this point in the next chapter – but results in a diffused scepticism (especially when it comes to the proposed reforms ‘in order to assure quality of education and freedom of thought’), in a retreat to the private sphere of families, and in a widespread desire for emigration.

CHAPTER 4 POLITICAL ACTIVISM ON CAMPUS

Zeinat has already been briefly introduced as one of the students I met during my main fieldwork. Her father was engaged in the Palestinian liberation movement in the late 1970s and the 1980s, and her mother shared his commitment. This led him and his family to emigrate from one Arab country to another in order to escape repression, which he nevertheless experienced in various forms of torture, until he finally settled down for a while in Jordan, where Zeinat grew up, along with her older sister and much younger brother. Zeinat inherited from her father both a deep sense of awareness of the injustices her people have had to suffer and the willingness to act. However, she soon discovered that the University of Jordan was not the right place to organise demonstrations or to be engaged in any form of open political activism, so when I met her, she was already deeply disillusioned about the actual possibilities of ‘changing something’. During her first year as a student at the university, she saw some of her friends thrown in jail for trying to organise political activities on campus, and the hard lesson was soon learnt. Moreover, according to her assessment, most students do not seem to be interested in politics, and the Palestinian case is quite a polarising issue in Jordan, as I discuss later on. While on campus, she limited herself to chatting with friends, with whom political issues were not the main topic of conversation, and to occasional social activism, for example in debating women’s rights during classes and by supporting professors who were vocal on this topic, often dismissed and neglected by the students.

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Outside the campus, she still considered herself an activist, but in a rather quiet, personal way. For instance, she translated a book by an Israeli historian, which questioned some mainstream assumptions about the foundation of the state of Israel and its relation with Arab countries, into Arabic. As this apparently non-political activity nonetheless runs against the official Jordanian-Israeli historical narrative, she was not able to circulate the book publicly, but with the help of some friends she was able to promote it underground. She doesn’t see the book raising any interest in challenging the deep entanglement of Jordanian and Israeli historical relations. Zeinat also took part in social and cultural activities outside the campus, where she tried to resist boredom by defying the normalcy of oppression in many subtle ways, but her involvement was becoming more personal and less organised. Any form of oppositional political engagement on campus is repressed by the regime, and Zeinat contended that it is because this is widely understood by students that all those who might have some political interests keep silent and do not take part in elections and demonstrations. There is an assumption of a kind of non-written agreement between the university administration and the politically active students that the current situation is not likely to change in the near future, and that the regime is not going to accept any form of criticism of its policies inside the campus. I argued in the previous chapter that some of the students are more privileged in various ways, and this is somewhat coherent with recent reforms and developments in university governance. Activist students belonging to such a category have been granted some personal freedoms concerning dress codes, personal behaviour, and some (limited) freedom to gather in places where the social norms are less strict and where they can enjoy some freedom of speech. This development is in line with broader trends operating elsewhere, as the reach of neo-liberal reforms creates tiers of citizenship and privilege that Ong defines by gradations of citizen rights and benefits (Ong 2005). In the Jordanian case, it has been noted that policies affect different segments of Jordan’s citizenry by expanding rights that effectively reach only certain portions of the population while constraining the (often political) freedoms that only portions of the population are striving to utilise (Schwedler 2012).1 ‘This project entails far less participatory democracy than it does the privileging of

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the activities of certain kinds of citizen-subjects: those who vote regularly, shop even more regularly, and embrace the identity of a united, modern Jordan’ (Ibid.: 261). I see this attempt to construct a particular kind of Jordanian citizen, combined with generalised repression of any political dissent, especially in the university context, as exemplified by Zeinat’s experience, the ways in which she was constrained and effectively directed towards a particular kind of engagement. But this situation is hardly satisfying, and the burden of knowing all too well how the system works is often hard to put up with – a few years after I left, Zeinat left Jordan for Europe, a ‘choice’ she shared with a few other students I met who had similar experiences, as I discuss in the next chapter. This repression of dissent is not limited to the Palestinian cause, of course, and many people involved in the university system claim that the major rift is not the Palestinian/Jordanian one, but rather that of belonging to the ‘right’ circles which more easily lead to good careers – something I experienced on many occasions. Being an activist is a risky business, and can quickly lead to problems with the Jordanian authorities, the system is constantly pointing out the general direction of ‘appropriate’ forms and modes of expressing dissent, which occurs within a neo-tribal context, reinvented or reempowered though it is. The university as an institution is to be seen as an integral part of the regime’s survival strategy; it manages a significant proportion of the youth population, contributing to the task of forming a disciplined citizenry in a volatile context. Far from being a coherent monolithic structure, it hosts different and at times competing forces, and this is reflected in students’ subjectivities within the institution, both the politically active students and their peers. The management strategy involves different layers of control, and this is a major factor behind the feeling of stuckedness described in the previous chapter – the sense of being caught in a situation that is not easily changeable, the pressure from different parts of society towards stability and the concrete threats posed to all who try to question the existing order. This chapter deals with the contradictory character of universities as organised spaces of political dissent, and leads to the conclusion that recent changes in the nature of student activism can be taken as indicative of a new consciousness, capable of resisting political repression.

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Political activities on campus 2004 Discipline and political control are very evident within the university itself, at the core of the present system that emphasises control of students’ activities. Different treatment of different categories of students enables diversification of the degree and visibility of political and social control. This differentiation takes on a particularly visible dimension when it comes to treatment of the student demonstrations that shatter the peace of the campus, but which are normally restricted to a relatively quiet level, especially in the better faculties. Student elections are an important part of university life, and Jordan is no exception in this regard despite some local specificity. Demonstrations are also an integral part of campus life, at least theoretically, especially with regard to heated political issues. Thus, I start by analysing the student elections of 2004, which I witnessed in person, before turning to the analysis of a couple of demonstrations, both held in the same year. The University of Jordan is one of the more prominent in the country, and its prestige is directly associated with that of the state, especially on official occasions such as graduation ceremonies and visits – as a consequence, everything is kept under tight control, and student elections are no exception. The Department of Students’ Affairs, da’rat sh’un al-talaba, has a notorious role in suppressing students; its head is usually a member of the armed services, and the department controls all non-curricular activities and the election of the student council, albeit to a lesser extent than in former years.2 The student council consists of 80 members (half of them nominated by the academic senate, the other half elected) and a president. This arrangement is in itself quite controversial, and is usually portrayed as a way to limit the rise of organisations motivated by political Islam.3 Its president is also appointed, so the majority of the council is always favourable to the decisions made by the academic senate, which in turn is quite eager to follow political directives from above, despite the University of Jordan’s representation of the council as one of its greatest accomplishments in promoting democratic participation on campus. The university website states, in its mission and objectives section, ‘the objective is to enhance the democratisation process, at this early stage in the students’ life, and to get them more actively involved in different forms of democratic participation in the future’. Needless to say, students are well aware of

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this system, which partially reflects the political system at large, and consequently are not particularly motivated to go and express their own views at the ballot box.4 Moreover the Muslim Brotherhood has been prevented many times from fielding its candidates, and this again reflects the more general political system.5 In 2004 the academic senate declared more than half the candidates linked to the Brotherhood unfit to run for election. Nevertheless, on the day of the elections, the campus, which is normally populated quietly by students, is animated, and there are many groups of young people, not necessarily students, gathered in the gardens and alleys, playing drums and singing. I was told that, due to the restrictions against political parties, almost all the candidates run on a tribal or a regional basis, and the groups are made up of members of clans or their clients and associated neighbours. When the results are announced, fights break out all over the campus between the winners and the losers. These fights are quite violent, as groups are armed with clubs and occasionally guns (normally used to shoot in the air) and they throw stones at competing groups. This contrasts with the usual absolute prohibition of violence on campus – guards are everywhere, and at even the slightest sign of a potential fight they intervene and if necessary take those involved into custody. Moreover, students are not actually involved in the fights, it is as if they are assisting or playing a supporting role in a ritualised show. Violence is anticipated, and we foreign students of Arabic were earlier told by our professors to leave the campus right after class from a gate far from the main scene; however, most of us were too interested to leave, and so we joined the large groups of bystanders who were simply looking at the stone-throwing spectacle. Apart from an occasional provocation from one of the contenders there was no challenge to a public presence, which for its part kept silent, and the overall impression was of watching something largely staged. While the guards were nowhere to be seen, they were nonetheless present inside the buildings to ensure that the violence did not extend beyond what seemed to be a well-defined boundary. From time to time, they emerged and picked out some of the more excited fighters, but they limited themselves to this without attempting to stop the fights, which continued for several days after the election, before being concluded with various forms of reconciliation, or simply because the contenders were exhausted.

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The resurgence of tribes in Jordanian public life is nothing new, given that tribes have been at the core of the Jordanian state – including the military, judiciary system and even the business sector – from the very beginning (Massad 2001). My contention is that tribes are increasingly becoming the only viable path for expressing forms of anger and dissent, a claim made all the more plausible given that all political parties have been irrelevant for quite some time and even the Muslim Brotherhood seems to be less and less relevant in this regard.6 The Brotherhood is commonly perceived to be collaborating with state power, which it recognises in return for certain social benefits, and is certainly not a consistent opponent of Hashemite rule. This neo-tribalisation is heavily encouraged by the state, because it conveys dissent into paths that are easily controlled, and because it allows the regime to present itself as a modernising factor in a country which is otherwise ‘too-rooted-in-itstraditions-to-change’. This latter point has been made in other studies (Layne 1994, Shryock 1997), and is (to an extent) demonstrated by a quotation from a book by a member of the royal family, in which the phenomenon is presented as something which will not change, although the state is trying to modernise: It’s merely a resurgence of the ancient animosity between the ahl al-madar and the ahl al-wabar (the ‘clay-dwellers’ and the ‘animalhair dwellers’); between the sedentary and the nomadic; [. . .] it is also a tension sadly more real than outsiders probably imagine, and persists to this day underneath the surface of society, rearing its ugly head every now and then in the most unexpected places. For example, the last three years (1997–1999) have seen ‘mob fights’ at the University of Jordan – fortunately none too serious – between students from the ‘Abbadi Tribe and the old Settled Clans of Salt. Moreover, in May 1999, three days of fighting erupted, at the same university, between hundreds of Beni Hamidah and Beni Sakhr students, and this because of a single (albeit public) slur by a Beni Sakhr student about the Beni Hamidah! Needless to say – and having personally been involved in the solution of the problem – what finally defused the situation was the traditional ‘cup of coffee of reconciliation’ between the elders of both Tribes, rather than the pressure brought to bear on the two Tribes by the University and civil authorities! (Ghazi Bin Mohammed 1999)7

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Being able to silence all other forms of dissent, and at the same time, not appearing to be directly responsible for what is happening, instead appearing to be working hard to change this situation, is one of the main reasons behind both the good reputation the Jordanian regime enjoys across the Western world and its stability (see Schwedler 2012 for a political analysis of the implications of this game). I come back to the tribal game in the second part of this chapter in which I discuss demonstration dynamics in recent years. Whether tribal violence erupts independently of state intervention or not, it is evident that it leaves little or no room for other forms of dissent, and for this reason is at least tolerated by university authorities. However, as we will now see, the attitude of authorities regarding political demonstrations inside the campus is quite different. In Jordan more than half the population is of Palestinian origin. The exact figure is the subject of intense debate: underestimated in official figures which, when provided at all, stress the Jordanian character of the state, and overestimated by Palestinians. It seems safer to put this figure at least at 60 per cent of the population (Al-Hamarneh 2004, who also differentiates between Palestinians born in historic Palestine and those born in Jordan), and students of Palestinian origin are well represented at the University of Jordan, though it is impossible to provide a reliable estimate of the numbers. For this reason, I expected huge protest demonstrations in favour of the Palestinian intifada and against the military operations of the Israeli army directed at destroying Hamas, particularly the day after the killing of Sheikh Yassin, the spiritual head of the Hamas movement, in 2004.8 Similar demonstrations were spreading all over the Arab world, at least according to satellite TV channels, so I assumed that the same was about to happen in Amman. Despite the lifting of martial law, political demonstrations in Jordan are rarely a quiet business, since there are no rights for demonstrators, and police can be brutal (Schwedler 2012). Demonstrations on campus are rarer, for reasons that I detail below, but I expected the situation on campus to be different, as police and army are officially interdicted to enter it. Jordan is the second Arab country to have signed a peace treaty with Israel, after Egypt. The kingdom is usually seen as being a close ally of the USA and of forces interested in the stability of the region, at least in recent decades. However many regime opponents say that Jordan is not a free country, and that political activism that threatens such directives is

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actively repressed. (Jordan is nevertheless the Arab country that has granted citizenship to more Palestinian refugees, though refugee camps continue to exist until this day.) Thus, demonstrations against Israeli actions or US interests immediately become demonstrations against the status quo, and are treated as such by the state and the security apparatus. Moreover, Palestinian activism on campus has a relatively long history in Jordan. The day after Sheikh Yassin was killed – an act which seemed particularly outrageous to Muslims and Palestinians, since he was regarded as a spiritual leader, quite old, and in a wheelchair (although Israel held him responsible for certain terrorist operations) – the demonstration inside the campus was limited to a couple of hundred students, about half of which were female. Many university guards and almost 50 members of the notorious mukhabarat (security services) surrounded them, in line with the usual strategy of keeping the protests contained, on campuses and on refugee camps, so that even those just outside the area could have remained unaware of the demonstration nearby. The secret police were highly visible, wearing suits and sunglasses in an almost self-mocking way, thus representing an immediately recognisable marker, making it clear that the approved demonstration was going to take place without violence. The sharp contrast with the violence on the student election day was easily noticeable. During the few demonstrations I had the chance to witness in my four semesters on campus, there was usually a speech delivered by a student, usually belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement that is able to somewhat transcend ethnic and national divides. After the speech, the students marched toward the main campus gate, which was closed for the occasion and guarded from the outside by riot police. Yet I never witnessed a direct clash. Instead, it seems that the unwritten agreement was in operation again, and the entire scene had a staged character.

Political activism at Jordanian universities These two scenes involved two of the most pressing issues in Jordanian politics, namely the Jordanian– Palestinian rift and the role of the tribes, and reflect the importance of universities in legitimising power and at the same time giving room for some dissent. These two themes are intimately linked, since the tribes ‘have come to symbolize Jordan’s

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national identity in contradistinction to Palestine’s traditionally more settled population and hence the tribal character of Jordan is often used to accentuate the autonomy of the two nations’ (Layne 1994: 27). Formulations of Jordanian national identity are informed by Jordan’s special relationship with Palestine, and Palestinians in Jordan are at once Self and Other (Ibid.: 36, Massad 2001). The history of the Jordanian– Palestinian relationship is long, uneasy and complex, the object of numerous studies, and it is impossible to do it justice in a few lines here. While some recent studies postulate the Palestinian as the ultimate Other in Jordan (Massad 2008), others show that the relationship is complex and irreducible to simple dichotomies such as inclusion and exclusion, despite the fact that Palestinians are constituted as a minority and that Jordan might be their home but not their homeland (Brand 1988, 1995, Al-Hamarneh 2002, 2004). While there is some obvious tension, implicit in the impossibility of obtaining official figures, and resurfacing in public cases, Jordan is a socially coherent state with Palestinians de facto integrated in socio-economic activities. In many conversations with professors and students, I was told that the real divide is between those who have access to spheres of influence and those who do not, and that these groups are mixed. In order to situate the discussion on the recent events, it is necessary to give a brief overview of student activism in Jordan. Public universities in Jordan, and especially the two largest ones (the University of Jordan and Yarmouk University) have been at different times in Jordanian history centres of political opposition to the regime, either as direct centres of activities or as places where activists got together, for the first time relatively outside family control (Brand 1988, Larzillie`re 2012).9 High school student activism predates the establishment of universities in Jordan, and even the foundation of the Hashemite Kingdom. As early as the 1930s, high school pupils were engaged in protests, particularly in opposition to Zionism and related political developments in Palestine, but this was limited to the city of Salt (Anderson 2005, quoted in Adely 2009b). In the 1950s, student movements emerged, mainly in response to political developments in the country and in the region (Kharinu 2000, quoted in Adely 2009b). At the same time, a cadre of university graduates was returning to Jordan from universities in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo. Many of these graduates had become deeply immersed in political activities when in

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university (some had already become politicised in high school in Jordan as well) and they returned to Jordan determined to carry on these activities and organise their peers (Adely 2009b). With the imposition of martial law in 1957, student movements had a very limited space in which to manoeuvre, although some groups resisted, organised clandestinely and often outside Jordan’s borders. These groups reflected different political ideologies, from Baath and communist (the latter normally studying in Eastern Europe) in the 1950s and 1960s to those who concentrated on a more pro-Palestinian stance (Reiter would label this stance ‘ethnonational’) in the 1970s (Kharinu 2000), while communist student organisations continued to exist into the 1970s, with the label Ittihad al-watani li-l-talabat al-urdun, despite being forced underground. The rise of political Islam, as mentioned earlier, is partly a different story, since in Jordan it builds upon an existing structure, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was not opposed to the regime, and which was given ministries in the 1970s and 1980s (including education), and was ultimately used to fight leftist and nationalist students.10 From the second half of the 1970s, these two universities grew into centres of anti-regime political activity, with most of the activists being Palestinians (Reiter 2002). Since the 1990s, the student councils have been taken over by groups identified with the Muslim Brotherhood, but Reiter is keen to highlight that the ‘social composition of the activists’ did not change; most of the activists of the university Islamic movements in the 1990s were of Palestinian origin as well: More than once, King Hussein expressed concern that the universities would become a hotbed of antiregime political activity. He asserted that ‘our universities may [if they expand beyond the state’s capacity for strict supervision] become a fertile ground for wild, irresponsible, subversive, and negative tendencies and elements’, or in other words, a focus of unrest and organized opposition for Palestinian young people in Jordan. (Reiter 2002: 158) Despite Reiter’s insistence on Palestinians being the main component of the university student movements, and the main preoccupation of the regime, I contend that the Jordanian-Palestinian divide is not the most relevant, and that Jordanian students are activists as well. My interest in this discussion is to analyse the ways in which these decades were

