The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 has reopened questions that have been suppressed for decades: what is the function of knowledge production in Syria, and what role should universities play? This article aims to reframe the conversation on how to reform or rebuild the higher education sector in Syria following the fall of the Assad regime.
Rebuilding higher education in Syria raises a number of crucial policy questions that cannot all be addressed here. These include widening access, infrastructure recovery, equitable regional provision, staff shortages and brain drain, aligning higher education with labor market needs, rethinking admissions in a context marked by post-conflict reconstruction and 14 years of disrupted educational trajectories, and the development of sustainable funding and governance models. All of these constitute essential areas of policy concern, well documented in the literature on post-conflict education, and should be addressed through inclusive deliberations involving educational experts, university leaders, and the broader academic community.
This article focuses on a more foundational issue: the conditions under which knowledge becomes meaningful, legitimate, and socially consequential. The potential we are dealing with is not simply one of reconstruction, or even reform, but of rebirth, because what has been destroyed are the very conditions under which knowledge is produced, authorized, circulated, received, and evaluated, not just since 2011 but over the past five or six decades.
Rebuilding the conditions for autonomous knowledge production systems in contexts like Syria’s is particularly important because societies emerging from authoritarianism and violent conflict face questions that cannot be answered through imported policy models alone. They require institutions capable of generating contextually grounded knowledge that addresses the specific challenges faced by the post-conflict context including the need to cultivate critical debate, and produce the intellectual resources through which citizens, policymakers, and educators can collectively make sense of the past and imagine alternative futures. Universities are uniquely placed to perform this role, provided they are restored not simply as educational institutions, but as credible spaces of intellectual and civic life.
The argument developed here is that rebuilding Syrian higher education requires more than physical reconstruction or administrative reform. It requires rebuilding trust in universities as sites of open collective deliberation, intellectual freedom and public engagement. The article argues that this process can begin through three relatively low-cost but strategically significant interventions: reconnecting universities with Syria’s wider intellectual life; transforming them into spaces where contested histories can be critically examined rather than prescribed from above; and embedding them more deeply within the civic initiatives that are trying diligently to drive Syria’s social and political renewal. Together, these measures constitute essential preconditions for the more resource-intensive institutional reforms that must eventually follow.
The Long Crisis of Syrian Higher Education
The crisis of higher education in Syria did not begin in 2011, although the protracted war both exposed and intensified its underlying structural weaknesses. Its roots lie in a longer history of centralization, authoritarian governance and securitization, and the gradual erosion of academic autonomy, dynamics that were not incidental but structurally embedded within the logic of authoritarian rule.
From the 1970s onward, Syrian universities became increasingly embedded within a system of governance that prioritized loyalty, indoctrination, and administrative control over intellectual independence. Public universities were organized as a state-centered system, governed primarily through the Ministry of Higher Education, with key decisions (from curricula and appointments to research agendas) subject to political oversight. During the 1990s and 2000s, higher education expanded significantly in terms of access, and the 2000s saw the emergence of a number of private institutions as part of broader economic liberalization policies following Bashar al-Assad’s hereditary succession to the presidency. Yet this expansion was not accompanied by corresponding reforms to institutional autonomy or pedagogical practice, and research remained tightly constrained, largely channeled into state-led projects rather than nurtured within universities themselves. Instead, the sector came to be characterized by overcrowding, underfunding, rigid bureaucratic governance, widespread corruption, and the suffocation of any culture of critical inquiry. The humanities and social sciences were particularly affected, often functioning within narrow ideological boundaries and with limited meaningful research outputs. Over time, this produced a system in which universities functioned less as sites of knowledge production and more as spaces of credential distribution, political indoctrination and control, and social regulation.
At the same time, processes of securitization and political oversight contributed to the marginalization or exclusion of critical intellectuals, some of whom continued their work outside formal institutions before later joining growing communities of scholars in exile. This led to the gradual emergence of parallel spheres of intellectual life. Within universities, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, much academic work either reproduced state-sanctioned narratives, avoided politically sensitive questions altogether, or expressed critique only indirectly through historical abstraction, comparative analysis, or discussions of colonialism and developments elsewhere in the region. Independent intellectual production, by contrast, increasingly took place beyond the university, in publishing houses, cultural forums, civil society organizations, and later in exile, where scholars and public intellectuals such as Burhan Ghalioun or Yassin al-Haj Saleh engaged directly with questions of authoritarianism, political violence, citizenship, democracy, and Syria’s social and political future. Although notable exceptions existed within the university, including figures such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Ahmad Barqawi at different points in their careers, the cumulative effect was the gradual separation of critical intellectual life from formal higher education, producing a widening gap between academic institutions and broader intellectual and cultural production.
