Faculty of our people!

IN Europe, one often encounters family owned and operated restaurants, where the father and mother are in the kitchen and children take orders from customers. I remember I had lunch at a fish restaurant handed down to the same family for six generations. They kept the old tools used by the founder of the restaurant over a century ago. In Saudi Arabia, you can find something similar, with a difference in some important details: a family or a tribe that has captured all the positions at a public university — managers, deans, professors and drivers at the university all from the same family, and the career ladder is based on kinship. Certainly it is not the first time where tribalism and ignorance override the interest and the principle of equal opportunities, and it is also not the first time that this has happened in academia. This type of administrative corruption does not have a financial gain, but is stealing the opportunity of an anonymous person who deserves a position or job. But what›s new is the need not to hide it, as it is now in broad daylight and without the slightest concern of regulators. We look coldly at the list of employee names from one family at a university, because we realized that the family’s wasta has become much more powerful than systems in some government departments and institutions. Okaz daily has published reports on the staff structure of the family at some of our universities under a humorous headline: «dismantling university cells». Just imagine the modern transition that such universities can bring to us where currently its marble walls are crying of the effects of racism and intolerance. Racism here is not of one species, but of different types and forms that do not stop with a specific type of families or tribes and races. Racism can be found in counter directions: against the tribal people or against certain families, according to the nature of the family that took over the university’s administration. And the damage here does not stop at denying qualified people the career opportunities they deserve for the benefit of people who may deteriorate academic and administrative standards. The damage goes far beyond that when we imagine what it would do to the students who graduate from these universities, where they will apply this principle at each ministry and corporation they work in either because they lived through this ideology during their foundational, academic years, or because they have been subjected to injustice so they apply racism out of defense for their career. What was published about achieving integrity in relation to the appointment of the son of the Minister of Civil Service in the same ministry with a salary higher than his qualifications is a very important issue. Not because integrity can do nothing, but symbolism of this case reveals that it reaches a point of tampering that cannot be tolerated.