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formative of the two main phenomena that I discuss in the second half of the chapter, namely the ‘resurgence’ of tribalism at the university and the formation of student movements who make their claims in a less political and more ‘citizenship-oriented way’. Although the abovementioned student groups were organised around particular political ideologies, and were often preoccupied with and motivated by regional political events, they took up more narrowly defined ‘student issues’ such as the high cost of tuition, academic policies and the demand for a general union for Jordanian students (Adely 2009b). During the 1980s and 1990s, from time to time there were small student protests, typically in response to political events. However, two major campaigns in these decades were triggered by changes in university policies on student issues (Ibid.). The most famous political protest, which developed into a bloody clash between students and police officers, occurred at Yarmouk University on 13–14 May 1986, and shows this entanglement of student issues, broader political matters and the university as a heavily controlled institution in Jordan. After tuition fees were raised, students demonstrated; 32 of them were dismissed because of their active role in the demonstration, and this triggered even larger protests, with a prolonged sit-in on campus that lasted until the early hours.11 Then the army attacked; three students were killed and a large number of them were arrested. The security forces’ brutality against the students was criticised even in the upper reaches of the establishment. A ministerial commission of inquiry found that, while political student organisations were responsible for inflaming the situation, blame rested mainly with the new president of the university, who was forced to resign on the grounds of insensitivity to the students’ claims, the university was forced to cancel the summer semester to calm down the situation, and three professors were fired (Reiter 2002). This tragic case shows the ways in which apparently technical issues, such as raising of fees, could quickly be appropriated by politically active students. The regime proved resilient, and King Hussein linked the incident to the events of Black September, noting that irresponsible elements had disrupted the stability that Jordan had enjoyed for 15 years. This was despite the fact that, according to reports, both Transjordanian and Palestinian students had taken part in the demonstrations (Ibid.). The King directed the Prime Minister to implement the recommendations of the ministerial commission and to close the loopholes immediately so that the

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universities could no longer serve as staging grounds for violent activity against the regime. By ‘closing the loopholes’, Hussein was referring to legislation that would enable supervision both of student activities and of the university administrations, and indeed, sometime later, higher education legislation was changed so that the Minister of Higher Education was empowered to oversee the universities, and university independence was considerably limited (Ibid.).12 This case is hardly unique, despite being quite exceptional in both its violence and broader significance – it was often whispered about even at the time of my fieldwork, almost 20 years after the events took place, when discussing issues of political activities on campus. During the 1980s and 1990s, Jordan faced economic restructuring and socio-economic and political tensions (Bank and Schlumberger 2004), and the typical response of the regime was ambivalent and imprinted with a strategy of survival, as analysed in many studies. The core strategy allowed some freedom of expression and some political competition, while setting restrictive legal frameworks for expressing these, and keeping a panoply of repressive means to be applied to all those who resist.13 The repressive state did not prevent the eruption of several protests, and those on campus mirror those that took place outside, mainly linked to the ‘initially dramatic efforts at liberalization’ as in Salt, Ma’an, Kerak and Amman in 1989 (Lust-Oskar 2001: 553). Similar riots erupted when controversial price rises were instituted, or even announced, and when political events in neighbouring countries enraged the majority of the population. At the university level as well as at a broader societal level, the regime has so far been quite successful in preventing riots from constituting a real threat to its grip on power. This trend did not significantly alter after 2011 and the revolts that spread from Tunisia to Egypt and from Bahrein to Syria, despite the presence of some ingredients that led to the successful toppling of regimes elsewhere, such as unemployed youths setting themselves on fire. The resilience of the Hashemite regime has been of long-standing interest in literature that deals with Jordan, and my interest here is to point to developments in political activism in Jordanian campuses, and on how these developments had already led to a tribally dominated form of political expression in 2003– 5, and even more so in recent years. Reiter argues that the ‘ethnic transformation’ in the public universities has been working to the regime’s benefit, and quotes the

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changes in the admission system (the makrumat) as being designed to enhance the number of Jordanian students (relative to Palestinians).14 Such a clear cut conclusion seems misplaced, though, as before 1970 many Palestinians served in the army and the police, and their sons benefited from the makrumat; things of course changed after this, but the makrumat seem to encourage loyalty to the regime, regardless of the Jordanian-Palestinian divide. To curb the influence of Islamistmotivated students, the government attempted to create a nationalist student movement (tajammu al-watan) for the student elections of 1998 at the University of Jordan, but it only partially succeeded, the fact that students admitted on the quota system were invited to vote for it notwithstanding (Reiter 2002). By the subsequent year, this student faction had already ceased to exist. Thus, in 1999, the government took a different course, reforming the electoral system to the one I described above, with only half the seats on the student council being contested through elections. This step aroused vociferous protests in the universities,15 but was still in place when I conducted fieldwork, and in 2004, as I have described, succeeded in keeping most students away from politics, leaving them with tribal-motivated discourse.16 Reiter concluded that, despite the social and ethnic transformation in the universities, which worked in favour of the regime in its confrontation with Palestinian-based opposition factions, and despite the dramatic change in the ethnic composition of the student body, the regime was unable to fully contain the student organisations headed by the Islamic opposition movement (Ibid.). This conclusion was already questionable in 2003–5, as I have described in the two scenes from the university. The increased implausibility of any political opposition or even of movements in favour of the Palestinian cause has led to an over-representation of tribal identities in Jordanian politics (the ‘risky business’ denounced by Schwedler) and consequently on campus. When I returned in 2012, this predominance had not only acquired full visibility, but had grown to the point at which it was starting to be represented as a threat, even in mainstream media.

Political violence on campus 2011– 13 Compared to the situation that I have described so far, in which protests on campus were limited to national and international political events,

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and to student elections, the situation has changed radically in recent years, and this change is being observed and debated publicly in Jordan. The number of recorded fights at Jordanian public universities went up from 31 in 2010 to 61 in 2011, and then to 80 in 2012, according to reports published by the National Campaign for Defending Students’ Rights, Thabahtoona. According to a recent study, in the academic year 2011/12, covering only seven public universities, 835 students were involved in clashes, including 175 at the University of Jordan (Muhafazah 2014: 134). These fights do not happen out of the blue, and were already on the rise in previous years, but in the years following the Arab revolutions they acquired a new visibility, and possibly a role in Jordanian public discourse. It is usually quite hard to get clear information about any single incident, as newspaper articles tend to represent them as chaotic situations, and conflate moral judgement on the events with actual description, and oral or online reports tend to be partial at best. Moreover, since my stay in 2012 occurred during the semester break, I was not able to witness any of these incidents in person. Nevertheless, a typical clash begins with a small incident, for example a boy who stares at or offends a girl, or even a snow ball fight that ends with a student being shot in the leg. A quick escalation follows, in which groups of boys overtly affiliated with a particular clan or tribe clash, usually without the immediate intervention of university guards. This diffused violence is not typical in Jordan, even on campus, where small confrontations were almost absent in my direct experience, never involved weapons (although a few male students used to hint at having arms in their cars, I never saw any) and were quickly calmed down by bystanders or by university guards. The overall limited interest in detailed information leads to a lack of in-depth analysis, which means that old and new stereotypes are used by the media to provide quick and reassuring explanations for the violence, in ways that do not challenge official discourses and representations. The usual explanation given for these clashes involves questioning the mentality of those involved. Tribalism is portrayed as backward or unreasonable, while university and state authorities are portrayed as trying their best to prevent further clashes from happening in the future. This helps to reinforce the modernisation rhetoric employed by the regime when talking about education and university in particular, without discussion of the actual consequences of past political choices.

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In conversations with professors in 2012, most of them portrayed this violence as largely unprecedented, apparently disconnected from broader political issues, and spreading with worrying ease. I often heard stories of students lacking respect for their professors, missing classes and quarrelling over poor performances at exams, all on tribal grounds, a claim that I almost never heard in 2003– 5.17 An assistant professor in biology told me that a colleague was physically threatened by a student belonging to a tribal family after a failed exam; other similar cases seem to be happening at the university, at least in the perception of professors. Sameh Muhafazah (2014) conducted a survey among more than 500 undergraduate students in 2011– 12 for his study of student violence on campus. He found that students indicated that the main causes of violence were the perceived injustices in admission criteria, dissatisfaction with university regulations, high competition among different factions at student elections and tribal intolerance (al-t’asib al-qabili), a conclusion that concurs with the one expressed in the media and by public officials. Proposed solutions include a return to the real morals of Jordanian society.18 Perhaps unsurprisingly, solutions proposed by officials tend to take less account of the link between violence and structural elements of the university and broader society, other than being more superficial.19 They usually call for respect for the law, tougher consequences for perpetrators and more control on campus. This last point includes the requirement to carry identification cards in order to enter campus (something theoretically in place already in 2003–5, but they were checked only occasionally and at certain gates – it was not uncommon for students to receive visits on campus from non-student friends), the instalment of security cameras and training for security guards on how to control fights. Mistaking an increased securitisation for the solution to a complex problem is by no means a Jordanian peculiarity, but at the University of Jordan this was regarded as the easiest solution. At the time of my second fieldwork visit, entrance via the main gate was controlled by electronic turnstiles that check each student’s identity card. No attempt was made to look into the roots of the violence, it was seen purely as a security issue, and so stricter security measures were taken, further enhancing the character of the campus as a ‘gated community’.20 Violence at Jordanian universities is, in my opinion, a result of unresolved tensions at the university level as well as at the social and

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political level, and an explanation of this phenomenon should go beyond specific events and focus on the broader relationship between education, citizenship and stability in Jordan. Episodes of on-campus violence are intricately related to a lack of freedom on campus, especially when it comes to student elections and the freedom to organise groups and activities.21 Underlying this evident dissatisfaction is the state’s broader lack of respect for human rights. In this sense, the university system mirrors Jordanian society at large, with strong limits to free association and discussion but within a system that enables a certain degree of free speech. Other explanations include the perceived failures of the education system, controversial education reforms enacted in recent years and ineffective responses to campus violence from university administration. Yet another explanation points to the regime’s traditional strategy of using tribalism (the ‘tribal card’) as a way of allowing limited forms of controlled dissent. In this context, clashes are understood as mainly rooted in tribal events, and/or as possible means of expressing social tensions. It is useful to recall the important caveat that ‘the domain of kinship cannot be separated from the domain of politics either at the behavioural or the symbolic-cognitive level. This is as true today as it was in 1960’ (Antoun 2000: 446), and that tribes are a resilient phenomenon among both rural and urban people in Jordan (as well as in Palestine). The relevance of families should already be clear from the students that I introduced in the previous chapter, and economic circumstances are reinforcing this dependence (as I discuss in the next chapter). Still, the emergence of this phenomenon on an unprecedented scale clearly points to the political choices made in the past, especially those of privileging the Jordanian tribes over the possibility of constituting political parties independent of personal affiliations. In this context, already explosive, the allegiance to tribes silences other potential ways of expressing social dissent, and limits the possibilities of social critique. By discouraging participation in social and political issues, this system undercuts the university’s crucial role in creating responsible citizens able to fulfil their proper role in society. These clashes must also be understood within their regional context. So far, the possibility for revolution in Jordan has been ruled out by a divided opposition, successful containment measures enacted by the Jordanian state and worrying news coming from neighbouring

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countries, especially Egypt and Syria. Still, fundamental problems plaguing Jordanian society have not been adequately addressed. Violence in Jordanian universities is in large part an effect of these unresolved tensions, at the university level as well as the political level. Moreover, it points to an ongoing citizenship crisis, to the struggle to be a legitimate Jordanian, as well as being a worrying sign that violence is being seen as a more and more legitimate form of dissent in the country. As I showed in the previous section, Jordan has witnessed different levels of political activity on campus, with different challenges at different times that led the regime to grant more power, access and visibility to tribes. Moreover, violence increased, especially at public universities, because of a change in social values, which was reflected in certain changes in governance, in the admission procedures and in the reforms, in the context of deteriorating living standards, ongoing political repression and an increasing gap between rich and poor. The situation is further complicated by the fact that most of these are general trends that seem to be spreading rather than retreating, and to change at least those which most directly relate to the university requires quite some effort. Positive steps might include reforming higher education, updating the university environment and curricula, radically modifying the basis on which the academic staff is appointed, increasing economic support to universities, and granting more academic freedom (Maraqa and Oehring 2013).

The reality. . . and the world In recent years, a few social and political campaigns and movements have been launched in Jordan, as a way of resisting the changes but also as a way of raising students’ awareness of their rights and duties as citizens, projecting higher education as a ‘mutual interest’ between the state and the citizen. Among these movements, Thabahtoona (‘you have slaughtered us’), the national campaign for defending students’ rights, seems to be the most relevant (Adely, 2009b) and promising. Launched in April 2007, this campaign is surely among the most interesting political developments to have originated in the university milieu, having become a public voice for issues and concerns of university students in Jordan. Initially focusing on the issue of the increasing costs of higher education, the campaign has evolved into both a monitor and

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advocate for students and their families, while also maintaining the focus on the financing of higher education. Thabahtoona has taken up the challenge of defending student rights, both to access higher education and to enjoy academic and political freedoms on Jordanian campuses. The campaign has publicly taken a stance quite critical of government interference in student affairs on campuses (Ibid.). Moreover, Thabahtoona has provided regular monitoring and reporting of new incidents of interference by security forces in the life and governance of universities, providing a roadmap for an academic and human rights agenda for higher education in Jordan (Ibid.). The usual harassment and repression of student activism on campus has not managed to stop the activities of this group of students, who benefit particularly from the new information technologies that help spread the word and in creating some sort of community despite all restrictions on movement.22 A typical example of their activity is their criticism of government policies (Thabahtoona, 24 July 2014 as a sample) regarding cuts in university funding, which they argue will result in university education for the rich only. They also denounced the appointment, by the Head of the Yarmouk University, of 80 administrative staff in his last month in service, despite the huge deficit accumulated by the university.23 The article adopts a sarcastic tone regarding the countless higher education plans made during recent years that fail to address students’ main problems, namely poor quality, and above all the corruption of the system. The activists involved in the campaign, aided by volunteers in different universities, are quite able to spread their views, providing information on their activities and on student affairs through reports and commentaries. In addition, they have a few hotspots on school and university news, university fees, private schools and university violence on their website.24 Recently they called for a demonstration on 11 June 2014 in front of the University of Jordan main gate, under the motto ‘we will not pay the bills for your corruption’ (lan nadfa’ fawateer fasadkum), to protest against the raising of fees for parallel students (the increase ranges from 30 per cent to 100 per cent from the previous year). The demonstration was apparently well attended, and it received some media coverage, for example from the online edition of the newspaper al-Ghad, which is supposedly the second newspaper in Jordan by diffusion and distribution. This recent example shows the modus operandi of the

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campaign, using issues directly related to students’ experience to raise awareness and concern, in a generation that is portrayed as being particularly uninterested in politics and rather consumeristic (AlBustani 2006, quoted in Adely 2009b). My own contention is that the extent of constant repression should never be underestimated, and that after decades of inaction (again caused by martial law) there is widespread mistrust of the real intentions of political parties. These are factors that students like Zeinat know all too well. Thabahtoona is not the only recent movement that tries to mobilise students in struggling for their rights. Among the recent experiments there is the Arab renewal bloc (kutlat al-tajdid al-‘arabiyya), the student expression of the Jordanian Democratic Popular Unity Party (hizb al-wahdah al-sha’biyya al-dimuqraty al-‘urduni), which has among its primary goals the establishment of a properly elected student union, until now lacking (Ibid.). In early February 2012, I interviewed one of its representatives, outside the campus, and he confirmed the real difficulties in organising any meaningful political activity among students, not only because of the ongoing repression. The well-known context plays a definite role, since the ongoing Syrian civil war, the recent Iraqi crisis, the ongoing Palestinian tragedy and the inflow of refugees, have instilled longing for stability in the public discourse, and given the regime yet another excuse to pursue securitisation of civil life and to engage in ‘anti-terrorist’ repression of all sorts. Moreover, there is a concrete sense of immobility, of being stuck in a situation with no easy way out, in which the regime leverages regional threats (imagined or real) on the domestic front (Al-Tarawneh 2014). These other movements notwithstanding, Thabahtoona is particularly noteworthy for several reasons.25 The first is the experience of Egypt, a leading country in the region especially when it comes to education, youth, political turbulence and repression. The 9 March movement (Aboulghar and Doss 2009) was founded in 2003 by a group of professors, mostly at Cairo and Alexandria universities, to defend university autonomy and dignity. Without entering into detail, this movement is credited with having been one of the predecessors of the Kifaya movement, itself one of the ancestors of the groups that made the January 2011 revolution possible.26 Its importance is not limited to its relative political success, which is in itself quite volatile, but goes deeper into the very notion of what a university should be, and how those who

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inhabit it can defend it from oppression. Despite the obvious differences (9 March being mostly composed of professors, while Thabahtoona is mostly a student endeavour), I see these movements in defence of student rights, autonomy in governance and in research and resistance to profitisation, as being the clearest way in which the university creates a new citizenship consciousness.27 It is too early to see if this movement will become a significant actor in the years to come, in the difficult Jordanian context. Nonetheless, it already opens up spaces for deliberation and critique, emerging from within the university as an institution and reclaiming much of it from the prevalent commercial logic. Through this movement, the difference between reality and the world emerges, and this is what enables critique in Boltanski’s terms. The difference between reality and world also relates to two regimes of action – practical moment and moments of reflexivity. In practical moments reflexivity is low, the reality of reality is not questioned and action is approached pragmatically. Boltanski likens this to a sort of tacit agreement among the actors to avoid creating unease and to ‘close one’s eyes’ to diverging interpretations and contradictions, refraining from disputes for the sake of the action in common (Boltanski 2011: 61–5). As I tried to show in the first two chapters, this is hardly the situation in Jordan in recent years – university is one of the most evident terrains of disputes, not simply over the actual institution but also over different conceptions of what education, becoming a citizen and an adult is or should be. This is rather a moment of reflexivity, and campaigns such as Thabahtoona, while accepting the impossibility of opposing the regime politically, use the language of equality, access and knowledge to put forward demands for change within the institution. Its very ability to persevere in its activities is a sign that it has indeed struck a chord with the Jordanian public, and it appears to have some impact on decision making about higher education (Adely 2009b).

