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  | 03 July 2026

The destruction of universities in conflict zones often captures global attention in the form of shattered lecture halls, bombed laboratories and students cut off from classrooms.

But across the Middle East, a quieter crisis is also unfolding inside higher education: universities are being hollowed out not only by violence but also by political interference, institutional fragmentation and economic collapse.

The newly released  by the 91���� (91����) documents direct attacks on higher education institutions across the region.

Yet the damage extends far beyond physical destruction. In country after country, the university is being weakened as a space for independent inquiry, social mobility and public trust.

That erosion takes different forms.

In Lebanon, attacks on public higher education and political polarisation are undermining one of the country’s last shared academic spaces.

In Iraq, unstable policies and deteriorating infrastructure are trapping academics in a system that cannot fully use their expertise.

In Syria, years of fragmented governance have raised deeper questions about the integrity and recognition of university degrees.

In Yemen, salary collapse and chronic power shortages are pushing universities toward institutional exhaustion.

And in Türkiye, academics warn that political pressure and administrative intervention are shrinking the space for independent debate on campus.

Taken together, these pressures reveal a regional higher education crisis that is no longer defined only by war damage. It is increasingly about whether universities can continue to function as trusted institutions at all.

As Robert Quinn, executive director of , put it, attacks on higher education are rarely “isolated, one-off” events. Rather, they are often “symptomatic of wider conditions of repression against freedom to think, question, and share ideas.”

Lebanon: Erosion of rare shared space

In Lebanon, the crisis in higher education is not only about damaged campuses or interrupted teaching. It is also about the weakening of one of the country’s few remaining spaces for social mixing and upward mobility.

, the country’s main public higher education institution, has long served students from diverse sectarian, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. That role, however, has come under strain as conflict-related disruption, economic instability, and political polarisation reshape academic life.

According to the , the escalation of hostilities in 2024 and 2025 resulted in at least three documented attacks on higher education, including airstrikes that damaged buildings at the Rafik Hariri campus of the Lebanese University in November 2024 and the Islamic University of Lebanon in late 2024.

, professor of journalism and media studies and director, Institute of Media Research and Training at Lebanese American University, said the consequences of attacks on public institutions go well beyond physical damage.

“Attacks on the Lebanese University do not only serve as an obstacle to low-income and marginalised communities and hurt their chances for social and economic mobility, they also affect cohesion in society,” he said.

Melki noted that many private universities in Lebanon are tied, formally or informally, to specific sectarian communities, making the public university unusually important as a “melting pot” where students from different backgrounds can study together.

Extended periods of instability, online learning, and declining campus life, he argues, threaten that role by pushing students back into narrower social and ideological circles.

The damage is also deeply personal. Faculty members face what he describes as an “invisible effect”: the psychological toll of instability, the loss of teaching facilities, and the fear that academic work can be interrupted or rendered meaningless by events outside the university’s control.

Research slows, motivation falls, and the pressure to simply keep classes running often leaves little room for serious intellectual work.

Quinn noted that many scholars try to “compartmentalise risks so that they may continue to function – to research, teach and publish – pretending as best they can that things are normal and relatively safe”.

But widespread attacks, he argued, can overwhelm that coping mechanism, leaving even those who appear to be managing “carrying a terrible amount of repressed stress and anxiety that impedes proper intellectual work”.

At the same time, Melki warned that some of the most troubling pressures now come from within universities themselves.

He pointed to cases in which outspoken faculty members have faced retaliation or stalled promotions because of their political views, creating a climate in which academics may think twice before pursuing controversial research or speaking publicly.

For Lebanon’s higher education sector, the danger is not only physical disruption but the gradual transformation of the university into a less open, less courageous intellectual space.

Iraq: Policy instability and ‘brain waste’

In Iraq, the crisis in higher education is less about direct violence on campus than about the slow accumulation of political interference, unstable policy shifts, and failing infrastructure.

Data from the Education Under Attack 2026 report identifies one attack on higher education students, educators, and personnel during the 2024 to 2025 reporting period, specifically noting an incident in October 2024 where police allegedly used force against recent graduates and health workers protesting at the Ministry of Higher Education in Baghdad.

, emeritus professor at University College Dublin and chairman of the Network of Iraqi Scientists Abroad, pulls no punches in describing the suffocating effects of political interference.

