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 News of the Institute and Lasallian Family
Rome, November 9, 2004
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National Catholic Reporter Issue Date: October 29, 2004
 Nurturing academia in a war zone
Holy Land's only Catholic university brings hope in face of violence, security clampdowns
By PAT MORRISON
After Jerusalem, perhaps even more than Nazareth, the favorite site for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land has been Bethlehem, the famous “City of David” where tradition tells us Jesus Christ was born. There’s little in Bethlehem today, however, to resemble its Christmas carol image. Three years of Israeli-Palestinian violence, curfews and travel restrictions have seen the tourism industry -- Bethlehem’s lifeblood -- grind to a virtual halt. The city’s hotels and restaurants, upgraded and renovated in anticipation of the throngs expected to come for the 2000 millennium celebrations, stand practically empty, many shuttered permanently. Their fresh new façades are pockmarked by bullet holes, their windows blown out by rocket blasts. Bethlehem in 2004 is not an environment one associates with hope.
But if you know where to look, there are still places in Bethlehem where hope is alive and growing. One of these is Bethlehem University.
The university, which last October marked its 30th anniversary, is unique on several fronts. It is the only university directly sponsored by the Vatican, and the only Catholic institution of higher education in the Holy Land.
It claims a few other “distinctions” as well. In its 30-year history, Bethlehem University has never once finished an academic year on schedule. It has been closed by the Israeli military at least a dozen times. Israeli Defense Forces occupied the campus for more than two months, placing several faculty members under house arrest. And every one of its buildings has been damaged -- by bullets, grenades or, in the newest military technological upgrade, by laser-guided rockets. Bethlehem University may be the only Catholic university that has been functioning for most of its life in a war zone.
Its ability to thrive amid challenges of this magnitude is part of the university’s success story, one of the reasons it’s a beacon of hope in an otherwise desolate landscape.
It came to be, and exists to this day, because of the church’s commitment to the Palestinian people. When Pope Paul VI made his historic visit to the Holy Land in 1964, he asked the Arab Christian community what their greatest needs were and how the church could help. They handed him a collective wish list, with a university as the No. 1 priority.
At the time there were a number of academic institutions in the region, several under the auspices of Catholic religious communities. But there was no institution of higher learning to serve young Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim alike, and none that accepted both male and female students in equal partnership.
 “In 1964 there were absolutely no universities in Palestine,” Christian Br. Neil Kieffe told NCR in a phone interview. Kieffe, who formerly served as provincial superior and headed Lewis University’s School of Aviation outside Chicago, has served in a variety of posts at Bethlehem University for the past 13 years. Today he is the university’s director of institutional technology.
One of Pope Paul’s main reasons for devoting so much energy and urgency to Bethlehem University’s founding, Kieffe said, “was that Palestinian young people were going abroad to study and they didn’t come back.” The pope worried that if the drain of the country’s best and brightest continued, before long there would be no leadership to serve the hoped-for emerging Palestinian state, and no living Christian presence in the Holy Land.
The pope asked Cardinal Pio Laghi, then apostolic delegate to Jerusalem, to spearhead a committee to establish the university. As a natural choice for administrators, Laghi tapped the De La Salle Christian Brothers (Brothers of the Christian Schools), who already had a respected presence in the region. They had been educating Palestinian boys in their École des Frères since 1893.
The Christian Brothers offered space in their school for the fledgling university, and in the summer of 1973, three U.S. brothers arrived to join the Palestinian faculty. Bethlehem University officially opened its doors to the first 100 students on Oct. 3, 1973.
Today, Bethlehem University offers state-of-the-art education to a student body of just over 2,000 students, an enrollment that has held steady over the past several years. The student body is 66 percent Muslim, 34 percent Christian, and -- significant for the Middle East especially -- two-thirds of the students are female. The 2004 graduating class was the largest in several years: 511, up from 425 in 2003.
The university includes five colleges or faculties: arts, science, business administration, education and nursing. One of its showcase programs was developed specifically with the needs of students and the region in mind: the Institute for Hotel Management and Tourism. By providing training and internships in these related fields, the university aims to help its graduates find jobs within the country or in neighboring countries such as Jordan and Egypt, thus limiting emigration from the Holy Land. The Institute for Hotel Management offers a bachelor’s degree in hotel management, a diploma program for those pursuing careers with travel agencies or as tour guides, and a further associate degree program in hotel management.
The university’s nursing program is also fine-tuned to meet the needs of Palestinians, the majority of whom do not have access to the advanced levels of medical care offered by Israeli facilities. Among its specialties, offered at various levels, are midwifery, neonatal nursing, physiotherapy and occupational therapy.
With its unique status as a Catholic university in the Holy Land, the university plays a key role in promoting peace and justice as well as interreligious and cultural understanding. In 2000, the university opened Turathuna, the Palestinian Cultural and Heritage Center, as a way of fostering appreciation and awareness of the region’s heritage.
The school’s 30th anniversary also brought timely additions to the curriculum. A new major in computer science was added. And, thanks to the government of Finland, the university has a new state-of-the-art digital media center.
In addition to the media center itself, Kieffe said, the Finnish government has underwritten a program that sends Finnish media experts and their students to Bethlehem to teach at the university. They bring expertise to the university that otherwise it could never afford, Kieffe said. “And they’ve had the bravery to keep coming.”