CHAPTER 5 THE UNIVERSITY AND THE LABOUR MARKET

When I got to know Wajiha, at the beginning of my fieldwork, she was a student in biology, admitted via the regular programme to a faculty that was not her preferred choice, but her parents could not afford the fees to enrol her in the parallel programme. We developed a close friendship, and we often met several times a week, in or outside campus, exchanging views on becoming adults, managing family obligations and time for friends and romance, and on what to do after the university years. Later during my stay, she graduated with good grades and started looking for a job, a process that I witnessed only the beginning of in person, then followed from a distance through emails and chats, and that by the time of my second period of fieldwork had reached a certain stability. After initially thinking of staying within academia, she started looking for a job related to her specialism. As marine biology was said to be on the rise, she sought jobs in Aqaba, Jordan’s only port, on the Red Sea. She got shortlisted for two positions, but she did not get one post, according to her because of the good wasta that backed the person that eventually got the job, and she refused the second when she was asked whether she would be willing to work with colleagues from ‘neighbouring countries’, which she took to mean Israel. Despite the salary being quite decent (450 Jordanian dinars in 2005, when the average salary was below 200) and some attractive benefits, such as accommodation in Aqaba (the commute by bus takes almost four hours), her family background rendered this option inconceivable.1 Beside these

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political considerations, three of her siblings were already abroad, and her mother expressed fear at being left alone with her ageing husband, whom she was less and less able to properly take care of. A younger brother was still living in Amman, but Wajiha knew that she was the person required to take care of this situation, and she accepted it. Wajiha’s true desire was to enrol in a master’s programme abroad, and back in 2005 she was already sending applications to universities in Europe, without her family being aware of these attempts. Her plan was to obtain a scholarship, and only then to start the complex negotiations to obtain permission to leave Amman for an entire year. Having refused the position in Aqaba to meet her mother’s expectations was, in Wajiha’s eyes, an argument in her favour, as it showed her care of, and commitment to, family duties. In the meantime, her extended family started to worry about her marital future, and she was busy receiving proposals and occasional dinners out with would-be suitors. Her parents were not directly involved in this, perhaps partly because one of her sisters had recently married, but an aunt, who interestingly enough never got married herself, was rather active and kept calling her to inquire about developments. To escape being increasingly subject to pressures to marry while being less mobile – no longer being a university student, justification was needed for almost every movement, lots of excuses had to be found, and there was considerable stress involved in avoiding being seen by anyone who could report back – Wajiha decided to orient her job search towards the most favourably regarded job prospect for women, namely teaching. Her first job applications were directed to private schools, where the clientele is selected by high fees and by English as the language of instruction, but she could not get a position. She complained that a couple of students from her own faculty got the jobs instead, despite having lower grades than hers. Although no official explanation was given, at the job interview Wajiha was explicitly told that female teachers should not wear the veil, as this was a symbol of backwardness that was incompatible with the goal of forging modern-minded pupils.2 Wajiha eventually accepted a position as a secretary in a small company in Amman, a job not exactly in line with her expectations but that nonetheless allowed her to get out daily, and also put some distance between her and her family by enabling her to be financially

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independent. The pay was average, JD 175, and there were no social or health security provisions, but the job was official, with a contract, the working place decent, and the money allowed her to provide for her daily needs – living independently, something that this wage would not permit, was obviously ruled out by her family, since unmarried women are usually not allowed to live alone. After almost a year, when I had already left, she resigned out of growing dissatisfaction with her job (I was never told exactly what the company business was) and particularly with her boss, who she depicted as arrogant and authoritarian. The resignation came when she had another job in hand, as a teacher in a private elementary school, where she would earn a better salary and have more independence in her work, and it was more in line with her actual interests. Although the school was similar to those which had refused Wajiha earlier, teaching in English a curriculum that is not linked to the provisions of the Ministry of Education, she nevertheless got the position – her own comment was that perhaps this was due to the fact that the pupils were all Arab, while in the previous schools there were also some foreign pupils.

Labour market and the university A discussion of how students enter the labour market is important since, not only is it an important aspect of how education has come to be assessed, by national and international agencies and by students and families alike, but it is a fundamental phase in young people’s lives, one in which choices are made and structures are more visible than usual. Entrance into the labour market constitutes an invaluable moment in which the reality of the institution is put to the test. Such a discussion might seem to involve an unwelcome concession to the utilitarian language increasingly employed by governments and many others all over the world, which sees wages and employment possibilities as the only measures of academic success. Amongst others, Olssen and Peters (2005) discuss how governments worldwide came to see universities as key drivers of an entrepreneurial knowledge economy. Core to this reconfiguration have been closer links between industry and academia, whether defined in terms of a ‘triple helix’ or as ‘mode 2’ science, with the economic contributions of the

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universities now measurable by governments through proxies such as ‘impact’, ‘employability’, ‘engagement’ and ‘knowledge transfer’. (Mills and Ratcliffe 2012: 150) ‘Mode 2’ refers to knowledge being produced in-use, linked directly to the functional imperatives of the world of work. The Middle East has not escaped this recent reconfiguration, with public policies, think tanks and research centres, as well as students and their families, all involved in the co-production of this new trend, usually considered to be part of the neo-liberal understanding of the world (Cantini 2016). The complex link between university and the labour market has been made explicit in a different, more neutral way through the notion of university as a hub: connecting some of the most prominent institutional sectors of modern societies: the labor market and the larger economy, the professions and the sciences, the philanthropic sector, the family, and the nation-state. This structural arrangement is historically specific and crossnationally variable, but in certain times and places, higher education systems are key sites where institutions intersect. (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 135) Even if in Jordan some of these dimensions are less pronounced than in the USA, the main focus of the article quoted above, particularly with regard to the philanthropic sector and professional associations, the links between the university and different societal institutions, are not to be underestimated. Among the most relevant social institutions in Jordan, the family, both nuclear and extended, occupies a central position that has been accentuated by recent decades of restructuring, as some scholars acknowledge (Antoun 2000, Baylouni 2006). I have argued elsewhere that the varying trajectories of students upon graduation are not entirely ascribable to religion (which nonetheless is a fundamental component of contemporary Jordanian social life), but are better understood by reference to the most fundamental conceptual tools of social analysis, such as class differences, and social and economic backgrounds, while always bearing in mind individual orientations (Cantini 2014). Labour power is an important pivot in the interplay

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between personal and collective class identity, because it is the main mode of active connection with the world (Willis 1981). In this chapter I again apply Boltanski’s analysis of the possibilities of the emergence of critique, this time in order to investigate the relationship with the labour market. In the first part I analyse official and expert discourses on the so-called school-to-work transition, with particular emphasis on the gender dimension. I then turn to discussion of the experiences of some former students in entering the labour market. In my main fieldwork I was a student like most of them, and conversations tended to be in the future tense, focused on expectations rather than on actual experiences, but in 2012 many of them, like me, were married, most were working, and a few had started having babies, so conversations revolved around the new issues that kept us busy, being more focused on the present time, with some occasional slips into a form of restrained nostalgia for the years gone by. The number of students with whom I kept in contact, and who I was able to meet again in 2012, was of course much fewer than when undertaking my main fieldwork, and class considerations were even more present than before – if, as I have shown in previous chapters, students came from different backgrounds, most of the former students with whom I am still in contact tend to have a more privileged origin. Notwithstanding this, their experiences are interesting if read in contrast with the official discourses on the desired outcomes of a university education, as well as with the social expectations placed upon them.3 Their subjectivities, which are not only shaped by the institution but by the material conditions of their lives and those of their families, come to the fore. Such a discussion also allows for contextualisation of students’ religiosity, which is just one component of their subjectivities, along with class, geographical origin, family and the like (Cantini 2014). Through them, the ambivalent character of the university becomes apparent, a liminal space, highly formative, in which disciplinary aspects come together with increased possibilities. The labour market can thus be seen to be a fundamental aspect of an analysis of the university as an institution, one which contributes to the definition of its aims and scope, as well as being relevant in the broader context. As many studies show, the Arab region is characterised by both a high proportion of young people in the population and by high

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unemployment, which will not be absorbed through industrial development given the current system of economic exploitation (Kadri 2012). Jordan is a paramount example, as an essentially rentier economy that increasingly relies on foreign workers to carry out menial jobs that most educated Jordanians do not want to do, while being unable to absorb the demand for high-skilled jobs. This chapter combines an analysis of official discourses with the reality of the institution, and attempts to discuss the world of entering the job market as it is experienced by some former university students. The cases analysed do not provide statistical evidence, of course, but they do give an impression of what awaits students at the end of their studies, and contribute to an understanding of Jordan’s current situation. In this sense, the chapter offers a bridge between the first two chapters, which were oriented towards official discourses, and the next two, which were more attuned to students’ experiences, and therefore provides a conclusion that brings the reader through and out of the university. The chapter also enables further comparison with other countries that are also experiencing the double burden of an illiberal government and neoliberal economic restructuring. In this sense, my analysis seeks to interrogate the experiental contradictions at the core of neoliberal capitalism, of capitalism in its millennial manifestation: the fact that it appears both to include and to marginalize in unanticipated ways; to produce desire and expectation on a global scale yet to decrease the certainty of work or the security of persons. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000b: 298)

School-to-work transition Some of the recurrent themes in the expert literature are to be found in Wajiha’s experience, including among others the difficulty in finding a proper job, even more of finding a job related to her specialism, the mobility of the labour offer, the privileging of personal connections over qualifications and the weight of family expectations on student trajectories, in particular on those of women. The difficulties involved in finding proper employment are given particular attention in the specialist literature, which includes a number of works devoted to analysis of unemployment amongst educated young people (Amer 2012,

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Assaad 2012, 2014). Jordan stands out in the region as a success story in terms of literacy rates and percentages of youth enrolled in the different levels of the educational system.4 At the same time, there is a huge problem of graduate unemployment, which is higher than overall youth unemployment (Kanaan 2009).5 Despite an average annual growth rate of 6 per cent between 1999 and 2009, the unemployment rate hovered between 13 and 16 per cent during this period, according to official estimates. Unemployment is particularly high among the rapidly growing number of educated workers, who are emerging from the burgeoning education sector. This pattern of growth accompanied by persistently high unemployment is a longterm feature of the Jordanian economy (Assaad 2012). Accelerating growth has led to the creation of more jobs, but only one third of these have been filled by Jordanians, the rest being taken by foreign workers. This is generally attributed in the expert literature to a mismatch between educational goals and labour market needs, and such a conclusion is now treated almost as simple common-sense in Jordanian public discourse. On the Ministry of Higher Education website, for example, one reads that the ministry worked on bridging the gap between higher education output and labor market in order to respond to the present and future needs of qualified and specialized cadres in various areas of knowledge; and to compensate for the lack of natural resources in the region by creating a qualified human resources [sic] fortified by knowledge and efficiency. Another explanation involves a discussion of the types of jobs created, based on the hypothesis that university graduates are looking for jobs that are adequate to their expectations, and are willing to remain unemployed for a time until they find such jobs. The economy seems to be generating low quality jobs that do not appeal to these graduates, and are more likely to go to foreign migrants (Assaad 2012). The first kind of explanation involves the well-known mantra of the necessity of joining the knowledge economy, a global discourse that is particularly apparent in the Arab region, as indicated in Chapter 2. The proposed solution is that a ‘private sector led economic growth path’ comes to produce ‘high quality high wages’ jobs, but in order to achieve

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this ‘the skills of the labour force also need to be improved’. In Jordan, a country with a limited supply of natural resources but with a ‘good regional reputation for its educational system’, unsurprisingly, ‘the primary place for the skills acquisition responding to the needs of a knowledge economy is a higher education system with improved quality’ (World Bank 2009). Even in such discourses, though, the economic system is increasingly under criticism for its failure to provide real chances of social advancement for educated youth.6 As the same report acknowledges, there is an expectation mismatch between the desired type of employment and the available low wage and low skill jobs on one hand, with approximately 60 per cent of unemployment attributed to the fact that the majority of unemployed Jordanians are not willing to accept the available, typically low quality, jobs at prevailing wages (Ibid.). The rest of the unemployment is explained by the kinds of jobs that are created by the private sector in Jordan, in the context of shrinking public employment as a consequence of structural adjustment policies. These are mostly temporary and informal, not offering the non-wage benefits and stability that university graduates ‘have come to expect’ (Assaad 2014: 34). At the same time, employers often prefer to hire foreign workers rather than Jordanian job-seekers with low wage expectations in cases where the skills levels obtained through the education system do not differ, and this tendency has been exacerbated by the huge influx of refugees, mainly Iraqi, and since 2011 Syrian, who are denied, or kept on without, work permits. As a result they forcibly join the informal sector, in some areas contributing significantly to the local economy, and work for lower wages since their tenuous legal status makes them exploitable, finding employment in the service industry or as skilled workers in fields such as carpentry and textile production (Dhingra 2014). This second line of argument, which investigates the actual labour offer and how it has changed in Jordan, is particularly developed by Assaad, who provides an analysis of job types. He distinguished five categories – government employment; formal private waged work, which includes waged and salaried employment with either a legal employment contract or social insurance coverage in either the private sector or in state-owned enterprises; informal private waged work, which includes waged and salaried work in the private sector with neither a contract nor social insurance coverage; employers and self-employed

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individuals in the private sector; unpaid family workers in the private sector (Assaad 2012). Government employment constitutes about a third of total employment in Jordan, significantly reduced from the 1980s, when its share was about 60 per cent – the usual, well-known effect of structural adjustment policies. Just over a fifth of employment is in formal private waged work, and over a quarter is in informal private waged work, despite significant efforts in recent years to increase the coverage of the social insurance system. Under a fifth is accounted for by employers and self-employed workers, and a tiny fraction is in unpaid family work (Ibid.).7 Only the first two categories are desired by university graduates, according to Assaad’s analysis, with a disproportionate preference for public employment, due to various factors, including remuneration, job security, associated social security benefits and the social status linked to this kind of profession after decades of developmentalist discourse.8 Parallel to the need to create highly skilled, attractive jobs in the private sector, international agencies suggest ‘worsening expectations for desirable public employment’, in order to help advance the knowledge economy, where ‘the high added value jobs of the private sector are at least as desirable as the public sector ones’; to reach the ‘ultimate goal’ of increasing the demand for and the supply of ‘high productivity workers’, more ‘flexible’ labour market institutions are required, ‘discontinuing the distortions caused by public sector employment’ (World Bank 2009). The second issue faced by Wajiha, only as a potential issue at the beginning of her work experience but essential later on, was the mobility of the labour market, something that is not at all uncommon among university graduates, and among older people as well. Jordan built its economic fortunes at least partially in close relationship with neighbouring countries, especially rich oil-producing ones, where many Jordanians, mostly of Palestinian origin, have been going to work throughout the past half century. Brand (2006) explores the relevance of labour-export for the very existence of the Jordanian state, where recurrent high levels of unemployment (for example, 25 per cent in the early 1950s) were usually solved by easing restrictions on emigration. Relationships with neighbouring countries were strong even before that, with the northern part of Jordan particularly linked to Syria and Palestine, while the south

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has more connections with the Hejaz and the Gulf countries. At least since the 1970s there has been significant migration to Europe, both east and west, to the USA and to Australia, especially of young professionals who have then settled there (Antoun 2006). One of the worst crises experienced in the recent past was the aftermath of the first Gulf War, when almost 300,000 Jordanians (mostly Palestinians) returned from occupied Kuwait (Van Hear 1994), and the regional dimension is always to be kept in mind, including when discussing recent high skill jobs in private companies particularly in the Gulf, which attract young minds from the region. Emigration to Gulf countries has the advantage that ‘questions of language, religion and cultural identity were not posed for Jordanians’ (Brand 2006: 212), unlike for those who settled in Western countries; moreover, Gulf countries do not permit foreigners to gain citizenship, and this reduces the possible problems emerging from a system of double nationality. Graduate emigration is explicitly encouraged, enabling Jordan to rely on its young people’s brains (al-insan aghla ma namluk, ‘the human being is our most precious resource’, was one of King Hussein’s mottos) in order to sustain its economy through remittances and to establish itself in the regional landscape as a labour-exporting country, despite the fact that the interests of the state and those of the expatriates do not always coincide (Ibid.). The prestige enjoyed by Jordanian education in the region, partially as a consequence of the good image established by its graduates working abroad, is crucial in the recent struggle to attract foreign, feepaying students in an increasingly volatile market.9 The third aspect, not explicitly mentioned in our conversations but only hinted at in passing, is the significance of personal connections over qualifications, something that is a heated topic in Jordanian public debate in the form of the wasta phenomenon. Wasta is ‘the systematized exploitation of influence for personal advantage’ (Joffe 2002) and continues to be part of the social, economic and political reality of the country, a social phenomenon which virtually everyone complains about. While in much of the literature, and in Jordanian public debate, it has become synonymous with corruption, and is regarded as holding the country back, it is evident that it is at the same time a phenomenon that is being actively reproduced by a wide variety of people in different contexts. However, its impact on overall access to the labour market is questionable, as it appears to create opportunities for those with the

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right connections at least as much as it reduces them for those who lack the necessary social capital. Richard Antoun has tried to offer an explanation of this classic patronage-clientele relationship more in line with recent anthropological reflections, which emphasise the trust and cooperation created through everyday practices, processes and understandings.10 Nonetheless, as a concept in the public sphere it is loaded with negative connotations.

