Dr. Yar Ebadi was heartbroken when he visited his alma mater and former workplace, Kabul University, in Afghanistan in 2005.
Warfare ripped Kabul University after his 1981 escape to the United States. Its walls sported more bullet holes than paint. A deep hole had been dug in a lab’s floor to dump bodies whenever casualties piled up, left to decompose. Even though classes had resumed at Kabul University, no one had bothered to fill or even cover the hole.
A lack of faculty resources was equally distressing. The most recent course syllabus was 20 years old.
Ebadi was so upset after returning from his homeland to Kansas State University, where he is dean of its college of business administration, that he convinced his president they should help revitalize the institution.
Today, K-State is developing modern curricula for Kabul University’s English and engineering programs. Most Afghan faculty across all disciplines hold no graduate degrees, Ebadi says. And undergraduate education during the years of Soviet and then Taliban occupation consisted mostly of “indoctrination, not scientific learning.”
Ebadi was a Kabul University mechanical engineering professor in the late 1970s. Like him, a few of his colleagues managed to flee after the 1979 Soviet invasion. But most “were taken away and never heard from again” when the Soviets controlled the country, he says.