2011 and the Fragmentation of the University Sector
The revolution-turned-war of 2011 exacerbated these dynamics and fragmented their field of operation. Universities were physically damaged, students and faculty were displaced, and the sector became territorially fragmented. The World Bank’s latest assessment estimates US$108 billion in physical damage across Syria by the end of 2024, including US$23.4 billion in physical damage to non-residential buildings (a category encompassing education, health and government facilities), although losses specific to universities are not disaggregated. The conflict also placed enormous strain on institutions that continued to operate. At Tishreen University, for example, enrollment rose from 33,284 students in 2010 to 50,426 in 2015, while the student–teacher ratio deteriorated from 1:45 to 1:75, reflecting the combined pressures of internal displacement, staff loss, and institutional strain. New forms of higher education provision subsequently emerged in different areas, often under precarious conditions, engendering parallel systems of higher education across different areas of territorial control. In some areas, new institutions and initiatives emerged outside state control – most notably in the Kurdish-administered northeast and the opposition-held northwest – often supported by local actors, NGOs, or international organizations. Across all regions, higher education provision operated under severe logistical constraints, while forms of political oversight persisted in different ways, remaining most entrenched within regime-controlled institutions.
Ultimately, the higher education sector experienced not only material destruction, but a deeper crisis of trust, legitimacy, and institutional coherence. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this lies in the widespread non-recognition of degree certificates, not only internationally, but even across different areas of territorial control within the country. These parallel systems evolved under markedly different political and institutional conditions. Universities in regime-controlled areas largely retained formal institutional continuity and state recognition but remained subject to severe securitization, political oversight, and international isolation. By contrast, institutions established in the Kurdish-administered northeast experimented with new governance arrangements, multilingual curricula, and programs reflecting the Autonomous Administration’s political and educational philosophy, while facing acute challenges of international recognition, funding, and academic mobility. Universities in the opposition-held northwest similarly developed under conditions of institutional uncertainty. Established to provide higher education beyond regime control, they became vital educational refuges for displaced students but operated amid chronic insecurity, weak financial sustainability, uncertain accreditation, limited research capacity, and continuing dependence on local initiatives and international support. Despite these differences, all three systems struggled to secure international partnerships, retain academic staff, and establish stable institutional legitimacy.
This period also saw a significant brain drain, with many academics relocating abroad and contributing to knowledge production in exile. Indeed, Syrian intellectual life became increasingly de-territorialized, with some of the most important forms of academic and intellectual work taking place outside formal institutions and beyond national borders.
After Assad: Priorities for a Rebirth of Higher Education
Since the fall of the regime in December 2024, the transitional authorities have initiated discussions on reunifying the higher education system, including efforts to restore cooperation between institutions that had operated under different authorities, review questions of degree recognition, appoint new university leadership, and express commitments to rebuilding international academic partnerships. At the same time, however, these initiatives have remained largely administrative and piecemeal, and changes in the higher education sector have so far been limited and uneven, shaped in part by the material and institutional constraints imposed by large-scale destruction, but also by political uncertainty and the top-down normative priorities currently shaping the transition. While the authorities have expressed ambitions to modernize universities, strengthen international partnerships, and align higher education more closely with reconstruction and labor-market needs, much of the legal and institutional architecture inherited from the Assad era remains in place. More fundamentally, questions surrounding institutional autonomy, academic freedom, governance reform, and the future relationship between universities and political authority remain unresolved. Consequently, a coherent and publicly articulated vision for the long-term reconstruction of the sector has yet to emerge. Meanwhile, the sector continues to face deep structural challenges at almost every level, ranging from damaged infrastructure to depleted human resources and outdated pedagogical and institutional practices, and the lingering effects of decades of centralized control and securitization.
