Displaced private universities struggle

Every day at 1.30 pm, the bells ring at the Mohammed Salahuddin Al-Habaj Secondary School for girls, in the Syrian capital’s Mezzeh neighbourhood. The female students head out, making room for a group of older male and female students to enter – students from Qasyuon University, writes Mokhtar Alibrahim for Al-Fanar.

“The deteriorating security conditions and the inability of many students and professors to get to the main campus have led us to obtain the approval of the Syrian Ministry of Higher Education to rent the school building temporarily so we can continue to hold classes,” said Mohammed Al-Jalilati, president of Qasyuon University, whose main campus is located about 50 kilometres outside the capital on the Damascus-Amman international highway.

This kind of arrangement is no longer unusual among private universities in Syria. Ittihad Private University, founded in 2003 in Raqqa, a city in northern Syria, has also moved its campus, to the Institute of Fine Arts in Mezzeh. The International University for Science and Technology moved its faculty of pharmacy to a temporary campus at a public sports facility in central Damascus.
Full report on the Al-Fanar Media site