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The below article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I suggest that anyone interested in the American University of Afghanistan read it's content carefully.


From the issue dated November 28, 2008
At American U. of Afghanistan, Turmoil at the Top

A president steps down amid faculty complaints of absenteeism and unrealistic plans


By AISHA LABI

Billed as the country's first independent university, the American University of Afghanistan was established in 2004 with financial support from the highest levels of the American and Afghan governments.

The Bush administration has pledged at least $55-million in direct support since 2005 for an institution that its backers hope will become a training ground for the future leaders of Afghanistan. The government of President Hamid Karzai has allowed the university to lease 43 acres on the outskirts of Kabul near the former royal palace, on which a new campus is to be built.

But its development has been rockier than anticipated, even taking into account Afghanistan's growing instability.

A number of current and former faculty members say that a good share of the blame goes to the university's recently departed president, Thomas M. Stauffer, a former head of two U.S. universities, who stepped down in September.

In a written statement announcing his resignation, Mr. Stauffer offered no explanation for his decision or details about why he was leaving after less than two years.

"I will continue to support the university in any way I can and look forward to seeing the university continue to develop on the solid base we have built for it," he wrote.

But support, critics say, is exactly what was lacking during Mr. Stauffer's tenure. They describe him as an absent administrator, detached from the realities on the ground and uninterested in soliciting advice from the staff.

And although one of his main responsibilities was to raise money for the university, it is unclear whether he brought in much of anything, faculty members say.

Mr. Stauffer's controversial leadership and abrupt departure raise questions about how he was hired and what potential may have been squandered during a critical time in the university's growth.

Ambitious Plans

With most of the private institution's students dependent on some form of financial aid to cover tuition, the failure to generate scholarship money has had a direct impact on student recruitment.

Many faculty members felt that the president's preoccupation with ambitious plans for expansion detracted from the more pressing needs of the institution's existing programs, such as undergraduate education. Retaining faculty members in what was already a hardship post was complicated by the low morale under Mr. Stauffer's leadership.

"The bigger issue here is not the petty complaints that I have about the man so much as how he was able to secure his position and, ultimately, the message that it sent to the students and government officials in Kabul," said Frank Petrella, by e-mail. Mr. Petrella was dean of academic affairs until Mr. Stauffer decided not to renew his contract in November 2007.

That act spurred the first public sign of dissent that had been building on the campus: The faculty issued a vote of no confidence in Mr. Stauffer last December.

Optimistic Beginnings

The low morale on campus late last year stood in marked contrast to the optimistic atmosphere in March 2005, when First Lady Laura Bush and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings visited Kabul and announced a $15-million founding grant from the United States Agency for International Development.

In 2006 the university's first students began attending classes. In December of that year, after an international search, the Board of Trustees announced the selection of Mr. Stauffer, a former president of the University of Houston-Clear Lake and of Golden Gate University, as the new institution's first president and chief executive.

Despite the challenges it has faced, the university has grown from two faculty members and 34 undergraduates to 22 faculty members, 196 undergraduates, and 128 "foundation studies" students, or those preparing to enroll in full degree programs. Eight more faculty members are scheduled to begin teaching in January.

The university offers undergraduate degree programs in business administration, information technology, and general studies. It attracts mainly wealthy and working students, given that tuition is $2,400 a semester. Fees cover less than 10 percent of the institution's expenses, and 70 percent of its undergraduates receive some financial assistance, according to university officials.

Students and faculty members alike have been drawn by the promise of an institution that is Afghanistan's "only not-for-profit, nonpolitical, nonsectarian, nongovernmental, private and independent, internationally supported university," as its Web site declares.

Judith P. Schiffbauer, an associate professor of English who has worked in Afghanistan on and off since the late 1960s, said she joined the brand-new university in September 2006 because she believed the educational opportunities it offered would be instrumental in helping shape the troubled country's future.

She still believes passionately in that mission but has been disillusioned by what she saw of how the institution was managed.

"At a time when the university was in its infancy, and its Kabul-based administration, staff, and faculty were challenged with developing curriculum and supplying textbooks for the nascent undergraduate program, renovating war-damaged buildings on the campus, and attracting and properly housing needed additional faculty," she wrote in an e-mail message, "Dr. Stauffer persisted in pursuing such ideas as opening a law school, constructing a teaching hospital, and building a center for the study of public administration. Those of us on the ground in Kabul viewed such ideas as extremely premature and Dr. Stauffer's focus on them as sorely disconnected from the difficulties we faced."

Ms. Schiffbauer and others said Mr. Stauffer was rarely in Kabul. (A Chronicle reporter interviewed eight current and former faculty members and administrators, although three of them would not speak for attribution.)

Rebecca L. Carter spent two years in Kabul as the university's registrar and now holds that position at the American University of Armenia. "We really had very little knowledge of Dr. Stauffer as he was seldom in Kabul and when there rarely left his hotel," she wrote in an e-mail exchange.

Others were more scathing about what they said was Mr. Stauffer's obvious reluctance to travel to Kabul, his insistence that he needed an armored car for driving around the city, and what they viewed as his unwillingness to subject himself to the challenging conditions with which they themselves had no choice but to cope. An attack in January on a five-star hotel popular with foreigners may have influenced Mr. Stauffer's apparent reluctance to spend time in Kabul.