It is against this backdrop that current discussions of reform, and the possibility of rebirth, must be understood. These discussions have centered on reunifying a fragmented higher education system, rebuilding international partnerships, modernizing curricula and governance, addressing questions of accreditation and degree recognition, and redefining the role of universities in Syria’s social and economic reconstruction. So, the question is not only how to rebuild universities, but how to rebuild the political, educational, and social conditions through which universities become meaningful public institutions where knowledge is produced independently, debated openly, connected to society’s most pressing challenges, and recognized as a legitimate resource for public life. This means restoring knowledge as: (1) a source of personal and intellectual fulfillment at the individual level; (2) a resource through which societies critically interpret their past and imagine alternative futures; and (3) an essential foundation for evidence-informed public policy and democratic governance.
In that sense, higher education is a profoundly societal project, not merely an educational one, which places particular weight on disciplines such as history, civic education, sociology, and politics. Indeed, the humanities and social sciences can fundamentally shape society and the narratives through which Syrians understand themselves and their future.
At the practical level, this entails some curricular reform and, equally importantly, a shift toward critical thinking, creativity, dialogical approaches to learning, and participatory pedagogies. Such changes must begin in basic education if they are to take hold in higher education. But I will focus here on what might be done within higher education, my area of research, offering a set of short-term, relatively low-cost suggestions that could begin to enable this process of educational rebirth. I then briefly point to longer-term strategies, which will require significant funding and infrastructural transformation.
The short-term proposals should be understood both as foundational to these longer-term shifts and as time-sensitive signals that can help ensure that invaluable resources (human, institutional, and financial) are invited in rather than alienated in the process. Because at this stage, what is most urgently needed is the restoration of trust and intellectual life within Syrian universities.
Three entry points are particularly important.
- Reconnect Universities with Syria’s Intellectual Life
First, Syria must bridge the gap between academic and intellectual spheres. Some of the most dynamic Syrian intellectual production over the past four decades has taken place outside universities, in exile or domestically, in civil society, in cultural and political spaces, and in what might be described as a black market of intellectual circulation. The securitization of higher education has purged some of Syria’s most notable thinkers and critical intellectuals from the academy, creating two parallel spheres of knowledge production with a deep schism between them. It is vital to reconnect these spheres. Universities need to reconnect with these spaces by becoming safe sites for public intellectual life.
In practice, this could take relatively low-cost forms, such as opening university spaces to public lectures, debates, and collaborations with civil society actors, as well as establishing visiting scholar schemes that bring exiled Syrian intellectuals into short-term teaching and research roles. Encouragingly, modest initiatives in this direction have begun to emerge. In June 2025, for example, Jusoor, in partnership with the Syrian Science Council and Abjad, launched its first academic exchange initiative inside Syria, bringing Syrian diaspora academics to teach and engage with colleagues and students at Damascus, Aleppo, and Idlib universities. Such programs provide an important foundation on which more systematic and institutionally embedded forms of academic exchange could be built. Similar initiatives have emerged in post-war contexts such as Bosnia, where the development of the new central University of Sarajevo Library has deliberately reimagined the university library as a hub of academic, cultural, and civic life within the university campus. In addition to housing research and knowledge infrastructures, the project is intended to create a space for cultural programming, public engagement, and interdisciplinary intellectual exchange as part of broader processes of post-conflict recovery and social regeneration. While such initiatives may face resistance from administrators accustomed to centralized control, recent participatory discussions on higher education reform in Damascus point to growing interest in more open and socially engaged universities, even as significant political and institutional constraints remain. These efforts are unlikely to succeed through top-down directives alone. They will depend on a combination of institutional support and bottom-up initiatives led by civil society organizations, individual academics (including exilic scholars), and students, potentially supported by diaspora networks. Even modest steps in this direction would signal a shift toward de-securitization and help rebuild trust in universities as spaces of free and generative intellectual exchange.
- Make Universities Spaces for Plural Memory and Historical Debate
Second, Syria must address the disjuncture in historical narrative or, more specifically, what sociologists describe as cultural trauma narratives. There has long been a deep gap between official or institutional narratives and the lived, communal experiences of Syrians, especially regarding the events since 2011. This disjuncture has eroded trust and alienated many of Syria’s students and academics, in some cases producing ongoing forms of re-traumatization that undermine the conditions necessary for meaningful learning. There is now, for the first time, an opportunity to begin closing this gap by allowing space for plural, contested, and lived narratives to enter the university. This is essential to restoring legitimacy and trust. It cannot be achieved by simply reversing which narrative, national imaginary, or future vision is privileged; rather, it requires transforming universities into sites where competing narratives can be articulated, debated, and critically examined.
