The University a Place of Slavery

About the Book

Over forty years ago, I wrote a memo for the sixties, “The University: A Place of Slavery,” in the heat of the battle. I did not alter or revise the text so that the reader of the second decade of the twenty-first century can capture the temper and the spirit of the exciting sixties. The memo is self-explanatory; it is hubris and upheavals with a Sparticist touch, and it includes the literature of the epoch with its divergent perspectives. Moreover, it embraces Rousseau’s Emile in the age of Enlightenment, the forerunner to the French Revolution and the education for liberation and the rediscovery of the humankind. The appendix is indeed as illustrations for the contents of the memo, and it adds what is relevant to the context I wrote in. Besides, some of the press reports under struggle I engaged in with the autocracies of the university system, which I faced with its arrogance and futilitarian nonsense. To the students and professors of this era, I say: it is time to revive the spirit of humanism and human integrity and to move the world from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of revolutionary change and to inscribe under the sun that never sets that freedom is our lodestar that teaches us to paint wings of freedom on our shackles. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Elias Bacas in helping me have this book published.

About the Author

Professor George Hajjar was a great achiever; in Canada, he was unemployable for five years with a Columbia University PhD in political science and international relations. The president of Political Science Association of Canada (DV) guaranteed him a post at a top university if he signs a statement that pledges not to criticize the two sacred cows: Israel and the faculty. In the United States, he was deported for participating in un-American activities and entering the United States illegally instead of being charged with abducting a governor. In Kuwait, he was deported for telling King Faisal of Saudi Arabia that he will not pray in Jerusalem. In Algeria, he was deported for “proselytizing” the Muslim Brotherhood while being a secularist Christian instead of propagating the Arabization Project. In Iraq, he had a period of respite in peace and prosperity under President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. In Lebanon, his birthplace, he was appointed to the Lebanese University under the force of arms, but he “graduated” (retired) without a pension. In Qatar, he appeared on Al Jazeera program the Opposite Direction ten times but was given an honorarium only once.