Mr. Stauffer did not respond to multiple e-mail messages sent to his personal account, or to messages left on the phone of a colleague in Maryland, whose number was supplied by the university's news office as his main contact in the United States. But Akram Fazel, chairman of the Board of Trustees, spoke in the former president's defense.

Reached by telephone at his home in Paris, Mr. Fazel said that the board had been "surprised" by Mr. Stauffer's resignation, a decision that he said Mr. Stauffer must have reached because of "security problems" in Kabul.

"He has done an excellent job, he has made some good recruitments, and has recruited two senior vice presidents who are running the university very smoothly," Mr. Fazel said of Mr. Stauffer.

Mr. Fazel said that the board had no problem with the amount of time Mr. Stauffer had spent in Afghanistan, in large part because of the travel required for the fund-raising responsibilities the president's job entailed.

According to Ms. Schiffbauer, another source of the faculty's unhappiness with Mr. Stauffer was his decision not to renew Mr. Petrella's contract.

Mr. Petrella said his ouster stemmed from his reluctance to back the president's plans for a law program at the university and other projects.

"He would never articulate what programs would be offered in the new program. Criminal law? Shariah law? Business law? Communication law? Only that it would begin as a program in legal studies," Mr. Petrella wrote, adding that he felt he had no choice but to refuse to support such a sketchy proposal.

Mr. Stauffer "never asked for an opinion or initiated any discussion on any of his plans,"wrote Mr. Petrella. "He simply devised this plan on his own and expected everyone to embrace it." (University officials declined to discuss why Mr. Petrella's contract was not renewed, saying it was an internal matter.)

A Pattern of 'No Confidence'

It turns out that the Kabul faculty's vote of no confidence was not the first time Mr. Stauffer had faced dissatisfaction from the academics he oversaw.

As The Chronicle reported at the time, in 1990 professors at the University of Houston-Clear Lake passed a motion of "no confidence in their president after he recommended the dismissal of a tenured faculty member, despite the recommendation of two university committees that the professor be retained."

In 1999, Mr. Stauffer resigned from his post at Golden Gate University, a month after that institution's law-school faculty passed a no-confidence motion in him and "less than two months after the American Bar Association criticized him for reneging on promises to support the university's law school," The Chronicle reported.

One of the charges leveled against Mr. Stauffer at Golden Gate was that he had not been spending enough time at the university's main San Francisco campus.

Asked whether the board was aware of Mr. Stauffer's history at his previous posts, Mr. Fazel said that a selection committee had worked closely with a "hiring institution." He deflected the suggestion that he and his colleagues had anything to regret in Mr. Stauffer's hiring.

The university in Afghanistan has succeeded on many fronts, with enrollment growing, faculty recruitment on the rise, and the rebuilding and renovation of a war-damaged building in southern Kabul that now houses 10 classrooms, a laboratory, and a new library. Its first students are scheduled to graduate in 2010, which will allow the university to apply for full accreditation.

Despite the successes, Mr. Stauffer's absentee leadership left many faculty and administrators feeling angry and frustrated by the toll they felt his mismanagement was taking on the fledgling institution.

The university has presented itself as "operating efficiently and transparently while growing rapidly," but its administration has instead come across as lacking transparency, Mr. Petrella said. "Students are crushed that they've come into a university and find the same kind of things they find in their own government."

In January, Mr. Stauffer was given a seat of honor at President George W. Bush's final State of the Union address. In June, Laura Bush announced an additional $40-million in federal funds over the next five years for the American University of Afghanistan. (USAID officials did not respond to a request for comment.)

Not New York

As for precisely how much money Mr. Stauffer's travels had generated, Mr. Fazel declined to provide a specific dollar figure but said that much of his efforts had gone to laying the groundwork for fund raising that has only recently begun to come to fruition.

Since Mr. Stauffer's departure, the university has hired two Washington-based fund raisers.

The university has also appointed an acting president, Athanasios Moulakis, a Greek-born professor of political science who joined the university early this year as its chief academic officer. Mr. Moulakis has taught at several European and American universities, including the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The university is conducting a search for Mr. Stauffer's permanent replacement. The process is likely to stretch well into 2009, Mr. Fazel said. "After all, we're not talking about New York or Paris," he said. "We have to underline what the situation is."

Mr. Moulakis says that morale at the university is good.

"We have been very successful in recruiting more and better people, and that helps to create a very different esprit de corps," he said. "The temptation to get unhappy is much less because there is a much richer collegial life." He noted that student enrollment is growing, and that the recent influx of additional financing from USAID ensured that the institution would be on solid financial footing for the next several years.

http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 55, Issue 14, Page A23

[dime a dozen]

Information here confirms a lot of what has been posted on this discussion board; notewothy too that the Chronicle is a publication of high standing, and Aisha Labi is an established and reputable journalist.

What about the doctor's spin at the end about good morale and better people due to a richer collegial life? This obviously doesn't include the fellow teacher who was sacked and raced back to Dubai a couple of weeks ago for opening a bottle of wine in the student dorm; nor does it include the number whose resignations are in process.

Good morale! I doubt it.

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Have the well liked flying Dutchman, Dr. JB, in Admininstration, and his accomplices been fired too? Or have USAID just clipped their wings?

What's staff turnover like now? It sounds like they should have a revolving door.

[dime a dozen]

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