In practice, this could involve revising curricula in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate multiple perspectives on recent history, as well as creating forums, such as seminars, community-based oral history projects, and student-led initiatives, where lived experiences can be documented and discussed. Recent discussions on higher education reform have increasingly emphasized the need for universities to contribute to peacebuilding, social justice, and historical reflection, suggesting a growing recognition that higher education must engage with Syria’s contested past rather than simply resume its pre-war function. Such efforts could be supported through partnerships with civil society organizations already engaged in memory work and documentation, of which there are many admirable examples. Comparative research on post-conflict education (particularly studies of history teaching at the school level in contexts such as Rwanda) shows that education systems become key sites for negotiating historical narratives, often tasked with promoting national unity while also cultivating critical historical thinking.
While this work focuses primarily on basic education, the tensions it identifies between state-sanctioned narratives and plural, evidence-based engagement with the past are equally present in higher education settings. In Rwanda, for instance, efforts to consolidate a single, official narrative in the name of cohesion have sat uneasily alongside pedagogical commitments to debate, inquiry, and interpretive plurality. Research further suggests that suppressing disagreement in such contexts may inhibit the kind of “productive conflict” necessary for learning and may in fact lay the groundwork for renewed forms of social division. As Bacevic shows in the context of the Balkans, universities are not merely sites of knowledge transmission but are actively entangled in projects of nation-building, shaping and contesting the terms through which political and historical narratives are stabilized.
For this reason, the role of universities in creating space for critical engagement with contested pasts remains essential, however difficult and politically fraught it may inevitably be. Indeed, these processes are likely to face political and institutional constraints, particularly around fears of renewed polarization in the absence of agreed national frameworks for transitional justice and clear protections for academic freedom. Although recent discussions on higher education reform and transitional justice increasingly recognize the importance of dialogue, historical reflection, and civic participation, there is as yet little evidence that such practices can become institutionally embedded within Syrian universities. For this reason, progress is unlikely to come through centrally imposed narratives alone. Instead, a gradual, decentralized approach (driven by faculty, students, and civil society actors, with institutional protection where possible) may offer a more viable approach. Early initiatives can start small with the understanding that they do not need to resolve social tensions; rather, their value lies in signaling that disagreement itself can be publicly and legitimately held. Over time, such practices could gradually extend into wider society and could position universities as key contributors to broader processes of civic reconciliation and commemoration.
- Harness Syria’s Civic Energy and Youth Talent
Third, universities should capitalize on the incredible existing energy and desire among Syrians to build a country they can call their own. There is a tremendous reservoir of that wonderful combination of talent and motivation, particularly among younger generations. It might be most palpable within civil society spaces that have emerged over the past decade. Universities can play a significant role in harnessing this energy not only by animating new initiatives, but also by recognizing, collaborating with, or integrating some of the existing cultural and civic work into higher education. Many such initiatives, particularly those led by civil society actors and emerging political formations, are currently operating in conditions of institutional uncertainty, including the absence of a clear legal framework for political organization. Universities can play a subtle but important role by providing a provisional institutional anchor for forms of civic, political, and cultural work that are still struggling to find space, for instance through hosting, convening, or affiliating with such initiatives, while remaining committed to pluralism and critical engagement.
In practice, this could take forms such as incorporating civil society projects into teaching and research programs (for example through a public sociology–driven department or dedicated research centers), creating joint initiatives between universities and well-aligned grassroots organizations, and establishing flexible pathways for practitioners to contribute to teaching, mentoring, and, where appropriate, curriculum development. Internship schemes, project-based learning, community-engaged research, and discipline-specific initiatives such as legal or policy clinics offer structured ways of connecting students with ongoing civic work, allowing universities to function as platforms that amplify, rather than replace, existing efforts. Indeed, comparative research on conflict-affected societies suggests that higher education can play a catalytic role in recovery when it is embedded in, and responsive to, broader social and civic processes rather than remaining institutionally isolated.