He argued that universities have been reduced from “beacons of light” to “political fiefdoms”. The muhasasa (sectarian-political quota) system, he said, has effectively privatised academic positions for party patronage.

“When the sanctity of the university is breached by outside agendas, it stops being a laboratory for ideas and becomes a place of enforced conformity,” Al-Rubeai explained. For faculty and students navigating these invisible red lines, he adds, “self-censorship has become the survival strategy”.

The crisis extends to the integrity of the academic degree itself. Al-Rubeai warned of an “institutionalisation of mediocrity”, fuelled by the influx of credentials obtained through shortcuts from weak regional institutions, alongside the rise of unchecked plagiarism and “paper mills”. He cautioned: “We are actively replacing [our best minds] with a culture of fraud.”

An Iraqi academic currently based in Germany, who requested anonymity to speak freely about conditions inside Iraqi public universities, offers a more granular view of how this erosion plays out on the ground. The core problem, he said, is not constant security intervention inside campuses but the instability of the system itself.

“One of the elements of structural weakness is not just the lack of funding, but the instability of educational policies,” he said.

Iraqi universities, he explained, have repeatedly shifted between annual systems, course-based structures, and the Bologna process, often without the institutional preparation needed to make such transitions work.

The result is confusion for students, faculty, and administrators alike, with different cohorts sometimes studying under entirely different systems within the same college.

That instability is compounded by severe infrastructural deficits, especially in scientific research. Unreliable electricity, limited laboratory capacity, and inadequate preservation systems make it difficult for researchers in the sciences to conduct sustained experimental work.

Laboratories that depend on continuous cooling, stable power, or long-running equipment are particularly vulnerable.

Yet the Iraqi case also reveals a paradox. These pressures have not necessarily produced a mass exodus from public universities. Government university jobs still offer a level of stability, pension security, and social status that keeps many academics in the system.

The problem, the academic argues, is therefore not only “brain drain” but also “brain waste”: qualified scholars remain employed but are unable to publish consistently, build research teams, or work in an environment that allows their expertise to flourish.

Syria: Rebuilding trust after fragmentation

If Iraq illustrates how instability can weaken an existing higher education system, Syria shows what happens when years of conflict fragment the system itself.

The Education Under Attack 2026 report documents that higher education has not been spared; for instance, four male students were reportedly killed in November 2024 when shelling struck Aleppo University student housing.

Additionally, in 2025, the report notes attacks such as the abduction of a professor at Homs University and the abduction of two university students by armed forces in Aleppo.

For Basem Mahmud, senior Social Science Researcher at the Syrian Center for Policy Research (SCPR), the main challenge facing Syrian universities today is no longer primarily one of immediate physical security.

The attacks documented in recent years, he said, were closely tied to the broader conflict environment, fragmented territorial control, and weakened state institutions. But after major political and security shifts since late 2024, the more urgent question has become how to rebuild universities as trusted and independent institutions.

That challenge is closely tied to the fragmentation of educational governance during the conflict. Different administrative systems, accreditation arrangements, and academic policies emerged across different parts of the country, weakening confidence in Syrian university degrees both domestically and internationally.

For students and graduates, the question is no longer only whether a campus can operate safely but whether the degree it awards will be recognised, respected, and useful in the future.

Mahmud argued that the current transition offers a rare opportunity to rebuild a unified national higher education system grounded in academic independence, quality assurance, and renewed international cooperation.

But he also warned against treating international rankings or external accreditation as the starting point for reform.

The deeper question, he said, is what kind of university Syria needs after years of conflict – and whether higher education can rebuild its relationship with society by producing knowledge that informs public policy, supports institutional reconstruction, and prepares graduates to contribute to long-term recovery.

In that sense, Syria’s higher education crisis is no longer only about survival. It is about legitimacy: whether universities can once again function as credible public institutions in a society trying to recover from prolonged fragmentation.

Yemen: Economic collapse, institutional exhaustion

In Yemen, the pressures on higher education are inseparable from economic collapse. Years of conflict have not only militarised parts of the education system and fractured governance; they have also destroyed the financial foundations that universities need to function at all.

