Good article about the increasing number of Americans studying abroad in the Middle East. Two (medium sized) problems:
1) Why is this article in the fashion and style section?
2) Many, many Arabic programs refuse to send their students to AUC (American University in Cairo) because it was moved out of the city several years ago. They built a new campus outside of Cairo (I've heard about 2 hours with traffic) and it's like living on a compound, not living in Egypt, so to have the article focus so centrally on AUC is unfortunate and highly unrepresentative of some of the more established Arabic programs in the states.
Totally agree, it would have been nice to have more of an overview of programs in the region.(Nice to see Middlebury in the mix, of course.)
ReplyDeleteThe comments on it are alternately hilarious and depressing, as they seem to agree that students studying abroad in the Middle East are either a) going to be haplessly indoctrinated and will return to the States as radical jihadists, b) gunning for a government career (no comment), or c) not necessarily getting a more meaningful/less hedonistic study abroad experience than kids in Paris or London. The latter becomes a more valid critique the more one focuses on AUC.
I was also surprised by how none of the people featured in the article had gotten a second passport if they were planning on traveling to Israel, or at the very least, gotten their Israeli stamps on a separate sheet of paper. Which is to say, I'm more surprised at their being surprised at how difficult certain border crossings were.
You're going to Syria soon, right? I hope your border crossing proceeds with very little incident!