BY ALFRED BABO
Presidential building of the Université Félix-Houphouët-Boigny in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Last June 1, 2019, a significant turn in Ivorian higher education went unnoticed. Indeed, it was probably the first time that the Federation of Students of Côte d’Ivoire (FESCI), a powerful and controversial union, was sponsored and officially supported by the Ivorian government—to which it does not have close ties—to organize its congress and to elect a new governing body. This is also a step toward the protection of student academic freedom in Côte d’Ivoire. Albert Toikeusse Mabri, the Ivorian higher education ministry who sponsored the event, reiterated a commitment to dialogue with the organization: “We want to pass on a message, the message of the place of the student in the pacification of the social front.”
Things did not always go that way! After I was removed from the war zone of Côte d’Ivoire by Scholars at Risk (SAR) and hosted at Smith College in 2012, I wondered what role academic freedom plays in a post-war state’s recovery. In my new Journal of Academic Freedom article “Postwar Recovery and Student Academic Freedom in Côte d’Ivoire,” I discuss how the pursuit of reconstruction by a conflict-affected state can both enable and undo student academic freedom.
According to the Global Coalition to Protect Education (GCPEA) and the Safe Schools Declaration, higher education is one of the primary victims of conflicts and wars. In Côte d’Ivoire, as reported by GCPEA, during the rebellion of 2002 and the civil war of 2010–11 the country’s three major universities were occupied by combatants and devastated. However, academic freedom is not the top priority of the post-conflict rebuilding process. Not only do national authorities undervalue the freedom to think and learn, so do international intervenors involved in the post-crisis reconstruction.
In spite of this, the post-war government of Côte d’Ivoire demonstrates a strong will to rebuild the Ivorian higher education that has been ruined by years of endemic violence and political turmoil during the last twenty years. The union students created to advocate and fight for their rights, FESCI, ended up being the organization most dangerous to academic freedom. All university actors such as the administrators, the professors, and the students themselves suffered from the wrongdoing of this union.
The violent past of FESCI pressed the post-war government to engage in hard policies. At the end of the war in April 2011, the new authorities took the radical decision to close the three main universities of the country for two years. The measure upset partners of higher education, especially the students who worried for their futures. Nevertheless, the government obstinately supported the efforts to end the cycle of violence and committed to ushering in a new beginning in academia. The reopening of the universities in October 2013 was the beginning of a “new departure,” a “new university” in which violence will have no place and will not be tolerated.
However, these pledges seemed unrealistic as more than twenty years of political crisis, police attacks, violent strikes, and all forms of criminality on the country’s campuses could not disappear in the blink of an eye. As argued in my article,
Côte d’Ivoire’s case demonstrates that when reforms enable students’ fully free expression, as they have at the Université Alassane Ouattara (UAO), the institution can contribute to postwar rebuilding. On the contrary, where students’ civil liberties are threatened by police repression, arrest, and imprisonment, as they are at the University Félix Houphouët-Boigny (UFHB), violence continues.
Ironically, the violence that post-war authorities wanted to wipe out erupted again, seriously threatening students’ academic freedom. Since 2013, Ivorian students, mostly at the UFHB, demanding better conditions of study and living on and off campuses have been victims of kidnapping, tear gas, arrests, exclusion, and imprisonment perpetrated by police. The government tried to ban their unions. This turn of events has proven risky for the torn nation. Since academia is also the main arena of political formation, such turbulence had the force to inflame political tensions and thus endanger the entire postwar reconstruction.
With the recent collaborative approach of the government, it is clearer than ever that it is necessary to protect free speech, freedom of expression, and liberty of association for students facing enormous challenges after a war.
Alfred Babo is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology and the International Studies Program at Fairfield University. His most recent publication is “Postwar Governance: Human Rights and Peacebuilding in Côte d’Ivoire” in the spring 2019 volume of African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review.
Read the complete volume of the 2019 Journal of Academic Freedom at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.