The Education Under Attack 2026 report records nine attacks on higher education during the 2024 to 2025 period. The report further identifies at least 63 cases of military use of schools and universities, including incidents where Houthi forces used university campuses, such as Dhamar University and the University of Science and Technology, as military bases or headquarters.

In a joint written commentary prepared exclusively for this report, Dr Lotfi Bin Dahman, director of the International Relations Center at Hadhramout University, and Dr Saeed Al-Amoudi, director of the university’s Information Technology Center, document the scale of that systemic collapse.

Faculty salaries, they note, have in some cases fallen to less than a quarter of their pre-war levels, triggering a widespread brain drain of academic talent.

For those who remain, basic academic operations are crippled. Prolonged electricity cuts – reaching 12 to 16 hours a day in cities such as Aden and Hadhramout – severely disrupt laboratory work and lectures.

Furthermore, the report notes that soaring transportation costs have created immense financial burdens, leading to high student absenteeism and threatening their ability to continue studying at all.

The crisis has also caused a severe decline in scientific output, as funding dries up and scholars are cut off from international conferences, leading to the relative scientific isolation of Yemeni universities.

The effects are visible not only in teaching conditions but also in student behaviour. Yemeni researcher Tariq Al-Marhabi said annual enrolment in some intermediate universities has collapsed from around 6,000 students to just 500.

As public-sector hiring has remained frozen since 2015, students are increasingly gravitating toward fields that might offer immediate work in the private sector, rather than pursuing disciplines with uncertain economic returns.

For faculty, the picture is equally bleak. In southern areas where salaries are still paid, Al-Marhabi said an associate professor may now earn the equivalent of less than US$200 a month, compared with more than US$1,000 before 2015. Even those salaries are not always paid on time.

Dr Mohamed Baazab, director general of international relations at the University of Aden, said salary disbursements in the south are often delayed and paid retroactively, further straining living conditions for academic staff.

Baazab adds that financial collapse is only one part of the problem. Political interference, fragmented governance, and inconsistent academic policies, he said, have also weakened academic autonomy and raised concerns about the quality and international recognition of some Yemeni university degrees.

In Yemen, then, the threat to higher education is not simply a temporary wartime disruption. It is the possibility of long-term institutional exhaustion – where universities remain open in name but lose the material capacity to teach, research, and retain staff.

Türkiye: No space for dissent

In Türkiye, the crisis takes a different form. Universities are not facing the physical devastation seen in war-affected countries, but academics and students have increasingly found themselves operating in a politically charged environment where the space for dissent, protest, and independent debate has narrowed.

The Education Under Attack 2026 report identifies at least nine attacks on higher education in Türkiye during the 2024 to 2025 period. While the number of violent attacks declined, the report stated that at least 300 students and staff were reportedly detained or arrested, particularly in the context of protest repression at institutions such as Boaziçi University and Middle East Technical University.

These patterns, alongside growing concerns over top-down governance and political pressure on campus life, have raised broader questions about whether universities can still function as spaces for open inquiry, civic engagement, and independent academic debate.

Beyond the buildings

Across the Middle East, the damage to higher education can no longer be measured only in destroyed buildings or interrupted semesters. It is also measured in students who stop enrolling, in researchers who remain in place but cannot produce, in faculty who fear speaking openly, and in universities that lose their ability to bring different social groups into the same intellectual space.

What emerges from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Türkiye is not a single model of collapse but a shared pattern of institutional hollowing-out.

In some cases, the pressure comes from war and economic ruin; in others, from political interference, fragmented governance, or the slow corrosion of academic trust. The result is the same: universities become less able to function as independent centres of knowledge, social mobility, and public life.

For Quinn, protecting higher education begins with a simple principle: educational spaces must be “off-limits: off-limits to conflict, off-limits to political interference, off-limits to violence and off-limits as resources to be used for any other purpose than education”.

At the same time, he stresses that higher education spaces and personnel are “extremely resilient”, even under the most difficult conditions.

Rebuilding higher education in the region, therefore, is not simply a matter of repairing classrooms or reopening campuses.

It is about restoring universities as trusted institutions – places where teaching, research and debate can take place without fear, chronic instability, or political coercion.

Without that restoration, the loss will not be confined to academia. It will shape the region’s capacity for recovery, public reasoning and long-term development for years to come.