The gender paradox Education for women has been considered a major pillar of modernisation and development for at least a century now, with waged labour the expected result of such an education, this having increasingly become synonymous with progress. The discussion of graduate unemployment is thus not complete until the gender dimension is taken into account, with family expectations and gender roles coming heavily into play. While graduate unemployment is higher than overall unemployment, female graduate unemployment is even higher, and this is of particular concern for international agencies and for the expert discourse, to the point that Jordan is usually depicted as a paradox (a ‘gendered paradox’, in the title of Fida Adely’s book, the focus of which is the link between female education and life experiences).11 The expert literature is replete with indications of females obtaining higher educational levels than their male counterparts and of their limited participation in the workforce – only 18.2 per cent, while male labour force participation stands at 64.7 per cent among the 15 to 34 age group, and it is generally much lower than that of men regardless of the age group or the place of residence (Amer 2012). The importance of the shahada (the university degree) is conversely relevant; the share of the labour force holding at least a bachelor’s degree is 52.6 per cent among women and 18.9 per cent among men. This is yet another paradox, as, while young graduates are experiencing rising levels of unemployment, female graduates are among those who participate in relatively high numbers in Jordanian economic activity. Indeed, women with more education are more active and much less likely than the least educated to withdraw from the labour market (Ibid.). Notwithstanding this, and despite representing only 22.2 per cent of the total active population, young women are overrepresented among the unemployed, of whom

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they constitute 39.4 per cent. The overall rate of unemployment among females is more than twice as high as among males (39 per cent versus 18 per cent in 2007, according to the World Bank). Although many young women in Jordan have the same educational opportunities as young men and thus acquire the same level of education, about five young males hold jobs for every young woman who is employed. In 2007 only 11 per cent of young women aged 15 to 29 were working for pay, compared with 54 per cent of males (Kanaan and Hanania 2009).12 This outcome is strongly linked to the lack of jobs that are compatible with the prevailing social and legal norms that govern the places and types of work that are considered ‘acceptable’ according to sex, age and social status, and thus affect women’s access to work, particularly after marriage (Ibid.). Amer (2012: 12 – 13) notes that unmarried university graduates have the highest participation rates among females in the Jordanian labour market (79 per cent). They have both the highest participation in employment (53 per cent) and in unemployment (26 per cent of the working age population), and when employed, this group tends to be concentrated in formal private waged employment.13 Cultural and political factors are usually cited to account for this paradoxical situation, from conservative interpretations of Islam and tribalism to policy makers’ lack of a true will to pursue the necessary changes in the law regarding personal status (El-Azhary Sonbol 2003). Marriage tends to drive a wedge between the labour market experiences of educated males and females, with females being perceived in the public discourse as a weak gender in need of protection, and this discourse is sustained by the laws regulating citizenship, custody of children, access to work and the like (Amawi 2000). Married female university graduates are predominantly concentrated in government employment (71 per cent), as opposed to less than half their married male counterparts (42 per cent), because this category of jobs is understood as being family-friendly (Assaad 2012).14 Statistics also show that women are less likely to change job, especially once they have obtained one in the public sector, but are more likely to leave the job market if they are employed in the private sector (Ibid.). This suggests that the opportunity structure for educated women in the labour market is deteriorating over time, as a consequence of the diminishing role of public sector employment in

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recent decades resulting from structural adjustment policies, as Mazawi noted (2007: 257 – 8). One therefore wonders whether the education for work reforms introduced in the Arab region do not operate [. . .] as a political ‘spectacle’, largely intended to satisfy demands by competing stakeholders with which the state is embattled to ensure its survival. (Ibid.: 262)15 Beyond the economic reforms that are transforming the Jordanian labour market, women have to face family and societal expectations in their quest for employment. Earlier studies have made clear that the family can both ‘support and suppress women’ (Joseph and Slyomovics, 2001: 8). Family can be conceived as network, resource, relation and form of socialisation, is the basic social unit, and structures most relationships and networks, in the socioeconomic sphere as well (Droeber 2005). Jordanian women are in constant negotiation between social, familial and self-expectations, and face many challenges as they move through their education and navigate a path into their adult lives. According to El-Azhary Sonbol, these challenges could be described as arising from legal constraints, the stress on morality, and the notion of difference. Even when reforms of personal laws are discussed (some laws are particularly infamous, such as the one justifying honour crimes), the emphasis on morality implies that women should not in any way risk enticing men to act indecently, a pattern of thinking which is based on a belief in an essential difference in nature between men and women, who are reduced to their essential nature as potential sinners (El-Azhary Sonbol 2003: 94). This notion of ‘difference’ provides a further basis for discrimination. Women are seen as the weaker sex and are therefore in need of protection. This way of thinking is externalised through the ‘special protection’ laws which are aimed to lessen the work burden for women and keep them safe from ‘dangerous’ jobs, despite the constitutional provision that guarantees equal right to work for all (Ibid.). Despite the paramount importance of the legal dimension in enabling social change in the country, I contend that it is education, and more crucially university education, that constitutes true potential for change. Women’s access to education ‘constructs new forms of status and respectability while guarding “traditional” ones. The value of being

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educated has become as integral to local constructions of modernity and respectability as to a national narrative about progress and development’ (Adely 2012: 134). Education is what enables women, at least some of them, to work outside the house in formal employment. At the same time education is also entangled with marriage prospects, due to the common perception that an educated woman is more marriageable, in the context of a perceived ‘marriage crisis’.16 In a context in which marriage is still the marker of adulthood, the delay in marriage works to prolong youth and create a condition of ‘waithood’ (Singerman 2007). In Chapter 3, I discussed the sense of waithood among students on campus, on how days are spent with a sense of futility that slips into a sense of being stuck, of not moving forward; this sense of impotence is shared by some activist students, as I discussed in Chapter 4. Similarly, the years spent entering the labour market, delaying marriage and ultimately becoming adult, are an extra burden on Jordanian youth, and not only women.17 A further paradoxical condition, this time not limited to Jordan but extendable to the entire region and possibly further, is that the more emphasis is placed on youth and on the need to reform education towards greater integration with market needs, the less the objective seems to be achieved, and recent decades have been characterised by an increased sense of despair among young people, accompanied by boredom and feelings of marginalisation. While this can well be considered to be a consequence of globalisation, with its increased stress on desires that are unattainable for most people, as many authors have pointed out, I am interested in investigating the link between education, its goals and the formation of youth subjectivities. As I show in this concluding section, this condition does not stop with the entrance into the labour market, but rather becomes pervasive, with people refusing jobs which they perceive as degrading, ‘choosing’ to wait instead. Hage’s comment on the pervasive phenomenon of waiting, how it ‘indicates that we are engaged in, and have expectations, from life’ (Hage 2009) must be seen in the prevailing context of crisis which exists in Jordan, one which leads to a sense of ‘stuckedness’, in which ‘crisis is a permanent state of exception’ (Ibid.). The life stories presented below are meant to show a few different ways of dealing with the feelings of ‘stuckedness’ that arise from this, and how they intertwine (or not) with the education received. The relatively high degree of mobility that some of them enjoy does not,

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I argue, contradict the idea of stuckedness but rather confirms it, particularly when it is associated with a sense of the impossibility of action ‘at home’, as already indicated in the previous chapter.

Yazid First introduced in Chapter 3, Yazid started off as a construction worker in his years abroad as an illegal migrant, before his forced return to Amman and his enrolment at the University of Jordan. He never really stopped working, though, in order to get some limited financial independence from his family. The fact that he was a young man who had experienced life abroad does not imply that the family could not play a big role in controlling his daily activities, as he would often lament – hence his endless days on campus, the evenings out for hours on end with friends in his father’s car, and the necessity of having some money of his own. To this end, Yazid started work in a renowned restaurant in one of the well-to-do neighbourhoods in west Amman, one which serves alcoholic drinks and where prices are inaccessible for even middle class Jordanians, and where the clientele is composed of expats and members of the upper class. With both these groups, his knowledge of two foreign languages came in handy, and this job kept him busy several evenings every week. He worked without a contract or a fixed wage; during my main fieldwork he was paid JD 4 per day, well below the average for this kind of job (which was about double this sum), something that the owner justified by the high tips left by most customers, which were kept by the workers. In addition, there were no social provisions and no job security, as the absence of a contract enabled the owner to have a strong hold over all employees, and particularly those who were more inclined to lament the dire job conditions. Only someone such as Yazid, who did not work out of absolute necessity, could sometimes take the luxury of arguing with the employer over wages, sick leave and so on. His colleagues were mostly older than him, and had families, so they could not afford the risk of being made jobless, even for a few weeks, and this greatly discouraged them from arguing for better working conditions. Since the salary was not enough to cover living expenses, some of them resorted to small thefts from the cashier when the owner was not around. When recounting this to me, Yazid mentioned that he is against theft because it is un-Islamic, but he

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justified it in this situation, and said that he might resort to it were he having to support a family. Despite the injustice he perceived in his employment, he was hesitant to leave the job as he feared becoming unemployed, with the consequent loss of economic independence. One of his recurrent jokes involved him working as a bus conductor, something that he thought as utterly degrading; in our conversation the topic of migration often came to the fore, but to the best of my knowledge he has never made it abroad again. To relate his experiences to the expert literature, Yazid belongs to the category of informal private waged workers, and his condition is quite common for young men of his social background. Absence of contract, social security, health provision, and stability to plan the future is becoming increasingly widespread, and his more or less selfimposed need to work prevents him from joining the ranks of those who remain unemployed due to their refusal to engage in underpaid and degrading jobs. When comparing his situation to those who enjoy public employment, Yazid frequently voices his suspicion that he is discriminated against, and unable as a Palestinian to obtain such employment – how much he actively seeks it, though, was never entirely clear to me. When I met him again in 2012 he was in the same, helpless condition of working without stability or social provisions, despite having graduated in the meantime and still being capable of speaking foreign languages. Meanwhile he had changed his job more than once, but he was not eager to discuss the details, and he limited himself to a laconic comment on the meagre pay, horrible working hours and the frustration that he derived from this. In his mid-thirties, he was still unable to start planning his marriage, the main way of getting out of the parental house for people in his situation – he mentioned a fiance´e, from his family’s village in the West Bank, but no plan for the foreseeable future. His condition is quite evidently one of stuckedness; not only is he unable to escape the informal sector, which is on the rise in Jordan as discussed above, but he does not see any possible future way out of this impasse.

Mohib Another graduate from the Faculty of Arts, language section, and a friend from the first months of my stay in Amman, Mohib, despite

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belonging to a family which was more upper middle class than Yazid, found himself in a similar condition. He worked as a translator, with the typical problems of this profession – hectic job commissions, both in time and in content, delay in payments, and uneven work distribution – and despite being quite happy with it he said that it was not enough to cover the expenses of his family, and that he had too much free time. At the time of my fieldwork he was not working regularly, and when we met in 2012 he had already had a few years of working experience. Moreover, he had married his fiance´e from his university years, like himself a Christian of Palestinian origin, and they were living together in their spacious flat in west Amman.18 Asma’ had a good position with an international agency, the typical formal waged employment in the private sector, and spent most of her day outside the home. Mohib worked from home, and alternated his translation job with his newer preoccupation, betting online on sporting events. He was becoming quite professional at this, and bet regularly on all kinds of events around the globe – he took some time one afternoon to explain to me the details of his calculations, the exact timing that had to pass before the bet reached its highest value, the importance of being at the events themselves when possible to profit from the few seconds advantage on those betting online, with not much success. But he made clear that this was a second occupation in itself, something that was guaranteeing an extra income of a few thousand dinars per year. Asma’ somewhat disapproved of his new passion, and Mohib took some precautions, such as betting with a credit card that was separate from their bank account, in order to always keep expenses under control. Interestingly, the situation of Mohib and his wife did not fit with the assumption, which appears in much of the expert literature, of a clear division between formal and informal employment. While Asma’ clearly worked in the formal waged sector, albeit private, he alternated the two conditions since his translation work was more or less official, while the betting was definitely informal. The informal work was not strictly speaking necessary to cover household expenses, as their official jobs were enough to cover this, particularly as they had no children. It was more a way for Mohib to keep himself busy during the long afternoons at home when translation work was limited. His condition did not reflect either the notion of waithood or of stuckedness, since he had a privileged life and was able to travel frequently for leisure abroad, and yet there was a

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fundamental rupture of the promise that a good education will lead to a good job, a rupture that caused frustration. This was further complicated by his absolute refusal to talk about politics, religion or social issues, as he had lost faith in any grand narrative. This overall sense of crisis is quite representative of the condition of most Jordanian youth in recent years, regardless of their actual economic condition, and it seems to have more to do with the impossibility of dealing with all the bad news coming from everywhere (Al-Tarawneh 2014).

Nabiha As mentioned in Chapter 3, Nabiha was already exceptionally busy as a student, dividing her time between family obligations, friends, her study and a multiplicity of other activities ranging from volunteer work to handicraft production. She graduated when I was about to leave, and then for some time we lost contact, but on subsequent visits, and particularly in 2012, I saw that she had not altered her active approach to life. As I argue elsewhere (Cantini forthcoming), she is among the students who did most to uproot my own biases, on multiple levels. Upon graduating she did not rush into marriage, but rather focused on her own career in an organisation that works with disabled children, and she continued travelling, even abroad. Eventually she did get married, and quite traditionally to a male cousin from her extended family, an important Jordanian tribe from Kerak, and the couple had a baby girl soon after. Surprisingly though, the couple live independently in a flat nowhere near either of their families, and Nabiha resumed her work soon after the baby was born. Her husband worked in Madaba as an army officer, and she spent most of her week alone, having to take care of her daughter, the flat and the work. We never spoke about the contractual details of her job, but she clearly belonged within the formal sector, and her husband was in public service. Despite the fact that she probably did not depend on her own wage for living, she insisted on continuing to work outside home, something that is very uncommon among women in her situation. The women I know in a similar position tend to abandon their jobs in favour of devoting more time to caring for their children, and normally keep themselves busy with philanthropic activity, something that is considered both appropriate and safe for the upper layers of Jordanian society.

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Also quite surprising is her insistence on staying in the country. Most female students I met subsequently followed a distinct path – marriage (not necessarily to someone from Amman or even Jordan), followed by emigration to countries where their husbands happen to have found employment, from Algeria and Gulf countries to Europe and North America. This extreme mobility is linked to several factors, some historical as Brand has argued, but also due to more recent economic developments in some of the destination countries, especially in terms of formal private waged employment in companies in the Gulf states (Kanna 2011). Having a good education is a crucial factor in finding a job that fits within the expectations that these students cultivate, as well as a partner who is suitable for the development of life trajectories that are increasingly regional if not global, and who consider mobility as a necessity, given the dire conditions of the Jordanian labour market and the structural restraints placed on women’s participation in the labour force. Such mobility, particularly when it is directed towards Arab countries, is quite in line with some of the goals of the education system as expressed in the Jordanian official discourse – cultivating brains for export, but with the maintenance of strong ties with families left in Amman. In such life trajectories the relevance of university education becomes clear. Despite all the constraints I have illustrated in this book – such as hierarchy among faculties and different disciplinary practices associated with different layers of the student population, political control and the impact of reforms that are altering the old understanding of what education means – the impact of education is quite clear in the lives of the former students with whom I kept in contact. While attempting to generalise from my experience would probably be misleading, my contention is that the university years open up possibilities and chances which are subsequently put to the test when reality, again in Boltanski’s understanding, comes into play.

The impact of education A few years after I left Amman, Wajiha’s life was changed by two interrelated events – the death of her ageing father who had been sick for many years, and a positive response from a master’s programme in Environment Studies at a university in Europe. She managed to convince

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her mother to let her go for the year of the programme, and she was thus able to realise the dream that she had carried with her since graduating, of going abroad to pursue postgraduate studies. While the death of the father would require a more elaborate analysis,19 it should be enough for the sake of a discussion on labour market trajectories to mention that this event was crucial in allowing Wajiha to follow this course. During the year in Europe we could not really keep in touch, apart from some sporadic contact online, through which I discovered that she had stopped donning the veil, and cut her hair, as well as enjoying fieldwork research and experiencing different lifestyles in the highly diverse community of students in the internationally-oriented master’s programme she attended. Upon returning to Amman, she found a job in a recently established company that deals with environmental issues, more or less the culmination of the dream she had since graduating. She had kept some of the old friends from the university years, but most of her time is now spent in the company of smart young people who work in her field. When we met in 2012, she was still living with her mother, although with a high degree of personal freedom due to her multiple job obligations that included frequent travel. Apparently her mother accepted the fact that Wajiha was no longer veiled – she had put on the veil against her family’s wishes, she told me – and that she is not going to be married anytime soon. Her new situation has put yet another strain on her marital chances, since not only has she been abroad alone, but she is actively pursuing her own objectives in her professional life, and is eager to stress that getting married is far from being a priority, and could not come at the expense of her professional life. On the contrary, if and when it happens, marriage has to be an added value to her own personal and professional development, and this attitude, despite the highly peculiar conditions of Wajiha’s life, seems to be increasingly shared by young professionals who are actively pursuing their own lives. Overstretching the argument would not do justice to the constant internal struggles that Wajiha deals with on an everyday basis. Negotiations of morality, what is acceptable not just in society’s terms but in her own as well, and of legitimate behaviour are always going on, and Wajiha could hardly be described as a revolutionary, normssubverting person. Despite all she has been through, she is a religious person who tries to come to terms with her own ambitions and desires in

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the environment that she had struggled so hard to get into. She is quite self-demanding from a moral point of view, and during our long conversations she was always eager to explain to me the reasons behind any behaviours or norms that I could not understand. It is within this religious background that all her actions are to be interpreted, or at least this is the position that she herself takes; they are consciously developed from a moral and idealistic point of view, quite overtly as part of a formative project that she is planning for herself, within the duties that her position imply and within her religion, even if in the rationalistic and personal form that she had gleaned from her father. Her educational trajectory, and the ways in which she navigated her way through the first years of independent adulthood, are revealing of the unexpected possibilities that a university education situated within the worldsystem might offer.

NOTES

Introduction

Youth and Education in Jordan

1. I quote some of this literature in the first two chapters; here it suffices to say that such studies are readily available on the internet, as a quick search under ‘Jordan higher education’ will confirm. 2. Schwedler quotes Jean and John Comaroff, who argue that ‘certain kinds of liberalization projects – particularly those that fetishize elections and civil society as markers of democracy – not only proceed under certain kinds of autocracy, but actually thrive there’ (Schwedler 2012: 261). 3. Universities are important sites for studying major contemporary changes in the structure and governance of the public sector and for exploring the specific ways the creation of markets for higher education and a so-called ‘knowledge economy’ are being imagined and enacted on local, national and global scales (Cantini 2016). 4. These authors look at universities in the USA, as well as studies done there. Their arguments are also valid for a discussion of universities in Jordan, given the international character of the university. 5. I use here, and throughout the book, the English translation of the French original, published in 2009, the one discussed at the LOST research group. My main reason for so doing is to use the professional translation rather than having to rely on my own. 6. Such a task cannot be performed by an individual, since, having a body, an individual is necessarily situated and can have only one point of view on the world (Boltanski 2011). 7. Graduate unemployment has established itself as a topic of study over more than two decades. While I deal with this in the last chapter, here I limit myself to quoting works on Egypt, where I also conducted research, such as Bennani-Chraibi and Farag (2007) and Tourne´ (2005), particularly significant because they address the link between official discourses on unemployment and neo-liberal reforms.

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8. This reflected in the reactions to my Arabic-speaking skills as well. If at the beginning the two sentences that I struggled to put together elicited a polite ‘you speak good Arabic’, toward the end of my field the reactions were much more mixed, ranging from polite compliments to puzzled questions on my precise interests in Jordan. Unluckily, this method requires a huge amount of time that I was seldom able to devote in the later stages of my research (both in 2005 and in 2012), when I was under more pressure to produce some results. The translation of Olivier de Sardan’s quote is, like all others, mine unless specified otherwise. 9. There are almost 50 names recorded in my field notes, perhaps half of whom have been constant presences during my fieldwork, with many unnamed further encounters; about a dozen of them were encountered in 2012 as well, with a few others being abroad. 10. I fully share the uneasiness expressed by other anthropologists about representing people and events, making them fit for an academic publication; most of the content of our exchanges is still not published.

