The 259 students who graduated this year from the Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco’s only English-language college, are practically guaranteed a job -- unlike those Moroccans who went through the country’s French-inspired education system. Commencement weekend at AUI, as it is commonly known, is not a very Moroccan affair. The atmosphere at the campus, set amid the pine and cedar forests of the Mid-Atlas mountain range, is part Swiss ski village, part Ivy League college. The university is in Ifrane, a mountain resort originally built for the French colonial elite wishing to escape the summer heat of Casablanca and Rabat. On a recent weekend in June, it was beset by a different kind of elite: AUI’s class of 2010 and their proud parents.
It was quickly obvious from the speeches that AUI did things the American way.
“AUI gives you not just a degree but a whole new personality,” said alumni President Khalid Baddou.
“AUI is more than a university; it is a community with an amazing culture. Here, you are given the weapons to face the real world with,” said science and engineering graduate Ahmad Arjdane.
The underlying message was loud and clear: This is what you miss out on if you study at traditional French-inspired universities in Morocco.
“I lost all hope with the French system while I was in high school,” said Fahd El Hassan, a 2009 graduate. “It is all about memorizing, not about learning.”
El Hassan was invited to speak at this year’s commencement because he had won third place in the 2008 Imagine Cup, a student competition organized by Microsoft and Unesco to further sustainable businesses through technology. This year’s AUI graduates included winners of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarschip and the Google Computer Excellence Award in computer science.
"Morocco has long been handicapped because it has been so oriented toward Europe and France," said the dean of the science and engineering school, Ahmed Legrouri. "Let’s face it: Where can you go with just French these days? France, Switzerland and Belgium? Even in France, technical publications are in English these days.”
The former Moroccan king, Hassan II -- although himself a strong Francophile -- was among the first to stress the need for Moroccans to learn English to help ensure international success. Fate lent a helping hand. In 1995, Morocco’s beaches were threatened by an oil spill from a foreign tanker off the coast. The oil eventually drifted away, but by then king Fahd of Saudi Arabia had written a $50-million check to come to Morocco’s aid. The money was used to found AUI.
The university likes to boast that Moroccan employers are falling over themselves to hire AUI graduates. A recent survey by the alumni association said 98% of AUI graduates had found a job, started a business or were working a master's degree within six months of graduation. This is in stark contrast to other Moroccan universities, some of whose graduates have been demonstrating every day for months in front of the parliament building in the capital, Rabat, demanding to be given jobs. Passersby sometimes make snide remarks about these demonstrators, saying graduates think a university degree automatically entitles a person to a government job.
"Like in many developing countries, it was long policy in Morocco that college graduates were given government jobs straight out of school," said AUI alumni President Baddou. "It was part of an internal security strategy at the time."
Moroccans also have learned the value of learning English. Moroccans initially missed the boat of the economic boom in the Persian Gulf countries because French was of no use in Dubai or Kuwait. Now, English is becoming a requirement in Morocco. Even some French companies in Morocco require that employees know English.
“The demand for an institution like ours is insatiable for the moment," said Simon O'Rourke, AUI’s American communications director. “We are the only one to offer the overall college experience."
Gert van Langendonck in Rabat, Morocco -  LA TIMES
 
 

Noureddine Mouaddib left Morocco to pursue his university studies in France over 30 years ago. He became a professor of computer science at the University of Nantes and a member of the French national council for higher education and research. Yet Mr. Mouaddib's thoughts turned often to his native country, where, he says, emigration has remained unavoidable for those who want to pursue higher education. "In the global South, as soon as you graduate from high school, you wonder: Where will I go? Canada, France?" he says. "If you look at world rankings, there isn't a single internationally visible university in Africa, with the exception of South Africa." Yet even as more and more young people in the region aspire to a good higher education, opportunities such as the ones he enjoyed have shrunk, he says. "Moroccan students and African students from modest backgrounds are no longer able to come to France or Europe to study. ... The door's been closed. With what they ask to get a visa—it's impossible." It was those realizations that led him, in 2005, to envisage the creation of the first global research university in Morocco. Mr. Mouaddib undertook a feasibility study and began talking with government officials, colleagues, and members of his country's diaspora about the need to create an internationally oriented, R&D-driven university in Morocco. This September the International University of Rabat, here in the capital city, is set to welcome its first 200 students. "Rather than young people traveling toward knowledge"—and finding their path littered with obstacles—Mr. Mouaddib says, "we'll move knowledge toward them." The university is a public-private partnership. Mohammed VI, the Moroccan king, donated the 20 hectares—about 50 acres—in a new technology park on the outskirts of the city. Classes, which this fall are being held in temporary offices, will move there next year, and the campus should be completed by 2015. The university plans to have 280 faculty members and 5,000 students by 2020. Two pension funds, one French-run, the other operated by the Moroccan government, are the two main investors, contributing over a third of the university's planned five-year budget of 1.12 billion Moroccan dirhams (about $130-million). Moroccan Context The curriculum has been conceived to complement government development plans and with emerging sectors in