State-imposed obstacles and institutional resistance may emerge as a response to such a move. There may also be concerns about quality control, political instrumentalization, or the uneven capacities of civil society actors. For this reason, progress is likely to depend on incremental and hybrid approaches, combining institutional endorsement with locally driven initiatives led by faculty, students, and civil society partners. Early successes, however modest, can demonstrate the value of such collaborations and help normalize new forms of engagement between higher education and the broader society it serves. At a time when higher education is increasingly shaped by neoliberal logics and the public mission of universities is in global decline, its relevance is particularly acute in a context like Syria’s. If revived, it could, over time, reposition universities not simply as sites of knowledge transmission, but as institutions that help rebuild the social fabric within which knowledge becomes most meaningful and historically consequential.
De-Securitizing the University as a Signal of Change
Universities must once again become places where intellectual debate, innovative experimentation, and civic participation are institutionally protected rather than politically managed. This is important in itself, but it also serves as a necessary signal that meaningful change is underway: that the higher education sector is committed to de-securitizing universities and enabling their re-emergence as autonomous spaces where academic freedom and political debate are upheld and practiced in everyday institutional life. In practical terms, this could include publicly guaranteed academic freedom, ensuring transparent and merit-based appointments of university leaders and faculty, restoring meaningful student representation through elected student unions and departmental committees, establishing clear procedures that protect universities from political and security interference, and encouraging public lectures and debates on matters of societal importance without prior political approval. Signals of this kind are crucial in fostering internal trust among Syrian students, thinkers, and academics. They are also essential for restoring confidence among global and regional partners and donors. Once universities are recognized as spaces of free thought and collective deliberation, rather than extensions of the state, it becomes much easier to build meaningful partnerships, particularly with critical intellectuals and diaspora networks, for whom trust in the possibility of finding an intellectual home in Syrian universities has been most severely eroded. This includes networks such as the Syrian Academics and Researchers’ Network in the UK (SARN-UK), which have accumulated a significant reservoir of human capital and organizational capacity over the past five years. Its vision reflects its keenness to collaborate with and support Syrian students, academics, and institutions. However, this potential will only be realized if there is confidence that academic freedom will be protected and that engagement will not be politically instrumentalized. At the same time, waiting for comprehensive reform risks delaying precisely the relationships on which longer-term transformation depends. Even in the absence of fully developed national frameworks, universities, diaspora scholars, civil society organizations, and international partners can, and indeed have, begun carving out autonomous spaces through small-scale collaborations, visiting scholar schemes, joint research projects, public lectures, and student exchanges. While such initiatives cannot substitute for institutional reform, they can help cultivate the professional relationships and habits of cooperation upon which more ambitious reforms will ultimately depend.
Repositioning higher education as a credible and attractive site of intellectual work is a political strategy that does not necessarily require extensive funding. It is about making universities once again places where people want to think, teach, and belong. Only once these forms of trust and legitimacy begin to be restored do longer-term, more resource-intensive reforms become viable. These should include strengthening research infrastructure, reforming governance and leadership structures, and aligning research agendas more closely with societal needs. It may also involve attracting internationally recognized faculty, as the strength of a university ultimately rests on the quality of its academic community. Strategic initiatives aimed at recruiting leading scholars over a defined period have, in other contexts, contributed not only to improvements in international standing and accreditation, but also to renewed student confidence and the attraction of further talent across the institution. In the short term, visiting scholar arrangements may offer a more feasible pathway. All of these steps are dependent on the trust-building moves discussed earlier, particularly given that they may require the development of sustainable funding models. Without the prior nurturing of a vibrant intellectual and academic life, reconstruction efforts risk remaining formal rather than transformative.
Conclusion: Higher Education as Social Re-Foundation
To conclude, the challenge is not only one of institutional reconstruction, but of epistemic and social re-foundation. The more pressing question, perhaps, is how to rebuild higher education in a way that does not simply restore what existed before. What existed before was a fundamentally flawed model, one that reproduced power asymmetries and social frictions which, as Syria’s painful history shows, contributed to recurring cycles of violence and unrest. What Syria needs instead is to recreate the conditions for a different kind of intellectual life, one that diverse Syrians can recognize as their own, and one capable of interrupting the reproduction of violence through new forms of marginalization, nepotism, and exclusion.
Higher education should therefore be understood not as a sector to be repaired after conflict, but as one of the arenas in which Syria’s transition will be made meaningful.
The views represented in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Arab Reform Initiative, its staff, or its board.