Chapter 1 The University of Jordan 1. Of course there is quite a debate on this issue. The Hashemite regime is trying, especially in recent years, to show that Jordan has always been a ‘land of civilization’, and that it can trace its origin back to the Nabateans (see Maffi 2004). I do not want to enter into this debate here – it should be enough to note that at the moment of the foundation of the Emirate of Transjordan the total population did not exceed 200,000, mostly rural inhabitants of Bedouin descent. The emir himself and his family, which is still the ruling family of the kingdom, came from the Hijaz region, now in Saudi Arabia. 2. Again, it is inappropriate to go into further detail. Wilson (1987) provides quite a detailed history of the first 40 years of the emirate, until it became a kingdom, and her account is interesting mainly because it shows the depth and frequency of the contacts that the king-to-be used to have with almost all the other actors involved. Massad (2001) is also interesting because he shows in concrete terms how the state was slowly established, mainly through the inclusion of the tribes in the army, and through the establishment of a judicial system. 3. This is quite obviously still the case today, with wealthier students going to Western countries for their undergraduate and postgraduate education, while the less privileged access higher education through government scholarships. 4. The doubly problematic character of such a statement should be evident; the regional comparison is simply a rhetorical artifice, while the supposed independence from the government is contradicted by the full cooperation with government agencies. This contradiction will be made explicit in what follows. 5. As Jansen notes, Jordan seems to be a positive exception when compared to several other Arab countries. She contends that, apart from prestige in culturedness, the expansion and privatisation of education was an expression of, as well as having a positive impact upon, the participation of girls (Jansen 2006: 474). ‘At the most

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competitive state institution, Jordan University in Amman, 65.9% of the first year students were girls in 1998. This “over-representation” of girls among the first year students reflects the fact that girls consistently outperform boys in secondary school exams in a broad range of subjects’ (Ibid.: 480). Interestingly, the facts and figures provided by the University of Jordan on its website indicate quite different numbers for the faculty staff. According to the university, the academic staff (including part-time lecturers and the Aqaba branch) totals 1,628. Gender is not included in the statistics provided. This discrepancy in figures is not uncommon, and although it largely depends on ‘who counts what’ – the case of a highly variable number of students given in different studies, for instance, could be attributed to the inclusion or otherwise of community colleges – it could also be taken as an indicator of a certain lack of coordination among different institutions. Although especially in the Jordanian case the regional dimension was always important, with graduates seen as the main national export, as is discussed in Chapter 5. For example, the National Youth Strategy states that ‘Jordan has developed one of the best educational systems in the Middle East, and ensured that educational programmes are linked to national development plans and females are fully integrated’. The goal is to develop ‘a comprehensive and integrated national education and training approach which develops the thinking and creativity of young people’ (National Youth Strategy). The MOHE website states that ‘Jordan’s educational role has become so effective as of what has been known about the high quality of its educational system, the thing which makes it the focus of attention and admiration in the region [. . .] and this is clearly reflected in the number of foreign students studying at the Jordanian universities which is close to 28,000 students from around the world’ (MOHE Brief Intro). These reforms, however, largely failed, as I detail in Chapter 2. The need to reform the Jordanian higher education sector is still a hot topic in the national public sphere. Information on Jordan is taken from the Jordan Human Development Report, 2000, pp. 53 –60. Jordan Human Development Report, 2000, p. 51. The category of foreign students is a particularly significant one, both for economic and for prestige reasons; Jordan fares quite well in regional competition, and ranks fifth worldwide for south-south student (i.e. the share of students abroad who do not go to countries belonging to the ‘global north’) mobility (Razafimahefa and Raynal 2014). On the other hand, there is a considerable number of Jordanian students (about 25,000) who prefer to study at universities outside Jordan. Where students study is often based on the income of the family; students from wealthy families tend to study in Western Europe and North America while middle class families send their children to countries such as Ukraine, Russia, Egypt and Syria, where the cost of living is lower (Massadeh 2012a: 9).

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13. Jansen provides an example, recounting that the decision of a professor to leave the private sector to enter the public one was motivated by a desire for greater job security. ‘She said that private universities offer higher initial salaries but, as businesses, they quickly react to the market and readily dismiss staff when profits decline or when they can hire refugee Iraqi professors at a much lower salary’ (Jansen 2006: 477). 14. For more information on the relationship between Palestinians and Jordanians in modern Jordan, see Chapter 4. For more details on the establishment of private universities in Jordan, see Massadeh (2012b: 154 – 177). 15. The mukhabarat, or security services, have a strong presence within the life of the university. Until the early 1990s, appointments of professors had to be cleared by the mukhabarat, something that is still necessary to obtain a government scholarship to study abroad. The deans and presidents are nominated by the Council of Higher Education, whose members are appointed by the king, and he can approve or veto their choices. I am grateful to Lucine Taminian for making this explicit to me; in a way, the mukhabarat can be considered the gatekeepers to the academic profession. 16. It should be noted, however, that the most prestigious among private schools currently have their own programmes, text books and teaching methods. These schools prepare their students to pass ‘foreign’ exams and not the tawjihi. I am again grateful to Lucine Taminian for pointing this out. 17. The National Youth Strategy focuses on deepening the ‘comprehensive concept of national culture within the minds of young people, and finding effective ways to enable them to contribute positively to the formulation of national information’, by enhancing the understanding and the appreciation of young people regarding their national culture. This is done by providing ‘clear concepts of Jordanian national culture’, as well as ‘elements of positive culture, values, customs and behaviours’ (National Youth Strategy). 18. This paradox is not the only one, of course. For example, Fida Adely notices that in high school textbooks ‘even the state’s own gendered narrative in the curriculum is at times inconsistent, reflecting the competing interests and perspectives of a variety of state representatives’ (Adely 2012: 85). Similar conflicting tendencies can also be traced in university reforms, as well as in international cooperation, as I discuss in Chapter 2. 19. The idea of crisis is quite fundamental in spreading globalisation (Friedman and Friedman 2013). Crisis also belongs to earlier phases in the development of universities, most notably the crisis of nationalism triggered the crisis of the ‘developmentalist university’ (Mamdani 2008). 20. I deal with this more extensively in Chapter 5. Ragui Assaad, one of the leading specialists on school-to-work transition in Arab countries, once explained to me that no matter how bad employment prospects are for university graduates, these prospects are usually better than for those who do not hold a university degree (personal communication, January 2011).

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21. They tend to have rather different perspectives on higher education reforms. See for example Osama Abi-Mershed’s account of tensions at a couple of conferences organised at Georgetown University in 2006– 7 (Abi-Mershed 2012). 22. Private schools are also stratified, with those run by a member of the royal family (such as Kings’ Academy, Amman Baccalaureate School and Amman International Academy) or big businesses (such as Amman Academy, al-Mashriq, Cambridge and Oxford) being at the top, followed by those run by small businesses, Islamic organisations, etc. Similar distinctions in quality apply to public schools, with urban public schools in rich neighbourhoods being at the top, and schools in rural and poor urban areas at the bottom, usually with no students passing the tawjihi. The prestigious high schools run Arabic and English programmes, and have their own text books which they import from the USA or UK. Almost all their graduates get admitted to Western universities. Upon graduating, they are recruited by prestigious state offices (the Royal Court, the office of the prime minister, etc.) where they are trained for their future career. The majority of high ranking state officials, big business men and bankers are graduates of these schools (Lucine Taminian, personal communication). 23. This is then reprised in Chapter 3, where I introduce the ways in which students construct their ‘reality’ out of this institution, building distinctions and separations among themselves that are at times encouraged by the shape of the institution. 24. In higher education in Jordan, wasta works via informal and/or family relationships with influential or high positioned bureaucrats and others in many government departments, but the higher education sector in particular promotes this procedure, which plays an unfair role in distributing university seats to unqualified students. Good relations with lecturers can automatically lead to students receiving high grades, even if their work does not merit them, and these students may become the future lecturers within Jordanian higher education institutions upon their graduation (Massadeh 2012a). Professor Mahafaza, currently the historian at the University of Jordan, and former president of Yarmouk University, criticised this use of wasta, the tribal influence and the social nepotism, not only in giving seats and promoting students but also in appointing and promoting teaching staff at the universities (Massadeh 2012a: 10; Reiter 2002: 150). For more on wasta in Jordan, see Chapter 5. 25. The way in which most interlocutors recall their tawjihi makes it sound like a rite of passage, especially when it is portrayed as an ideal contrast to the corrupt present practices. 26. The issue is debated; for example an article appeared in the Jordan Times in July 2012 claiming that ‘under Royal directives amending the foundations of the Royal makruma’, the Royal Court will no longer allocate university seats for tawjihi graduates under certain quotas, but will provide 1,420 scholarships to students accepted in public universities within the unified admission list as of the 2012/13 scholastic year. Yet the directives for admission of students to

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Jordanian public universities for the academic year 2013/14 are available online (http://admhec.gov.jo/AdmissionRules.aspx). The privileges include the 20 per cent for those serving in the army and in the security services; 15 seats are then allocated to the sons of ‘martyrs’ of the army, and another 15 to students from remote regions; 5 per cent are for children of officials and retirees of the Ministry of Education. In addition, there is automatic eligibility for children and grandchildren of past and present members of the Council for Higher Education, of the Board of Trustees, and of the employees in each university. An additional 5 per cent is reserved for Jordanians who studied abroad, 10 per cent for the sons of the tribes, and 10 per cent for sub-standard schools, plus a number of other privileges. The only makruma that deals specifically with Palestinians is the one relative to the children of the mukhaiyyamat, the refugee camps, who received 350 seats for the abovementioned year. It should be noted, however, that some makrumat, particularly those for the army and for the less privileged communities, allow children of relatively poor families to make it to the best public universities. 27. This makes studying at the University of Jordan quite expensive, comparable to studying at a private university. Yet the prestige associated with the public university makes this a preferable choice for many students (and their families). In public universities, the fees required from students vary significantly depending upon the specialism and type of admission. Fees are determined per credit hour, with the normal student load being about 18 credit hours per semester. For students on regular programmes, fees are lowest for arts specialisms (around 5 euros per credit hour), then increase for technical specialisms such as engineering and pharmacy, where they are about 20– 30 euros per credit hour, and reach 40 or 50 euros per credit hour for medicine and dentistry. Hence, for students on regular programmes, fees range from about 100 to about 1,000 euros per semester (EU Commission 2010: 5). The last price increase, in June 2014, set the credit hour in Medicine at JD 200 (220 euros) for the regular programme, while the parallel one requires twice as much. It is easy to see that prices are increasing exponentially, as is the case in other countries as well (UK for instance). 28. Similar discussions take place in neighbouring countries such as Egypt. I deal with the issue of privatisation of higher education in the Arab world in Cantini (2016). 29. The policies regarding the parallel programme are not accepted by many people in Jordan, as they could change the structure of Jordanian society in coming years, eventually bringing about a situation in which higher education will be limited to the rich who can afford it (see Chapter 4). This parallel system has been described by some academics as an indirect privatisation policy within a government institution, something that is occurring also in other countries in the region (for Egypt see Farag 2009). From an expert perspective, although difficult to escape because of the dire financial situation (Kanaan 2009), there is a certain consensus around the fact that the parallel programme may hinder the

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quality of Jordanian public universities, for example in exacerbating problems of registration to classes. The discourse on class is quite problematic in this regard, as the university cannot be conceived any longer as providing the main class barrier between the working class and the middle class. In Jordan, the elite send their offspring to complete their studies abroad, as do the upper middle class. Nonetheless, the parallel programme is intended to benefit the more solvent middle class (those who have benefitted from neo-liberal economic reforms) at the expense of lower strata of the population – with the exception of those protected by the state. This is particularly evident at the faculty level. In her detailed critique of the Arab Human Development Report, Fida Adely states that ‘few females or males really have a choice about the field they will enter; rigid high school completion and/or university entrance exams [. . .] typically tunnel students into certain fields depending on performance. Furthermore, a tracking system, based on academic performance put higherperforming students on the track to math and the sciences early on in their academic careers’ (Adely 2009c: 116). This is well known in literature. Already in the late 1980s, Shami noted that ‘in spite of the emphasis on science and technology, the social sciences as a whole are quite well represented at Arab universities in terms of both number of departments and number of students, especially at the undergraduate level. These departments were developed mostly to help absorb those students who were not ‘lucky’ enough to be admitted to the more competitive departments of sciences and professional schools. They provided a cheap alternative, since the courses basically depended on lectures, could absorb large numbers of students, and did not require expensive equipment or specialized laboratories. The establishment of social science departments is also related to another role that the university often fulfils in Arab society: that of a containing and even a conservative force’ (Hijazi 1986, quoted in Shami 1989: 651). The few classes I attended in the scientific stream were almost invariably taught in Arabic, usually in dialect, and with occasional references to English. This has been noted by other scholars; ‘the education system indoctrinates these literacies in students along lines deeply stratified by social class, gender and ethnicity. Education therefore places the student on a particular level in the education hierarchy. Some are initiated by their education and their social background into the content and techniques of the dominant literacy in each type, which explains their continuance in high positions. Others are denied this initiation and are given less adequate, under-resourced and neglected educational channels that extend subordinate literacies. These students are penalized as being of inferior worth and are given lower status in society’ (Taji 2004: 172–3). Writing about universities in the Middle East, Shaw notes that ‘after schooling, the survivors often arrive at higher education socialized to transmissive teaching and dependency on the text’ (quoted in Sultana 1999: 33). Sultana also quotes

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reports from the 1980s and the 1990s already making the same point, namely that the formal lecture method, memorisation of notes and textbooks, and examination-oriented teaching are the norm, with students having little opportunity for discussion, questioning or meeting professors. This remark echoes the reflections provided by Bourdieu: ‘programmed individuals – provided with a homogenous programme of perception, thought and action – are the most specific product of an educational system’ (1967: 340). A male professor in the Faculty of Education started shouting during one of his classes, a large audience mainly composed of female students, and most of whom were covered with hijab complemented by a black robe. His contention was that teaching them was simply useless, as the only good thing that they could achieve in their lives would be to go back to their villages, get married, have and nurture children. What struck me most was the total absence of reaction from the students. Similar behaviour would not be tolerated in the better faculties. I could never obtain official permission to enter classes, nor to carry out research at the university, despite my attempts. In some cases, especially when there were large crowds of students, I simply entered the classroom, sitting in one of the last rows of seats, usually in the company of one of the students whom I spent time with. In smaller contexts, I had to make personal contact with the professor or the lecturer, and I was usually allowed to attend one or two classes without having to obtain official permission. (I was usually told that a longer stay would have required some explanation in the class, and might have caused controversy. When I explained the purpose of my research, most professors were eager to share their ideas on teaching methodologies with me.) In a couple of cases, I was referred to the Dean of the Faculty, but as far as I know, this official step bore no practical consequences. This general trend has been also recognised outside the education system. Schools and universities are a central stage for the performance of national culture and patriotic sentiment in Jordan as in much of the globe, from the USA to Japan and India. This reliance on patronage as a primary source of revenue is ‘constitutional’ to higher education institutions worldwide (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 138), and it is used to legitimise other powerful institutions in society, including the ruler in authoritarian settings such as Jordan. This was recognised by Ibn Khaldun in his Muqaddimah, in which he states that at times of peace men of pen are more useful to the ruler to legitimise his ambitions and to show the excellent condition of his reign. Graduation ceremonies could be taken as ‘the legitimating glue that holds the entire enterprise of higher education together, the official business that rationalizes, blesses, and even renders invisible the other myriad functions of universities’ (Stevens, Armstrong and Arum 2008: 142). The official rule that requires only three or four people per graduating student to attend the ceremony is seldom respected. From the morning, entrance to the

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university lane, which is parallel to the main traffic street, is almost impossible because of the parked cars. The scene is completed by street vendors in greater number than usual, and the whole setting has the atmosphere of a popular celebration. Students speak the ‘ammiyya (dialect) of their place of origin. Normally they all understand classical Arabic, but they are seldom able to express themselves fully in this language. The ability to read is more widespread, at least among university students. The writing skills are harder to obtain, since classical Arabic is a highly sophisticated language. Students of the scientific curriculum are accustomed to studying entirely in English, some of them have difficulty studying a book in Arabic, and many of them regard books written in Arabic as pretty useless anyway. Having access to such a faculty was possible only through a friend from Turkey who was at the university at the time pursuing her PhD research in Muslim rites – the only foreigners that are to be seen here are non-Arabic speaking Muslims coming to Jordan to study both Shariʽa and Arabic. This is of course his version of the story. When I returned in 2012, I learnt that he had moved to Saudi Arabia in order to teach. This was a rather common trajectory, privileging economic security over a constant struggle to ‘change the system from within’. I met a few other professors in his situation, not necessarily young, and they were among the more generous in their time with me. Similar examples are not rare, and are often discussed privately by almost everyone populating the faculty. One of the more evident examples of this was the case of Professor Rula Quwwas, who was removed from her position as the Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages at the University of Jordan in nebulous circumstances (Lavalle´e-Be´langer 2012). I selected this example also because it shows with little doubt that my presence heavily influenced the lesson setting.

Chapter 2 University Reforms 1. The notion of mimetic isomorphism was firstly coined by Di Maggio and Powell (1983). 2. Official emphasis notwithstanding, it seems safe to indicate that a high degree of political control over top appointments at universities is still the norm. 3. While, among other things, the first is responsible for conducting studies, and collecting data and information, on the higher education sector, the latter assumes responsibility for students’ admission into public universities according to the principles approved by the Council of Higher Education (MOHE brief intro). 4. Such as the TOEFL certificate as an admission criteria to join master’s and PhD programmes, the update and digitisation of all university libraries; and the establishment of a Scientific Research Support Fund that finances projects of national priority, offering grants for outstanding graduates, awarding prizes for outstanding research, etc. (MOHE Brief Intro).

