An honors professor held a “teach-in” Monday night to provide ASU students with background information about the recent uprising in Egypt.
About 24 students joined David Pickus, a professor at Barrett, the Honors College, to get a better understanding of the protests.
“If you don’t know the general picture, it’s hard to form a good stance,” Pickus said. He emphasized that the events in Egypt were important because the future of the Middle East depended upon the formation of its governments.
Throughout the end of January and the beginning of February, protestors amassed in Cairo and Alexandria to call for the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
Protests in other locations like the Egyptian embassy in Washington and even near ASU’s Tempe campus soon followed.
The 24 students at the teach-in consisted primarily of honors students, some of whom had studied abroad in Egypt in the past.
Political science junior Cameron Bean studied Arabic in Egypt from last June to August through the Critical Language Scholarship sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
The scholarship pays for a student to study a language critical to national security, Bean said.
“I saw first-hand the police state and ... the atmosphere of fear in which people had no outlet to express their feelings about the government or anything like that,” Bean said.
Pickus passed a map of Africa around the circle of students and then described the political history of the country, starting with Egypt’s position in the Ottoman Empire, and ending with a brief description of Mubarak’s reign as president.
This background information intended to inform students of the upward and downward trends of Egypt’s political prominence through history, Pickus said.
He theorized four possible end results, such as a genuine democratic revolution or a take-over by the Muslim Brotherhood, and opened up the lecture to discussion.
One student asked whether the protesters would be able to unify, leading to a comparison of the protests in Egypt to the revolts of the French Revolution, which were not known for a unified revolt.
One ASU alumna who could not attend the discussion experienced the unrest in Egypt first-hand before she was evacuated on the first of February.
After two days of cancelled school and a riotous weekend, representatives from American consulting firm Booz Allen evacuated ASU 2005 alumna and fifth-grade teacher Penny Johnson, who was teaching in Egypt at the time of the protests. According to the Booz Allen website, the firm provides expert advice to civilian government agencies for evacuation decision-making.
Johnson decided to teach in Egypt after attending an international teaching fair in February.
“It was an incredible scene because the neighborhood came out to protect our school,” Johnson said.
The entire community gathered to protect Johnson and her boyfriend as guests of Egypt, Johnson said.
Johnson explained that the people she met would feed a guest before they fed themselves.
“They’re very warm people,” Johnson said.
Pickus noted that the protests may have calmed in Egypt, but that does not mean they are over. Though President Mubarak agreed to not run for re-election in September, he remains in power until then.
“It’s hard to tell what’s been resolved,” Pickus said.
Reach the reporter at hhuskins@asu.edu