the Moroccan economy in mind. The country is in a construction boom. In recent years, Moroccan authorities have begun major infrastructure developments focused on transportation, tourism and affordable housing. The government is also committed to developing local sources of alternative energy; plans are to have about 40 percent of the country's energy be wind- and solar-generated by 2020. The new university has responded accordingly. "Many students can't find the degrees they want in Morocco," Mr. Mouaddib acknowledges. "We are focusing on disciplines that are new and that respond to national development needs." In addition to business, political science, and information technology, Rabat will offer programs in renewable energy; railway, naval, automobile, and aerospace engineering (several airplane manufacturers have set up facilities in Morocco recently); and architecture and design. Fifteen faculty members are in place for this fall, and the university plans to hire 20 more for next year, and to continue increasing the faculty ranks year by year. The number of university students in Morocco has risen steadily over the past decade, to more than 300,000 today, and is projected to as much as double by 2015. Yet public universities here remain largely focused on humanities and social-science degrees that, critics say, give graduates no marketable skills. Morocco has only nine engineers per 10,000 people (compared with 40 in Jordan and 130 in France). The government has not yet met its goal of devoting 1 percent of gross domestic product to research and development. Mr. Mouaddib says his standing in the academic community and decades-old network of contacts helped him get his project going quickly. The university's faculty has been largely drawn from the Moroccan and North African diaspora. It was "something personal I wanted to do," says Mokhtar Ghambou, a professor of literature at Yale University, of his decision to help shape the Moroccan university's core humanities component. "At a certain point you feel nostalgia. You start to wonder, What can I do for my native country? To think about what you can contribute." Many of the scholarly recruits have helped structure partnerships between Rabat and their own colleges, and have brought corporate research sponsors to the new university. Mr. Ghambou himself hopes to divide his time between Yale and Rabat. International Orientation In the new university's name, "the word 'international' is not rhetorical," says Mr. Ghambou. "This is a unique project. People are joining from all over the world." Marcia C. Inhorn, a professor of anthropology and international affairs and chair of the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale, visited Rabat last year in a delegation led by Mr. Ghambou. As part of its mission to promote understanding of the contemporary Middle East, she says via e-mail, the council is looking to collaborate with "promising partner institutions" in the Middle East and North Africa. Yale hopes to engage in student and faculty exchanges with the university in Rabat, she adds. "Moroccan-American relations are being strengthened as well, and [the Council of Middle East Studies] wants to be a part of this hopeful moment," she writes. "Yale is currently in a major process of internationalization/globalization, and the Middle East is near the top of its lists of priority areas." Most of Rabat's partnerships are with major French universities—not surprising, given Morocco's historic links to France. The goal is to "combine the French and U.S. systems, pick the good things from both," says Mohammed Cherkaoui, a professor of mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who will lead the Moroccan university's engineering department. Rabat hopes to offer dual degrees with many of its foreign academic partners. Students will be required to spend two semesters abroad, and instruction is to be in both French and English. The new university's other defining characteristic is a focus on applied research. Morocco's ministry of energy will finance a five-million-euro (about $6.5-million) project to increase the efficiency of solar cells, says Mr. Cherkaoui, who adds that the university will make research on renewable energy "part of its identity." Rabat's corporate research partners include the engineering giant Siemens AG, the media company Vivendi, and the aerospace company Thales Group. Alongside government and corporate-backed research and development, says Mr. Mouaddib, the university will focus on "niche" research. "We won't produce super-high-tech products," he explains. "We'll work on products that meet the needs of the local, of the African, market. In other words, inexpensive innovations." The engineering department has already patented three alternative-energy devices. Designed to produce power for domestic use, they are a wind turbine that will function even with very weak breezes; a light panel that shuts off automatically when it detects other sources of light; and a solar-powered water heater. There is demand for such devices in Morocco and other African countries, where many rural areas remain off the electrical grid, says Mr. Cherkaoui. In fact, Rabat is already negotiating their commercial mass production. Regional Ambition The university hopes that at least 20 percent of its student body will come from sub-Saharan Africa. And it wants to offer opportunities to deserving student of limited means. It will give academic scholarships, covering the approximately $7,500 yearly tuition, to a fifth of its students, as well as help them get bank loans to cover living expenses. Dina El Khawaga, the Ford Foundation's program officer for higher education in the Middle East and North Africa, says the university has the potential to create a "more human and more egalitarian face to the internationalization of education in Africa." But even South African universities—by far the best in the continent—haven't had an easy time attracting students from other African countries, she notes. Rabat's administrators will have to address a number of questions: "Will they offer remedial classes? Who says Morocco will facilitate visas for students? Will scholarships be available to non-Moroccan students? What kind of institutional partnerships will allow them to reach this 20 percent [target of sub-Saharan African students]? When you are in a Dar el-Salam high school [in Senegal], what will encourage you to get up and go to Morocco?" "Theres a whole strategy that needs to be put into place," says Ms. El Khawaga, sounding a cautious but still optimistic note."I'm really dreaming that this will be a nice initiative by a non-oil country to make a research hub in the next decade. But we have to be patient. Our expectations have to be low." Mr. Mouaddib's vision is nothing if not ambitious. He envisages his new university as a catalyst for national and regional development and innovation, the center of a North African Silicon Valley. "Morocco can be a regional leader." he says, "given its potential, its position, its stability." The Chronicle