Bravery might not be an item on the job description at most academic institutions, but at Bethlehem University it’s a requirement for faculty and students alike. The shelling of and damage to the university’s buildings in various attacks took place for the most part when students and teachers were on the campus. One of the brothers still has a “souvenir” -- a four-inch book with a bullet hole through it.
In a January interview with British journalist Mike Hirst, the university’s president and vice chancellor Br. Vincent Malham ticked off a list of hurdles to running the university:
• Checkpoints, causing delays of several hours a day;
• Poverty -- unemployment is at 45 percent and the annual average income is $500;
• Increasingly illusive permits for travel in the West Bank and visas for international university faculty and staff;
• The security wall that effectively cuts off Palestinians from their businesses, families, farms and education.
The checkpoints and the wall, for example, make it a nightmare to get to the campus. “I’m really scared to death, because roughly 25 percent of the faculty and 20 percent of the students come from Jerusalem,” Kieffe said. Adding anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours to a commute because of delays at the checkpoint means that “some will just decide it’s not worth the hassle.”
The Israelis, he said, are just hoping “to wear you down. And they have. They really have,” he said. “If we lose 25 percent of the faculty, they’ll be impossible to replace.”
 The biggest problem facing the university, according to Kieffe and Sami el-Yousef, the university’s vice president for finance and planning, is the impossibility of scheduling a normal academic year or undertaking any long-range planning because of the unsettled political atmosphere and Israel’s increasing clampdown on the Palestinian Territories.
Whenever Israel imposes curfew, for example, university life slams to a halt. Sometimes, said Kieffe, “curfew is lifted and so students and faculty leave home to come. Then suddenly the Israelis decide we’re under curfew again, everything shuts down. Anybody who’s already here scrambles to get home before curfew -- they risk arrest if they’re out or being stuck on a locked-down campus if they stay. We’ve lost literally hundreds of days of school because of curfew alone.”
Under the best circumstances, testing is a stress producer for college students. But at Bethlehem University students have to contend with interrupted or shortened test times, again because of curfew. “We’ll have a two-hour test ready and then find out there’s curfew again. So going in, the instructor or professor warns the students, ‘OK, you’ll have half the time, so skip the following …’ It’s a terrible way to have to get your education,” Kieffe said.
El-Yousef, 44, has held a number of posts during his 19 years at the university. A member of the Greek Orthodox church, he belongs to one of the 13 oldest Christian families in the Holy Land and traces his family history in Jerusalem back 1,200 years. Each of his family’s four living generations has seen their Palestinian homeland under different rule: His children under Israelis, el-Yousef and his siblings under Jordan, his father under the British mandate and his grandfather under the Turks.
 A Palestinian policeman inspects shrapnel in a classroom at Bethlehem University in March 2002 after Israeli tanks fired three shells at the university.
While each generation had its own challenges, el-Yousef said he believes the current situation is the worst.
If the Israeli-built “security fence” -- actually a concrete wall 20 feet high in many places -- goes up around Bethlehem as predicted, “no one knows the impact on this institution,” he said. Because it will effectively seal off the university and large portions of Bethlehem itself from students and faculty, “we really are looking at downsizing.”
During the first intifada in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Bethlehem University was one of six colleges in the occupied territories that were closed by Israeli authorities for more than two years. The Israeli military contended that the schools were breeding grounds for terrorism and the sites of frequent demonstrations and violence. During the current conflict, Israeli troops clashed with Bethlehem University students in 2002, firing rubber bullets and stun grenades into a school building, responding, the military said, to stone-throwing students.
The political quicksand of life here makes strategic long-term planning impossible. “If you want to plan in an optimistic way, you look at peace coming to the region within the next five years. Then you need to open the university beyond Palestine to students from Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and other places as well,” el-Yousef told NCR. “But is peace coming? If not, you need to be conservative, engage in belt-tightening, plan accordingly. But how do you plan? We’re trying to engage in strategic planning for a five-year period,” he said. “But we shy away from it because the situation on the ground changes so rapidly.”
Finances are another major problem, Kieffe and el-Yousef agreed.
The annual $1,000 tuition consists of about $590 worth of financial aid, with the average student paying $410 out of pocket, Kieffe explains. The other $2,500-plus that is the real cost of tuition needs to be raised by the university. The Christian Brothers’ services are already primarily a donation.
“The people live on less than $2 a day, and the wealth that was in the Holy Land left a long time ago,” el-Yousef said. “It’s a huge challenge to raise 50 percent of your revenue from outside sources.”
El-Yousef noted the added difficulty of raising money when you’re a Vatican-sponsored institution. “When you go to the [Palestinian Authority] to try to get funding, they’ll say, ‘You’re rich! You have the Vatican behind you.’ And when you turn to Christian sources, they often tell you, ‘Ask the Palestinians.’ ”
Still, el-Yousef loves his job and is passionate about the university. “The strength of this university is in its academic programs. It’s a vibrant institution,” he said like a proud parent. “We produce the best graduates of any university in the region. We constantly get testimonies from employers. And our alumni, whether Muslim or Christian, keep telling us how Bethlehem University has been the key to their success, to their future.”
(Pat Morrison is a former NCR managing editor.
National Catholic Reporter, October 29, 2004)
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