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5. In the UK context, it has been noted that metrics have profound and unanticipated consequences, such as the institutional ‘isomorphism’ (Di Maggio and Powell, 1983) that accompanies global university league tables, or strategically instrumentalist responses to research evaluation exercises and student experience surveys. The new politics of measurement is simultaneously also linked to a profound, and intensely resented, reordering of academic governance (Mills and Ratcliffe 2012: 150–1). 6. Wright and Rabo also note that the academic literature on university reform gives attention to policy makers, managers and academics but rarely discusses students’ reactions to reform agendas and their own aspirations for their institutions. I will take up this challenge in Chapter 4. 7. The title of Fida Adely’s book, Gendered Paradoxes (2012), captures a similar set of tensions, in her case more focused on notions of gender and development. 8. Another study has slightly different figures. Public spending on higher education in Jordan declined from 2.5 per cent of the country’s GDP in 1991 to 1.3 per cent in 2011 (Chapman 2011). This second study nevertheless supports the conclusion that public expenditure has declined in recent decades. Expenditure on the military and defence are around 14 per cent of GDP. 9. This represents one of the most contentious issues among students and families, of course, as well as representing a major argument for associations that try to change the direction of the reforms, such as Thabahtoona (see Chapter 4). See for example ‘UJ breaks its promise and raises master’s fees by 100 – 180%’, 4 June 2014, http://www.thab7toona.org/?p¼943. The government has imposed a special tax, called the university tax, which is collected by the relevant government departments on a number of services, and paid to universities through the Ministry of Finance. This tax raised a reasonable amount of revenue when Jordan had just one public university, but now that there are ten, it is quite small, when compared with the overall needs of universities. In general, one can say that one half to two thirds of the budget of public universities comes from the tuition fees paid by students. Most public universities have introduced special programmes for which students pay much higher fees than those students who are admitted on a competitive basis, in an attempt to ameliorate the financial situation. In addition to fees and government contributions, universities have (a small) income generated from services provided to the public and from their own resources and investments (European Commission 2010: 4). 10. In a recent interview, the President of the University of Jordan asserted that, in order to avoid raising student fees, their investments will have to cover 50 per cent of the budget (Faek 2013). 11. This disparity in quality has of course a close relationship with the fact that students with the highest averages in the tawjihi are admitted to public universities, while those who are not accepted apply to public, as parallel students, or to private universities.

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12. ‘The university has provided the students with everything they need to get degrees they want easily and comfortably’ (University of Jordan Aqaba branch website). This kind of statement is usually to be found in advertisements for private universities, and it contributes to fears of low quality in education. 13. ‘Prime Minister Samir Rifai on Monday highlighted comprehensive reforms in Jordan. At a meeting with US Undersecretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs Maria Otero, the Premier said reforms have improved democratic life in Jordan and enhanced the role of women and youths in all aspects of public life. Rifai also commended Jordanian-US relations and the outcomes of King Abdullah’s recent meeting with US President Barack Obama and other American officials. For her part, Otero commended Jordan as a model of reform in the region’ (Jordan Times, 27 March 2010). 14. Although Jordan’s dependence on international aid has been well documented since the very inception of Hashemite rule. 15. It is to be noted that, among the few justifications offered by the World Bank for its call for greater flexibility and accountability in the system (since these reforms and their goals are typically presented as intrinsically desirable, not requiring further defence) is that it will help Jordan, amidst increased regional competition, to keep foreign students and compete with rapidly improving higher education options in the Gulf and other countries. 16. The list is far from being exhaustive, as further initiatives frequently emerge, at least in the present configuration. Here I simply follow the World Bank’s 2009 assessment of parallel programmes that have been implemented in the context of international attempts to develop ‘know-how’, changing the way in which higher education is conceived and organised in Jordan. Jordan is generally among the biggest receivers of aid in the region (Peters and Moore 2009). ‘Since the Iraq war, US economic assistance to Jordan famously doubled to $US 250 million in economic assistance and $US 200 million in military assistance. The Euro-Med Partnership provided Jordan with e570 million, making the kingdom the second-largest EU recipient per capita after Palestine. And, in 2006, the Millennium Challenge Corporation qualified Jordan as a threshold country by, providing $US 25 million annually for “political rights, voice & accountability, and trade policy”.’ (Schwedler 2012: 264). 17. Some agencies spell out their ultimate goal quite clearly, with education being one of the three components of comprehensive reform, the others being economic and political. In a post 9/11 optic, ‘of particular concern are youth who are out of school and could pose a threat to established order/civic unrest. High unemployment rates, and low school to work transition rates are key areas of concern to the Bureau’ (USAID/ANE Bureau). 18. These include the usual programmes on youth, technical education, and civic and democratic participation, as well as programmes on reproductive health and support for small and medium enterprises, to name just a few. For this section

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I am indebted to Abel Piqueras, at the time of my last period of fieldwork a member of the EU Commission in Jordan, for his attention to my research, and his generosity with both time and information. 19. It is to be noted that the first phase of TEMPUS, between 1990 and 1993, was established ‘to respond to the needs for higher education reform in Central and Eastern European countries, following the fall of the Berlin Wall’ (TEMPUS website). The geopolitical utilisation of academic cooperation should be apparent.

Chapter 3 Living the University 1. The University of Jordan hosted the International Leadership Academy, a branch of the United Nations University, the headquarters of which are in Tokyo. This closed down a few years ago due to budgetary problems, but it was not an isolated initiative. The Japanese Agency for Development funded a building for the study of the exact sciences, for example. These are just two examples of the many forms of international contribution to the shaping of the campus. 2. The privatisation of parts of public universities is not a uniquely Jordanian phenomenon, and is quite developed, for example, in Egypt (Farag 2009) and other parts of the Arab world. 3. This complaint is usually to be heard from professors in the faculties that receive less funds. For example, a junior professor in Biology showed me some of the laboratories in his faculty – while some are decaying, others are simply left abandoned. One in particular, on the ground floor, has been unofficially converted into a staff latrine. 4. Students from Amman and from private schools in general tend to perform better at the tawjihi and this is the reason for having a quota for students from dispossessed areas (see Chapter 1). 5. For an interesting parallel analysis of how students’ identities are linked with spaces within the campus at the University of Cairo, see Dessouqi (2011). She identifies several categories of students (regular students, those who seem to lack any motivation and just hang around, those who are politically active, those who belong to religious or ethnic minorities, those who seek flirtatious encounters, and those who are religiously motivated). Each of these groups has a more or less defined space within the campus, and other students observe distinctions between themselves. Despite the fact that some phenomena seem to be quite absent from the context of the University of Jordan, such as the open use of drugs, most of the categories that she mentions are also valid there. Importantly, the link between space and identity is quite strong. 6. This is a recurrent theme in most ethnographies in the region, from the scene described by Suad Joseph of the family fights in Burj Hammoud (Joseph 1994) to the recognition of the permeability between the mosque and the neighbourhood sounds, in a space where everyone knows what happens in the

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next house (Mahmood 2005: 91). In Amman, this is prevalent in poor rather than in wealthy neighbourhoods, as Lucine Taminian noted. This is somewhat in line with a reflection by the so-called Birmingham School, particularly in a book entitled Policing the Crisis, which pointed out the role schooling played as a ‘cultural battleground’, positioning people in the social hierarchy on the basis of their class, race and gender (Lave, Duguid and Fernandez 1992). Although veiling is now prevalent throughout the country, there remain some spaces in which a woman who is veiled is marked as ‘traditional’ or oppressed. Thus, the struggles surrounding the terms of Islam, education and progress for women were very much local ones enmeshed with other contests for power and influence within Jordan itself. (Adely 2012: 303). Jalabiyya, whether long or Pakistani style, is associated with religiosity: the former with moderate Salafism and the latter with strict or Jihadi-Salafism. The religious hat is normally worn only by religious students, while the hatta is more common; worn around the neck it is associated with Palestinian identity if black and Jordanian if red. Red hatta worn on the head is associated with Jordanian tribalism. I am grateful to Lucine Taminian for the comment. Sandals are one indicator of being working class, and are therefore carefully avoided. Shorts above the knee are uncommon, perhaps due to religious prohibition – the only male student I remember constantly wearing them was half foreign (his mother was Spanish, a condition negatively characterised in Jordan as bint ajnabiyya, indicating lack of authenticity) and a self-declared atheist, which was very rare. Seasonal changes are also an indicator of class, with wealthy students wearing jumpers in winter and light pullovers in summer, indicating that they have access to conditioned environments, while poorer students are heavily covered in the cold winter months. ‘Sheikh’ usually denotes a man with religious authority and in Jordan could simply refer to tribal leaders (Shryock 1997). In this context, however, the term is used half mockingly to designate whoever wears a jalabiyya and sports a long beard, as significant symbols of a despised alterity. Needless to say, negative bias is reciprocated, and girls like Asal could easily be labelled as easy, infidel and even prostitute, occasionally even by passers-by. I heard several versions of this from various sources. This repetition in itself shows the relevance of this particular divide, not between religious and secular students (the latter being a decidedly rare category in Jordan, not to mention the deep debates around these twin notions in the last years) but between students who think that religion should regulate all kinds of things, especially on campus (these are known as mutaddayyn, ‘the religious ones’), and those who think that religion is just a part of one’s own identity. Students such as Nabiha (a veiled Muslim girl), for instance, speak of Shariʽa students as mutakhallifin (backward). This divide has a political dimension as well, which I will explore in Chapter 4. A similar point is made by Kabatilo, who surveys university students’ ideas about religion and the state and concludes that ‘gender, social

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classes, religiosity and country of origin, rather than the Islamists’ discourse, play the most important roles in the definition, reproduction and understanding of the Islamic state, shariʽa and religious moralities concepts’ (Kabatilo 2013: 105). In addition to these differences, mukhamara women, with complete veil, usually enjoy more freedom than the muhajaba and non-muhajaba. The khimar, the face veil, makes them anonymous and thus more mobile, and they can move freely around the city. They are sometimes associated with illicit activities and particularly prostitution; they can do things that other women cannot do, simply because nobody knows who they are, or at least this is the prevalent rumour about them. There weren’t many of them on campus, at least during my main fieldwork, and thus they tend to be easily ascribed to certain places. I do not intend to enter into an elaborate discussion of intersubjectivity as the mode of the ethnographic encounter, but this was highly relevant in my research context, as I interacted more as a fellow student than as an ethnographer with a precise research design. As one professor commented, at the margins of the presentation of my field data at the University of Modena, for any and each piece of information that I provide about any student there is information about myself that is exchanged – this was especially true when discussing common concerns, such as love or entrance into the labour market. This reflected heavily on my bodily practice, especially at the gesture level – my proxemics was quite altered, as my brother noticed upon my return home. For a recent debate on the notion of intersubjectivity in anthropology, see White and Strohm (2014). This habit used to annoy me, especially when I had managed to direct the conversation somewhere that I felt was quite literally noteworthy, worthy of being entered into my field notes – a constant preoccupation during my time on campus. But I return to this. Reflecting upon these frequent moments, I think that what was more annoying was a different conception of private talk, namely the fact that it was not recognised as such. Walter Armbrust (1999) argues that the mixed gender character of elite leisure practices (the mingling of women and men in public spaces) has provided a focal point for contestation throughout the twentieth century. The presence of women in public leisure spaces has been a major marker of cosmopolitan or ‘Westernised’ elite practices, which have long been taken to indicate modernity and sophistication, and have legitimised elite status and prerogatives. ‘Gossip, kalam al-nas, can develop a particularly destructive power with regard to young women’s honourable reputation. Young people are generally well aware of it and keep complaining about other people’s talk about them and their alleged misbehaviours’ (Droeber 2005: 82). In her analysis of young women’s lives, Julia Droeber found that gossip is a burden for them, although the real impact of it is difficult to see in many cases, where consequences tend to be anticipated rather than actually felt (see Ibid., pp. 82 – 6). It should be recalled that Amman is hardly a place for stay-out-late students, with some exceptions (Schwedler 2010), and that clubbing is definitely an

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activity that most of these girls would not even consider. But a curfew at 8pm is considered severe even by Amman standards, at least by those who are not subject to it. There is a prevailing idea that less affluent female students, and those of rural background, will take pains to pass as middle class and urban. Gossip has them shopping in the second-hand market or outlet shops, where they may find ‘fashionable’ clothes, in addition to exercising, observing a strict diet, adopting the women’s Ammani dialect and their gestures, and so on. I will elaborate on this in Chapter 5. Students could have known a lot about other students, because Jordan is a small country where collective identities, such as geographical origin or extended family, are strongly felt, though it’s rare that someone will admit this outright, and only prolonged acquaintance will allow this kind of information to emerge, especially if the identification has painful consequences. I was informed about an incident which occurred at Yarmouk University, in which students hid behind a building to eat during Ramadan. They were reported to the guards by students from the Muslim Brotherhood, and the guards beat them harshly, some ending up with bloody noses. No action was taken against the guards. It has recently been argued that the religiously minded educated middle class combine Islamic traditions with pluralistic, individualised post-modern values, while the lower middle class are associated with the ‘peer-group oriented model of first modernity represented by the Muslim Brotherhood’ (Jung, Petersen and Sparre 2014: 106). While such a division is too neat, it nonetheless indicates that religious preoccupations are shared by all strata of society. For an overview of debates on subjectivity and Islam, see Abenante and Cantini (2014). According to Anderson, students are instructed that ‘individual transgression will lead to disintegration of society’ (2007: 81–2) and that Western influences will corrupt the Muslim world intellectually and culturally. This perception of a ‘crisis’ is in direct contradiction to the promises of national development, prosperity and security that education is meant to ensure (Adely 2012: 305). My initial idea was to engage with political, especially religious, activists to try to understand the challenges of political Islam (I began my fieldwork in March 2003, immediately after the invasion of Iraq, when such discourses were highly prominent). As months passed, the initial casual contacts made as a student of Arabic at the University of Jordan kept leading to other contacts, while at the same time developing into prolonged relationships that in some cases have lasted to the present time. The initial focus on the extraordinary, the political and the heroic gradually shifted to an interest in the everyday, the gestures, the plans for the future. The interest in Islam evolved into a broader interest in the challenges of becoming adult, which of course includes religious preoccupations but also more mundane issues and choices. And possibly to answer the question ‘why not Jordan?’ raised in the context of the Arab revolts of 2011 –12.

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Chapter 4 Political Activism on Campus 1. It is to be noted that in the broader Amman context the distinction between different kinds of citizens is not made in any particularly explicit way. ‘It is not that the elite, as a function of their wealth, have greater access to the protections and rights accorded by the constitution, but the specific rights being actively advanced, prioritized, and protected by the government are those related to a neoliberal vision of economic growth (foreign investment and cosmopolitan consumerism), at the expense of other rights (such as the freedom of political expression, popular participation, and assembly for the purpose of political protest). As argued below, these benefits do not map neatly or exclusively along class lines, but spatially: those residing, working, or traversing particular spaces, regardless of economic class, may reap at least some of the benefits of these reform priorities’ (Schwedler 2012: 266). 2. I am grateful to Lucine Taminian for this insight. 3. ‘The University of Jordan continued to grant its president authority to appoint half of its 80-member student council, including the chair. This measure was viewed widely as an effort to curb the influence of campus Islamists. Many students, including non-Islamists, continued to object to the university’s policy’ (US Department of State 2006). 4. The Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most established movements on campus, a result of its long and complex relationship with the Hashemite regime. At the time of my fieldwork, students considered it to be almost the only organised movement on campus in opposition to the regime, but at different times in Jordanian history it was almost the only legal movement allowed on campus, due to its function in curbing the leftist and Nasserist oppositions (Schwedler 2006, Singh 2002). Singh emphasises that for leftists the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be considered a true oppositional force. 5. This is not the place for a thorough discussion of the evolution of political parties in Jordan, and it shall suffice to mention that martial law had been in place since 1957, and even since it was revoked in 1989 political parties have not been able to gather any significant political base (see Lust-Oskar 2001). The Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a well-recognised exception, but nonetheless operates more in the social than in the political sphere, is especially strong in the professional associations (Longuenesse 2007), and has been allowed to operate because it does not directly challenge royal authority. Indeed, the Brotherhood was not opposed to the regime until the Wadi Araba treaty in 1994. The relative political liberalisation in the 1990s ‘comes in response to increasing domestic threats. It is intended to preserve the regime, not foster political change’ (Lust-Oskar 2001: 565). 6. However, these notes should be handled with care, for the political situation in Jordan has been rather unstable since the outbreak of protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, among other countries, especially given the new relevance that different branches of the Muslim Brotherhood are acquiring in some of these states. At the

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time of writing, though, the crises in Egypt and Syria seem to have a stabilising effect on the kingdom. Ghazi is known for his religious tendencies, presents himself as a kind of a Gulf sheikh and adopts their attire, long white dishadasha, brownish silk ‘abaya on top, and hatta. The over-simplistic explanation he presents, adopting a Khaldunian approach (I am grateful to Lucine Taminian for pointing this out), and his role in mediation, essentialises the question and overlooks the complexity of the entanglement between tribal belonging and the Hashemite rule (Shryock 1997). I had the same expectation whenever military operations involving mass killings of Palestinians, including many children, occurred, a sadly recurrent phenomenon, especially in the Gaza Strip throughout 2004. In a different context, Lukose (2005) discusses male college students in Kerala, India, and their political activism. She makes an important contribution to the theorisation of youth by demonstrating how ‘youth’ in Kerala is a gender inflected category, and associated with masculine political agency. She connects this with larger questions regarding emergent meanings of democratic citizenship – meanings that are rooted in two competing views of the public, a political public and a civic public (Cultural Anthropology 2011). The University of Jordan seems to be rather different, since political activism is far from being the norm among students, even at the level of ideals. Moreover, it can hardly be described as being a male activity, as Zeinat and other female students demonstrate. However, from a theoretical point of view it is impossible to dismiss the role of universities in enabling and shaping political activism. I am grateful to Ala Al-Hamarneh for pointing this out to me. I owe this detailed description to Lucine Taminian, an eyewitness of the events. Moreover, universities are also controlled at the faculty level (see Chapter 1), and politically motivated appointments (or rejections) are the norm. Most professors are quite eager to discuss cases, always ‘next door’, and some exceptional cases are also discussed among students. The same applies to civil society and its associations, at least at the official level. ‘Once created, these organizations were embedded in a web of bureaucratic practices and legal codes which allows those in power to monitor and regulate collective activities [. . .] Under such circumstances, civil society institutions are more an instrument of state social control than a mechanism of collective empowerment’ (Wiktorowicz 2000: 43). Antoun (2000) opens up a discussion on informal civil society that challenges some widely circulated opinions, and I follow his line of argument at least partly in the next chapter. He nonetheless acknowledges that ‘the royal quota system that gives preference to students of Transjordanian origin was not expressly designed to alter the political balance in the universities. However, the link between a special proregime faction for the student council and the royal quotas for students, in a case where the government took the extraordinary step of acting politically against

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opposition elements, suggests that the regime is fully aware of the political consequences of the quota policy’ (Reiter 2002: 162). ‘That same year, all the members of the student council resigned in protest at the university administration having raised tuition fees without consulting them. The local affairs editor of the establishment newspaper al-Ra’i wrote that the university administration would not allocate an activities budget for the student council, that it was putting the councils’ members under investigation on the basis of their activities in defence of students’ rights, and that it would not permit them to conduct activities in university auditoriums’ (Reiter 2002: 161). It should be remembered that, strictly speaking, most Jordanians and Palestinians belong to tribes, and this was also the case in the 1950s and 1960s, when political ideologies dominated. My contention is that, after political ideologies declined as a consequence of policies pursued by the regime, one of the few arenas left in which it was possible to manifest discontent was the resort to tribal identification. While discussions of nepotism and patronage (which I discuss in the next chapter) were quite common, they were not specifically framed in a tribal language. Tribally motivated violence is found outside the university as well, with incidents in emergency departments of hospitals and associated with housing disputes reported in the media. The fact that officials request greater implementation of the rule of law should be further put in the Jordanian context, in which legal decisions are erratic at best (when overt manipulation of rules is not simply the norm), and corruption is widespread in many sectors of society. Similar things are happening in other places as well, marking recent developments in the understanding of a university’s function. An example is the new campus library of the American University of Cairo, access to which (in an already secluded campus, far away from the city) is restricted by similar electronic turnstiles. In this case, control is further enhanced by the fact that the photo of each card that is used to enter the library is automatically projected on a large screen, to enable university guards to check whether the card corresponds to the person seeking entrance. Unfortunately there is considerable disparity between the reality of the institution and the world, in Boltanski’s terms. I have already mentioned that the University of Jordan, in its mission and objectives, states that there is a high level of democracy within the institution, where ‘students practice a democratic life by electing their 80-member Student Council, representing them from across the University’ (Mission and Objectives, UJ). In addition to this, the university also claims transparency in recruiting faculty members. Numerous sources contradict both these claims. Of course, the regime is not failing to notice this, and popular websites that are not so well in line are routinely censored or taken offline, e.g. 7iber. The ratio of faculty to non-faculty staff is one of the main indicators of a university’s efficiency in experts’ terms, something with which Thabahtoona concurs. See Kanaan et al. 2011.