One of the biggest changes brought by the arrival of King Mohamed VI to power in 1999 has been the development of new visible (or rather, audible) popular music scene in Morocco. In the last 10 years, fusion groups like Hoba Hoba Spirit or Fnaire, and rappers like Bigg or Muslim have been the flagships of a real musical revolution that have given the decades-long deprived Moroccan youth a chance to finally hear independent music that reflects their reality and aspirations.   With the notable exception of Nass el-Ghiwane, Jil Jilala and Lem Chaheb, the last two decades of the late king's reign were characterized by a grim cultural aridity where official representatives of culture, fully homologated by the authorities, were the only ones with access to state subsidies or TV distribution. While most Moroccans enjoy local chaabi (popular) groups or foreign music, the country's official TV channel (and until 1989, the only one), would to almost every Moroccan youth's great displeasure, limit its contribution to culture to the broadcasting of the infamous Sahra Fanniya Koubra (the grand artistic evening) a long and soporific succession of official artists every Saturday evening. With the death of the late king in 1999, a new generation of young and assertive performers was able to create a new space for musical expression. Despite some initial difficulties (a group of 14 Moroccan heavy metal singers were condemned to jail sentences for playing "satanic" music in 2003), bands such as H-Kayne and Darga were quasi-instantly able to secure a large audience of young Moroccans eager to hear music in tune to their concerns, speaking their language and free from the stifling norms of official art. Singing in colloquial Arabic, Berber, French and English, the different songs reflect the multiple identities of their creators and their public. They tackle issues rarely discussed publicly such as corruption, torture, sexuality and the difficulty of being young in a country of contrasts and inequalities. The Moroccan francophone press quickly labeled these changes ‘Nayda' (which means ‘up' in Moroccan Arabic) as a reflection of the Movida, Spain's cultural and social revolution which followed Franco's death in 1975. As in Spain, the arrival of a new King created a great deal of hope among a population eager for change. Indeed, immediately after his coming to power, the "young king of the youth" attempted to distance himself from his father's autocratic ways by (somewhat) liberalizing the political sphere, encouraging the emergence of new private radio stations catering to a younger audience and by sponsoring a number of major music festivals across the country. In less than 10 years, state-organized music festivals like Mawazine in Rabat became Morocco's major cultural events while Nayda's inventive groups were given wide access to state television and official events. However, as underlined by many Moroccan journalists, it quickly became clear that whatever change Morocco was experiencing could hardly be compared to what occurred in Spain in the 1980s. Catering to increasingly conservative voters, Morocco's main Islamic party, the Party of Justice and Development, regularly condemns the organization of music festivals and lumps together the risk of depravation that these festivals are supposed to encourage with homosexuality, drugs use and the westernization of Morocco's youth. Similarly, Rachid Nini, perhaps Morocco's most influential journalist, has also been a stern critique of music festivals which he sees as part of a large conspiracy to corrupt the younger generations of the country. While authorities were initially hesitant on how to deal with these changes, the terrorist attacks of 2003 made them realize the importance of allowing increasingly frustrated urban youth vent some of their dissatisfaction. The government now directly sponsors multi-million dollars festivals in all major Moroccan cities while at the same time assisting local artists with administrative and logistical support. According to Dr. Mohamed Darif, a political science professor at the University of Hassan II in Mohamedia, Nayda is simply "another effort by the state to co-opt culture and is doomed to fail." For Darif, "Nayda is an attempt to promote the image of Morocco as an open and tolerant society while at the same time trying to contain the appeal of extremism to increasingly conservative youth." Undeniably, the links between the Nayda movement and the authorities are much closer than they appear at first sight. The lead singer of Hoba Hoba Spirit, Nayda's most iconic band, was the star-columnist of the very influential Telquel, a widely read francophone magazine popular amongst Morocco's décideurs. Similarly, Bigg‘s aunt, Milouda Hazeb, is a prominent politician with the Parti Authenticité et Modernité also close to the authorities. More importantly perhaps, some of Nayda's songs are no better than Morocco's most nationalistic chants of the 1970s. L'fnair patriotic song Yed al-Hanna (Henna Hand) is a blatant example of chauvinism and underlines the increasing trend among Moroccan artists to express themselves in terms of traditional themes such as nationalism, loyalty to the monarchy and the need to defend Moroccan values and identity. Finally, the striking success of Nayda's artists is due above all to the ability of all these groups, including the staunchly independent ones, to benefit from government sponsored venues and have access to official music distribution channels. Without the government (often self-interested) benevolence, Morocco's fragile musical scene is less ready than ever to emancipate itself. Merouan Mekouar is a political science doctoral candidate at McGill University.

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