Lecturer, administrators sacked over ‘pants-for-pass’ class

Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, a state-run Islamic seminary, this week sacked three top administrators and a lecturer after the latter was seen in a video asking his male students to take off their trousers in return for securing a pass in an examination.

The incident triggered an outcry and heavy media criticism in this conservative Middle Eastern country after the video went viral online.

In response, the university announced sacking the dean of its Cairo-based teachers’ school where the incident took place, the deputy dean and the head of the department to which the lecturer belonged.

“Al-Azhar University took all urgent legal procedures once it learnt about the incident,” the seminary’s spokesman Ghanem Al Saeed said in a statement.

“These procedures also included expelling the teaching staff member Emam Ramadan for inciting students to commit immoral acts in the lecture room on the campus,” Al Saeed said. “This act makes removing him from the job obligatory because it is a dishonouring act for any teaching staffer and violates established academic values,” the official said.

Ramadan reportedly offered to reward the students who complied with his request to remove their trousers and underwear with top marks in the end-of-year examination of the subject he taught.

The school’s three top administrators have lost their posts over negligence of duty, Al Saeed said. An unspecified number of the students involved in the incident were also expelled from the institution, according to the official.

“This is an isolated act from a person [the lecturer] who does not represent the university and its methodology,” Al Saeed said.

The disgraced professor, who taught Islamic creed and ethics, defended his act as a practical application of his lectures. “All I did was a test by which I sought to show the impact of theoretical lessons of ethics in reality,” Ramadan, the lecturer, said in a Facebook post.

Ramadan, who lectured at Al-Azhar for around 20 years, later made a public apology for what he called his “mistake and mis-estimation”.

“I apologise to all my students for my mistake in attempting to show the difference between theoretical teaching and application. I also apologise to the university because of my mis-estimation. I never thought of harming the reputation of my university, which is the bastion of religion.”

Al-Azhar University is linked to Al-Azhar sheikdom, which is Egypt’s oldest seat of Islamic learning. The university adopts a gender segregation policy by having separate schools and lecture halls for male and female students.