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24. See www.thab7toona.org. 25. My interest in this kind of movement originated in Egypt, in 2008, when I attended a few meetings of the 9 March Movement in Cairo and Minya, but grew decidedly after having become part of the SSRC research group on Arab universities. During the first workshop of the project, in Beirut in 2010, I first heard from Fida Adely about the existence of Thabahtoona (it was founded after I had completed my PhD). The conclusion of this chapter owes quite substantially to the discussions held there. 26. One of the main gains of the 2011 revolution, namely direct election of deans in public universities, has been reversed by the new Egyptian president. 27. Youth movements should be conceptually distinguished from student activism (Bayat 2010, Chapter 2), but a thorough understanding of youth subjectivities and youth movements cannot be complete without placing the young in the historical setting in which they share common experience and common sensibilities.

Chapter 5

The University and the Labour Market

1. Part of her family still lives in the West Bank, in the city of Qalqilya, one of the places where Israeli occupation is most in evidence. The city is almost entirely surrounded by the segregation wall, and Wajiha could report endless cases of daily abuses committed against the Palestinian population. In her case, the feeling of longing for what she saw as her place was particularly strong, despite the fact that she was born in Amman, and never visited Palestine as she did not have the required documents to travel there. 2. Veiling in educational settings is a highly controversial topic, not only in Jordan. One of the most quoted examples is Turkey, where until recently female professors were forbidden to wear any (Neyzi 2001), but it is a crucial issue, one that touches upon the fundamental modernist, and modernising, understanding of education, and the complex perception of religion as being between a fundamental marker of identity and a potential threat, throughout the region. In Jordan, similar problems have also been noted in public schools (Adely 2012), where the debate is moving toward the next step, whether or not to accept fully veiled female professors (munaqqabat). 3. Interestingly, the experts I interviewed, or those I came in contact with, shared the suspicions about the limitations of their approaches, what Barry labelled the ‘fragility of metrological regimes’ (Barry 2002, quoted in Mills and Ratcliffe 2012), and showed some interest in an ethnographic analysis of the heated topic of educated youth and unemployment. 4. Youth is a constructed category, as undisputed at least since Bourdieu. In this kind of study, youth comprises those between 15 and 34 years of age. It should be remembered that in Jordan almost three quarters of the entire population are below 35 years of age (Amer 2012). It should also be remembered that 47 per cent of the 18– 22 years old are studying (university education).

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5. The male unemployment rate is zero among the illiterate section of the population, then rises sharply among those who read and write (14 per cent). It then declines steadily with educational level to 6.2 per cent among postsecondary school leavers and rises again to 14.2 per cent among university graduates. The female unemployment rate is more clearly related to education as it increases continuously with educational attainment, from zero among the less educated to 29 per cent among post-secondary school leavers and 29.5 per cent among university graduates (Amer 2012). 6. Expert literature increasingly recognises that ‘the challenge is whether the economy can fully break away from its rentier characteristics and diversify and deepen its modern service and industrial base, thus creating a labor market that harnesses the talents of an increasingly educated workforce’ (Razzaz and Iqbal 2008: 154). Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a lack of recognition that this is an overall trend, currently being discussed in a wide variety of countries. Egypt stands out for the obvious mismatch between economic data, which showed steady and sustained growth in GDP between 2005 and 2010, and the reality of a population increasingly dissatisfied with its economic standards, dissatisfaction that was among the main drivers behind the uprising of January 2011. As Rad (2011) notes, the persistent and widespread lack of decent employment opportunities is a major contributing factor to rising social discontent and political upheaval. For a thorough critique of this phenomenon, not limited to the Arab region, see Kadri 2012. 7. The distinction between formal and informal jobs is not always definite, as I will argue in the ethnographic part of the chapter. 8. According to Amer, while 97 per cent of government jobs are permanent, only 70 per cent of formal private waged work is permanent (Amer 2012). This might be another reason for the decided preference for the former. 9. Competition is becoming harder and harder because of the impressive number of universities created in the Arab region in the last two decades, and this competition is very apparent in Jordan, as well as in neighbouring countries (Cantini 2014). 10. According to him, the assumptions and mechanisms of tribal process remain part of pan-Jordanian social and political life, with dyadic diplomacy, patronclient relations, influential third-party mediators, and wasta being widely adopted in various social arenas; the ‘peaceful arrangement of differences’ is an embedded process at the local level. Moreover, ‘the assumptions behind tribal process continue to be relevant: intervention for conflict management is always recommended and meritorious; the intermediary is always to be preferred to the self as an effective pleader; the open, personal give-and-take in the guest room or analogous open forum is the best arena for dispute settlement; and the disputants always wish to be reconciled, whatever their pronouncements’ (Antoun 2000: 460). 11. Jordan has one of the lowest female labour force participation rates (LFPR) in the world (Kalimat and Al-Talafha 2011, quoted in Assaad 2012). According to

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the World Bank, Jordan, with a LFPR of 15.3 per cent, has the fifth lowest female participation rate among 185 countries and territories that report such data (Assaad 2014). This is a seemingly paradoxical finding given the rapid rise in female educational attainment in Jordan and the strong gradient of participation, especially above the secondary level. The primary argument is therefore that the female labour supply in Jordan is being constrained by changes that are occurring on the demand side of the labour market. Faced with a more inhospitable labour market, women in Jordan are opting to stay out altogether or to leave when they marry (Ibid.). Women, particularly those less educated, mostly work in the informal sector, working at home as hairdressers, seamstresses or cooks, or contribute in the agricultural field in rural areas. The percentage of unemployed educated women is therefore quite high, raising questions about the nature of education in Jordan and its actual impact on societal norms; hence the notion of a paradoxical situation, in which education is not leading to the expected emancipation. It should be emphasised, however, that the informal sector normally has not-soattractive working conditions, and therefore education gives at least the hope of a better quality of employment for women. A recent survey suggests that more than 50 per cent of the unemployed are unwilling to accept available jobs at the prevailing wages (Kanaan and Hanania 2009). Women are also more likely than men to be in formal waged employment, and less likely to be self-employed or working in the informal sector, at least insofar as the latter is accurately identified by such statistics (Amer 2012). Within the public sector there are further differentiations, with males more likely to be employed in administration and defence while women are concentrated in the care-related occupations, such as education and health, where they are more likely to work in a gender-segregated environment or at least in clearly circumscribed places that also conservative families could consider safe (Assaad 2012). It should be added that budgetary choices favouring state expenditure on the military have been carried through at the expense of the female-friendly parts of the civil and public sector, thereby raising further questions about the actual effects of proposed reforms. Marriage is an important institution in Jordanian society, and married life is perceived as an essential and preferred way of life by all young men irrespective of social or educational level (Amer 2012). Two opposing trends characterise family formation transitions in Jordan: early marriage, which is still prevalent though on the decline; and delayed marriage, which is a new phenomenon. Jordanian girls are still more likely than boys to marry as adolescents; 12.7 per cent of young women under age 20 and 48.6 per cent of young women aged 20 to 24 are married, compared with 1.4 per cent and 16.1 per cent of young men in the same age groups. A contrary trend is that family formation in Jordan is becoming difficult for many young people, as evidenced by those involuntarily delaying marriage because of job shortages and insufficient

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income. Today, the average age of marriage is on the rise in Jordan, and this has some positive aspects, since women who marry at a later age are able to obtain more education and enter the labour force (Assaad 2012). 17. A similar situation is discussed by Craig Jeffrey with regard to India (Jeffrey 2010). 18. The flat itself, paid for by his family, reflects the changing notions of family among this class in Amman; the living room is as usual understood as being a reception space for guests rather than a space within the house, and takes up half of the flat. Mohib keeps it completely empty, though he says they never have guests apart from a few friends who are accommodated, as I was, in the openspace kitchen that has a sofa and a television. This space is obviously much more in line with the ideal of a nuclear couple. 19. I am grateful to John Borneman for having generously discussed this with me, as well as other issues. A more detailed analysis of the relationship between the students I met and their families is still to be written.

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INDEX

(References to endnotes are indicated by ‘n’, e.g. 174n11 refers to note 11 on page 174. All entries for specific faculties refer to the University of Jordan.). 7iber, 172n22 9 March movement, 131 –2 Abbas, M. K., 34 Abdullah II, King, 29, 63– 4, 67, 165n13 Abu al-Shaikh, M., 35 academic exchange programmes, 78– 9 academic staff numbers: University of Jordan, 27, 157n6 academic standards and reform, 66, 67 accountability in higher education, 75, 165n15 accreditation: higher education, 33– 4, 65, 68 Adely, Fida, 2 – 3, 24, 42, 52, 60, 84, 85, 94, 102, 103, 108, 121 – 2, 123, 130, 143, 145, 158n18, 161n31, 164n7, 167n8, 169n24, 173n25 admission criteria, university, 43, 44, 45– 9, 93, 97, 159n24, 161n31; see also makrumat;

parallel programme: university admissions Advanced Studies, Faculty of, 82 Ahmad, 87 aid: international donors, 29, 165n16 Almaani, Waleed, 48 Amer, M., 138 – 9, 143, 144, 173n4, 174nn5,8, 175n16 American University in Cairo: security, 172n20 Amman concentration of private universities, 32– 3, 72 social differences, 83, 111, 170n1 east and west, 91, 97, 98, 166n6 social norms, 91– 2, 168n18 anthropology: study of higher education, 8 – 9, 61 university reforms, 14, 60 Antoun, Richard, 6, 52, 54 – 5, 105, 128, 136, 142, 143, 171n13, 174n10 Aqaba branch, University of Jordan, 72 – 3 admission criteria, 48, 73

Arab Human Development Report, 4, 51, 60, 161n31 Arabic language, 36, 163n42 Armbrust, Walter, 168n16 Armstrong, E., 9, 10, 23, 44, 51 –2, 60, 92, 94, 136, 162n40 Arts, Faculty of, 57 –8, 86, 88, 148 Arum, R., 9, 10, 23, 44, 51– 2, 60, 92, 94, 136, 162n40 Asal, 95– 6, 98, 167n11 Asma’, 149 Assaad, Ragui, 72, 138 – 9, 140 – 1, 158n20, 174n11 autocracy, liberalised, 6, 7 – 8 autonomy: universities, 65, 124, 131 – 2 El-Azhary Sonbol, A., 144, 145 Bader, M., 32 Barry, A., 173n3 Batarseh, I., 64 Bennani-Chraibi, M., 3, 84– 5, 155n7 Biology, Faculty of, 89, 133, 166n3 Board of Higher Education: private universities, 72

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bodily practices, students, 94 –5, 99– 106 Boltanski, Luc, 11– 12, 15, 16 –17, 22, 24, 44– 5, 62, 85, 111, 132, 137, 151, 172n21; see also ‘reality’: Boltanski’s formulation; ‘world’: Boltanski’s formulation boredom, 107, 114 Bourdieu, Pierre, 23– 4, 51, 92 –3, 94, 162n36, 173n4 boys: behavioural expectations, 104 – 5 Brand, L., 25, 121, 141, 142, 151 Burke, D. L., 72 campus life, students’, 90 – 111 Canadian International Development Agency, 77 citizen-subjects, freedom of, 114 – 15 citizenship active, young people’s exclusion from, 84, 97 construction of, 114 – 15 democratic, 171n9 education, 10, 22, 36– 7, 52, 85 royal family, 35 universities, 3, 12– 13, 25, 45, 49, 59, 76, 131 – 2 citizenship consciousness: Thabahtoona, 131 – 2 citizenship crisis, 129 class, 161n30 dress, 167n10 gender propriety, 103 postgraduate student trajectories, 136 – 7 classroom management, 39– 40 co-educational schools, lack of, 102 collegiality and reform, 67 Collier, S., 14 Columbia University Middle East Research Center (CUMERC), 73– 4 Comaroff, Jean, 98, 138, 155n2 Comaroff, John, 98, 138, 155n2

MIDDLE EAST

commercial activities: University of Jordan, 70 communist groups, 121 community colleges, 30– 1, 32 confirmation and critique, 12, 44 corruption, 172n19 student activism against, 130 wasta, 142, 159n24 Council for Higher Education see Higher Education Council crisis, 158n19 sense of, 150, 169n24 crisis and waiting, 107, 108, 109, 146 critical writing, 53 critique, 5, 8, 15, 44 confirmation and, 12 possibility of institutions, 11 –12, 85 universities, 16 – 17, 58, 106, 111, 132, 137 tribalism and, 128 culture national: universities, 158n17, 162n40 youth awareness of, 37, 51, 158n17 deans of faculties, appointment of, 34, 65, 158n15, 173n26 degrees, 78; see also shahada Del Sarto, R., 77 democratic citizenship, 171n9 democratisation, 6, 7, 77, 79, 80, 165n13 educational objective, 37 higher education, 73, 116, 172n21 demonstrations, 119, 120 student, 116, 119, 120, 123 – 4, 130 Department of Students’ Affairs, University of Jordan, 116 developmental agencies: youth, 2–3 difference, production of: universities, 25

dissent, 16, 113 – 32 Faculty of Shariʿa, 56 donors, international aid, 29, 165n16 dress Faculty of Educational Sciences, 162n37 Faculty of Shariʿa, 55, 94 –5 Mohammed Ghazi, 171n7 specific students, 86, 87– 8, 89, 90, 104 students, 94– 5, 104, 105, 114; see also hatta; hats; jalabiyyas; sandals; veil: students Droeber, Julia, 145, 168n17 Dupree, L., 5 Durkheim, E´mile, 36 economic development: role of education, 60 education: Jordan: overview, 1–2 educational philosophy, Jordanian, 34 –7 Educational Sciences, Faculty of, 82, 86, 87, 162n37 educational spaces: study of youth, 84 – 6 efficiency of higher education, 75 Egypt, 131 economic conditions, 174n6 Eickelman, Dale F., 10, 24 elections, student, 116 – 18, 125, 128 Elyachar, J., 95, 97 emigration, 115, 141 – 2 educated women, 151 employment formal and informal: distinction, 149, 174n7 Mohib, 148 – 50 private sector see private sector employment public sector see public sector employment Wajiha, 133, 134 – 5, 152 Yazid, 147 – 8 Engineering, Faculty of, 81 –2, 89

INDEX equal opportunities, 48, 64, 67 ERASMUS Mundus, 78 – 9 ethnographic encounter: intersubjectivity, 168n14 ethnographic method: participant observation, 93; see also methodology, research ethnography, 2, 3, 4 – 5, 14, 20 –1, 44– 5, 52, 61 Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), 77, 78 – 9, 165n16 European Commission and Jordanian Higher Education, 77 –9 everyday life on campus, 81 –111 everyday practices, study of, 15, 18, 21, 22 examinations, 53 Faculty of Arts, 57 Faculty of Shariʿa, 56 tawjihi, 45, 50, 53, 57 faculties, University of Jordan, 46; see also specific faculties and categories of faculty hierarchy, 49 – 52 family duties: Wajiha, 133 – 4 family expectations women’s employment, 145 Yazid, 147 family living spaces, 176n18 family, universities and, 136 Farag, Iman, 3, 14, 59, 84– 5, 155n7, 160n29, 166n2 fees, tuition, 69 – 70, 160n27, 164nn9,10, 172n15 student protests, 21– 2, 123, 130 foreign students, 27, 30, 82– 3, 117, 157nn8,12, 165n15 foreign workers, 138, 139, 140 Foucault, Michel, 49 fragility: universities and social orders, 11 freedom degree of: students, 97, 114, 128 private universities, 72

funding non-governmental organisations, 73 universities alternative sources, 67, 68– 9 discrepancies between faculties, 83 international donors, 77 –9, 80, 82 self-funding, 47 state budget cuts, 68– 9, 130, 164nn8,9 gender Islam and education, 7, 10, 102, 167n8 labour market, 143 –6 students: Faculty of Shariʿa, 54 – 5 gender-segregated social spaces, 101 – 2 geographical spread: public universities, 32 gestures, 95, 100 – 1, 103 – 4, 105, 168n14 al-Ghad, 130 Ghazi Bin, Mohammed, 118, 171n7 girls behavioural expectations, 101 – 4, 106 Faculty of Educational Sciences, 162n37 social control, 92, 168n18 global forms, universities as, 8, 14, 21, 24, 60, 61 globalisation, 7, 36, 146, 158n19 higher education, 21, 61– 2, 71, 76, 158n19; see also internationalisation of higher education gossip, 90, 101, 102, 104, 105, 168n17, 169n19 governance, university, 33 – 7, 65 –7, 72, 74– 5, 114, 131 – 2, 155n3 metrics, 164n5 TEMPUS programme, 79 ‘travelling technology’, 60

191 government employment see public sector employment government officials: academic background, 66 graduation ceremonies, 53, 116, 162nn40,41 Gramsci, Antonio, 24, 49 group interactions: students: University of Jordan, 95 –6, 98, 101 – 2 guards, university, 81, 99, 117, 120, 126, 127, 169n22 Gulf states, migration to, 142, 151 Gulf War, first, 31, 32, 68, 71, 142 Al-Hadi, Abd, 38 –9 Hage, G., 107, 108, 110, 146 El-Haija, Abu, 79 Hanafi, Sari, 3, 51, 66, 75 Al-Harmaneh, A., 119 Hashemite regime see regime, Hashemite hats, 94 – 5, 167n9 hatta, 167n9, 171n7 HERfKE, 14, 74– 7 higher education see also universities history of Jordanian, 26– 30 nature of see universities: nature of the institution public expenditure on, 69, 164nn8,9 Higher Education Accreditation Commission (HEAC), 33 –4, 65, 75 Higher Education Council, 65, 68, 158n15, 160n26 private universities, 72 Higher Education Reform for Knowledge Economy (HERfKE), 14, 74– 7 Higher Education Reform Forum (2007), 64 history: Jordan, 25 – 6 hub, university as a, 10, 136 Human Development Reports Arab, 60 Arab (2004), 51 Jordan (2000), 29, 40

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Jordan (2004), 76 humanistic faculties, University of Jordan, 81 humanities students v science students, 50 – 1, 67, 96 Al-Husban, A. H., 29, 66, 73, 78 Hussein bin Talal, King, 123 – 4 identification cards, university, 127 identities collective, 91, 99, 101, 107, 136 – 7, 166n5, 169n21 Islamic, 35, 36– 7, 167n12, 169n23 national, 16, 120 – 1 tribal, 120 – 1, 125 identity see also bodily practices, students; dress educational philosophy, 36, 40 university as maker of, 24, 92 Ifpo, 74 immigration, 6, 22 Gulf War, 31, 68, 71 impre´gnation: research method, 19; see also methodology, research incubator, university as, 9, 92 inequalities and globalisation, 7 informal sector employment, 140, 141, 148, 149, 175n12 information technologies: student activism, 130 Information Technology, King Abdullah II School for: admission criteria, 48 insecurity, regional, 21 institutions ambivalence, 35 conflicts, 42, 84 everyday functioning, 44 – 5 everyday lives of those involved in, 84– 5 fragility, 11 multiple, higher education and, 9 –10, 10 – 11 nature of, 24, 62

MIDDLE EAST

order and critique, 11, 49, 58, 132, 138; see also confirmation and critique tensions 76, 80 intellectual foundations of educational philosophy, 35, 37 International Leadership Academy, 76, 166n1 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 47, 68 international relations: Jordan, 6 internationalisation of higher education, 31, 33, 71, 73 –80; see also globalisation of: higher education donors, 77– 9, 80 University of Jordan, 82 intersubjectivity: ethnographic encounter, 168n14 Islam, 4 female unemployment, 144 gender and education, 7, 10, 102, 167n8 intellectual foundations of educational philosophy, 35, 37 legitimacy of Hashemite dynasty, 34– 5, 37 moral authority, 94, 105 – 6 political, organisations, 116, 122, 125; see also Muslim Brotherhood Islamic identities, 35, 36– 7, 167n12, 169n23 Islamic Law, Faculty of see Shariʿa, Faculty of Islamists: student council, 170n2 Israel, Jordan’s relations with, 114, 119 – 20 jalabiyyas, 94– 5, 167nn9,11 Jansen, W., 60, 68, 156n5, 158n13 jobs, nature of, available in Jordan, 139 – 41 Jordan: history, 25– 6, 156n1 Jordan Statistical Yearbook (2012), 29 – 30, 32

Jordan Times, 159n26, 165n13 Jordanian Democratic Popular Unity Party, 130 Kaya, L. P., 102, 104 Al-Khalailah, Y., 35 Khasawneh, S., 50, 67 Kifaya movement, 131 king see also Abdullah II, King; regime, Hashemite; royal family involvement in university governance, 34 university admissions, 46– 7, 158n15, 159n26 knowledge, legitimation of: universities, 9, 10– 11, 51 –2; see also temple, university as knowledge economy, 38, 59 –60, 62, 63, 139 – 40, 141, 155n3 kutlat al-tajdid al-ʿarabiyya, 131 Kuwait, migration from, 32, 142 labour force participation rate: women, 174n11, 175n13 labour market mobility of, 141 social discontent, 174n6 university and, 16 – 17, 60, 64, 135 – 53 HERfKE, 75 – 6 Wajiha, 133, 134 – 5, 152 language Arabic and English presentations, 53 – 4 instruction, 50, 161n33 Language Centre, University of Jordan, 18, 82 –3 Languages, Faculty of, 88 law of rules, 51, 66, 75 law, rule of, 51, 66, 67– 8, 75, 77, 172n19 laws Education Law no.3 (1994), 34, 36 foundation of University of Jordan, 27 gender, 145

INDEX higher education (2009), 64 – 6 Lebanon: higher education and service sector, 27– 8 legitimisation of knowledge, 9, 10 –11, 51 – 2; see also temple, university as legitimisation of regime, 2, 7–8, 63, 80, 120–1, 162n40 liberalisation, protests against, 124 liberalised autocracy, 6, 7– 8, 34, 155n2, 170n6 literacy rates, 29, 33 – 4, 139 Literature, Faculty of: admission criteria, 45 Maha, 86, 99, 103 – 4, 109 Mahmood, S., 104, 166n6 makrumat, 46 –7, 48, 97, 124 – 5, 159n26, 171n14 specific students, 89, 90 marginalisation, students’ sense of, 107 – 8, 146 marketing: University of Jordan, 70 marketisation: presented as inevitable, 67 marriage, 175n16 educated women, 146, 151 labour market and, 144, 175nn11,16 Mohib, 149 Nabiha, 150 Wajiha, 134, 152 Yazid, 148 martial law, 122, 131, 170n5 Massad, Joseph, 47, 49, 118, 121, 156n2 Massadeh, Nassar, 31, 42, 46, 47, 157n12 Mazawi, Andre´, 16, 80, 144 –5 media portrayals of campus violence, 126, 127 Medicine, Faculty of, 81 – 2 admission criteria, 45, 47 – 8 methodology, research, 17 – 21 intersubjectivity: ethnographic encounter, 168n14 Ministry of Education, 34

Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MOHE), 33, 38, 43, 65, 66, 139, 157n8 mobility educated women, 151 sponsored and contest, 60 students, 98, 99, 102 – 3 after graduation, 146 –7 veil, 168n13 ‘mode 2’ science, 135 – 6 modernisation, 40 –1, 50, 63, 67, 118, 126 Mohib, 148 – 50, 176n18 moral authority, grounds of, 94, 105 – 6 morality gender: legislation, 145 Wajiha, 152 – 3 Muhafazah, Sameh, 126, 127 muhajabat, 168n13 students, 57, 98 mukhabarat, 120, 158n15 mukhamara, 168n13 Muslim Brotherhood, 117, 118, 120, 122, 169nn22,23, 170nn4 – 6 Na’amneh, M., 29, 66, 73, 78 Nabiha, 87 – 8, 89, 98, 99, 101 – 2, 150 – 1, 167n12 Nasr, Marle`ne, 36, 37 nation building, universities and, 10 national foundations of educational philosophy, 35–6 National Youth Strategy of Jordan, 37, 157n8, 158n17 nationalism crisis of, 158n19 methodological, 61 nationalist student movement, 125 neo-liberal norms, 79, 80 ‘valuable citizens’, 45 neo-liberalism higher education and, 8 –9, 11, 138 HERfKE, 76 rights, 170n1

193 unemployment and, 155n7 non-governmental organisations, 73 OECD, 67 Ong, A., 14, 45, 61, 114 oral examination, 53 Palestinian cause, 113, 115, 119 – 20, 121, 173n1 Palestinians, 5, 25, 31, 119, 120 – 1, 142, 148, 149 private universities, 32, 71 students, 86– 7, 88 – 9, 119, 122, 123, 124 – 5 university admissions, 46, 160n26 parallel programme: university admissions, 70, 73, 160n29, 164n11, 165n16 extent of use, 21– 2, 47, 48 nature of students, 48, 50, 97, 160n29, 161n30 specific students, 86, 87, 88, 89, 133 peer review, 66– 7 performance indicators, key national: higher education, 65 personal connections: labour market, 142 – 3 Peters, M. A., 135 Pharmacy, Faculty of: admission criteria, 48 philanthropic sector and universities, 136 policy, anthropology of, 61 policy translation, 61– 2 ‘policy worlds’, 20 – 1 political activity on campus, 113 – 32 political freedom: constraints, 7, 113 – 32 political parties, 170n5 irrelevance, 118 politics avoidance of on campus, 53, 58, 125, 130 – 1 kinship and, 128 students’ lack of interest in, 113

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population, high youth, 28, 30, 70, 137 – 8, 173n4 practical moments v reflexivity, 22, 132 prestige: university education, 41 –2, 69 primary education, 29 private sector employment, 140 – 1, 148, 152, 174n8 restaurant work, 147 – 8 secretarial work, 134 – 5 translation work, 148 – 9 private universities, 28, 31 – 3, 42, 47, 69, 70– 2, 164n11, 165n12 IMF pressure, 68 salaries and job security, 158n13 privatisation of higher education, 22, 31, 47, 49, 68, 69, 71, 160n29, 166n2 professional associations and universities, 136 protest see also demonstrations; dissent; repression language of, 67 students: fees, 21– 2 youth: Middle East, 3 public sector employment, 140, 141, 174n8 teaching, 134, 135 women, 144, 175n14 public sector expansion: link to higher education, 27 quality of higher education, 42, 164n11, 165n12 Quwwas, Rula, 163n45 Rabo, A., 8 – 9, 59 – 60, 66– 7, 164n6 Ramadan: social differences: students: University of Jordan, 99 ‘reality’: Boltanski’s formulation, 151 institutions, 12, 22, 24, 85 universities, 15, 35, 58, 83, 93, 111, 132, 172n21

MIDDLE EAST

reflexivity v practical moments, 22, 132 reforms liberal, 7– 8, 165n13 university, 14, 22, 59 –80, 128, 129, 157n9, 164n6 refugees: impact on higher education, 31 regime, Hashemite autocratic liberalism, 6, 34, 48, 97, 124 higher education see also Abdullah II, King; makrumat; royal family creation of differences, 13, 25 critique, 15 development discourse, 50, 24, 126 opposition, 121, 122, 123 – 4, 125, 171n14 repression, 109, 114, 119–20, 122, 123, 124, 130, 131 production of legitimacy, 80 stuckedness, 115 tribalism, 126, 128, 129, 172n16 Muslim Brotherhood and, 118, 122, 170nn4,5 resilience, 6, 119, 123, 124 tribalism, 118 Reiter, Y., 32, 46, 71, 122, 123, 124 – 5, 171n14, 172n15 religion modernity and, 173n2 postgraduate student trajectories, 136, 152 – 3 religiosity: students: University of Jordan, 98– 9, 167n12 remittances, migrants’, 28, 68, 142 rentier economy, 47, 138, 174n6 rentier state, concept of, 5– 6 repression, 23 – 4, 49, 129; see also regime, Hashemite: higher education: opposition: repression reputation: students, 102 – 4, 168n17

research freedom of, and reform, 67 subordinated to teaching, 41, 43 United Kingdom, 66 – 7 research agenda, 73 revolution, possibility of: Jordan, 128 – 9 revolutions, Arab, 77– 8, 126, 131, 173n26; see also uprisings: role of young people royal family, 34 – 5, 37, 156n1, 159n22; see also Abdullah II, King; regime, Hashemite involvement in university governance, 34; see also makrumat Saeed, 89, 104 – 5 saha al-ʿilm: University of Jordan, 96 Samira, 99 – 100 sandals, 167n10 schools cultural battleground, 167n7 high: political activism, 121 private, 44, 134, 158n16, 159n22, 166n4 public, 90, 159n22, 173n2 social reproduction, 7, 167n7 Schwedler, J., 6, 7, 75, 109, 114, 119, 125, 155n2, 165n16, 168n18, 170nn1,4 science faculties, University of Jordan, 81 science students v humanities students, 50 – 1, 67, 96 scientific curricula, preference for, 50, 67 security campus, 127, 172n20; see also guards, university family: education, 42 security forces: violence, 123 self-expression: students, 53– 4, 57 –8, 98 senate, academic, University of Jordan, 116, 117

INDEX sex, opposite: students, 90, 96, 99 –100 shahada, 53, 54, 143; see also degrees Shami, Seteney, 27, 28, 41, 161n32 Shariʿa, Faculty of, 54 – 6, 81, 95 –6, 98, 167n12 shariʿa al-gypsy: University of Jordan, 89, 91, 96 shariʿa al-nas: University of Jordan, 91, 96 shariʿa oroba: University of Jordan, 96 Shore, C., 20, 61, 66 sieve, university as, 9, 44 Singh, R., 170n4 smoking: students, 88, 89 – 90, 98, 99, 101 – 2 social control, 91– 2 social differences: student subjectivities, 83, 96 – 7, 98 –106; see also social stratification: universities social discontent: labour market issues, 174n6 social expectations: women’s employment, 145 social foundations of educational philosophy, 35 social mobility, 21, 94 social norms, 91– 2, 144 social polarisation, 52 social reproduction schools, 7 universities, 9, 10– 11, 83, 92 – 3, 94 social sciences, 41, 108, 161n32 social sciences faculties, University of Jordan, 81 social stratification: universities, 9, 10– 11, 23– 4, 44, 49 – 51, 58, 93, 161n34; see also admission criteria, university; social differences: student subjectivities familial aspirations, 41 – 2, 49 – 50, 93 socialisation, political, 36– 7 socialisation patterns on campus, 5, 51, 95 – 6, 98 – 102

special protection laws, 145 spectacle, reforms as, 80, 145 state employees: university admissions, 47 state formation: Jordan, 25– 6 state institutions: youth, 2 – 3 Stevens, M., 9, 10, 23, 44, 51 –2, 60, 92, 94, 136, 162n40 structural adjustment, 140, 141, 144 – 5 stuckedness, 106 – 10, 115, 146 – 7, 148, 149 student activism, 121 –3, 130, 171n9 student council, University of Jordan, 116, 170n2, 172nn15,21 student differences: degrees of freedom, 114 –16 student numbers, 28, 29, 30, 70 community colleges, 32 female, 27, 156n5 private universities, 32 University of Jordan, 27 student status: liminality, 92 students foreign, 27, 30, 82 –3, 117, 157nn8,12, 158n15, 165n15 classroom participation, 39 freedom of choice, 49 global category, 21 identities see identities; identity self-expression, 53 – 4, 57– 8 study of, 83 – 6 studying abroad, 26, 50, 134, 151 – 2, 157n12, 158n15, 161n30 subjectivity see identity; identities Sultana, R. G., 42 – 3, 161n35 Surur, 88 – 9, 103 Taji, Mona, 76, 161n34 Taminian, Lucine, 158nn15,16, 159n22, 167nn6,9, 171n7 Tania, 103 tawjihi, 45, 50, 53, 57, 158n16, 159n22, 164n11, 166n4

195 teaching: occupation: Wajiha, 134, 135 teaching methods, 50 – 1, 51 –8 UN criticisms, 76 teaching standards, 97 technology transfer: TEMPUS programme, 79 temple, university as, 51 –2, 53 TEMPUS programme, 14, 62, 78, 79, 166n19 textbooks, 52, 159n22 Faculty of Arts, 57 Faculty of Shariʿa, 55, 56 Thabahtoona, 46, 47 – 8, 126, 129 – 30, 131 – 2, 164n9, 172n23, 173n25 theft: employees, 147 – 8 three circles system, 78 tradition: negatively regarded, 39, 58, 118, 167n8 travelling technology, university as, 24, 60, 62 tribalism, 120 – 1, 124, 125, 126 – 7, 128, 144, 172nn16 –18, 174n10 student elections, 117 – 18 trustees, board of: universities, 65, 160n26 unemployment, 137 – 8, 140, 141, 174n5 graduates, 30, 139, 155n7 women, 143 – 4, 174n5, 175n12 UNESCO ranking: Jordanian education, 29 Unified Admission Coordination Unit, 65 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 40, 77, 109 United States aid to Jordan, 165n16 Jordan’s relations with, 119 – 20, 165n13 Jordanian students, 26– 7 United States students: University of Jordan, 83 universal civilisation, openness to, 37

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universities see also higher education modernity and citizenship, 3 – 4, 10, 12 – 13 nature of the institution, 8 – 13 global form, 14, 21, 24 number and types of, 29 – 30 study of youth, 84– 6 university education: prestige, 41 –2 University of Jordan campus, 81 – 3 faculties see faculties, University of Jordan; specific faculties and categories of faculty foundation, 27 history of student activism, 121 – 3 University of the United Nations, 82, 166n1 university staff appointments, 34, 65, 130, 158n15, 163n2, 171n12, 172n21 ratios, 172n23 uprisings: role of young people, 3, 60 USAID, 77, 78 value and worth, global discourses on, 22, 24 veil, 167n8, 168n13 abandoning the, 152 educational settings, 173n2

MIDDLE EAST

students, 94, 98 – 9, 104, 167n12 specific students, 86, 87 –8, 89, 90, 99, 100, 103, 152 teachers, 134 violence, 172n18 campus, 120, 123 – 4, 125 – 9 media portrayals, 126, 127 tribalism: student elections, 117, 118 waithood, 107, 146, 149; see also stuckedness Wajiha, 89 – 90, 98, 99, 101 – 2, 103, 173n1 post-university trajectory, 133–5, 138, 141, 151–3 Al-Waked, A. A., 72 wasta, 45, 133, 142 – 3, 159n24, 174n10 West Bank, 5 Wilson, M., 34 – 5, 156n2 women education, 145 – 6 and employment, 143, 145 – 6 and empowerment, 24, 145 – 6 gossip, 168n17, 169n19 labour force participation rate, 174n11, 175n13 leisure spaces: modernity, 168n16

unemployment, 143 – 4, 174n5, 175n12 workers, foreign, 138, 139, 140 ‘world’: Boltanski’s formulation, 15, 22, 35, 58, 85, 111, 132 World Bank, 4, 67, 78, 140, 141, 165n15 finance for education, 29, 68 HERfKE, 14, 74 – 7 statistics, 29, 32, 140, 143 – 4, 165n16, 174n11 worth and value, global discourses on, 22, 24 Wright, S., 8 – 9, 20, 59 –60, 61, 66– 7, 164n6 Yarmouk University: student activism, 121, 123, 130 Yassin, Sheikh, killing of, 119, 120 Yazid, 88, 89, 91, 99 – 100, 101, 104, 109, 110 post-university trajectory, 147 – 8 youth constructed category, 173n4 educated, 1 – 2, 3 youth movements, 173n27 youth population, 28, 30, 70, 137 – 8, 173n4 Zeinat, 90, 109, 113 – 14, 115, 131, 171n9