No school in sight

You’d think not having school would be awesome.

I’ve never been a huge fan of school. I’ve always seen it as means to an end, both in high school and college.

But now, in Cairo, a student strike preventing classes is stretching into its second week.

Not having school is awful.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we had known in advance what days we’d have off, or for how long, because then we could have traveled.

As it is now, we’re kind of on call. We have to stay in Cairo on the off chance that campus suddenly opens.

We’ve been told the earliest campus will open again is Sunday. Many teachers suspect it will stretch on longer.

Some teachers are going to extra lengths to have classes, asking us to congregate in the dorms or in coffee shops. Some professors will even drive to the dorms to personally pick up their students and take them to class.

However, the real concern, at least for us international students, is whether our credits here will now transfer.

American University in Cairo President Lisa Anderson said in an email that every semester must consist of 15 weeks of classes in order to be complete.

As it stands, we’ve already lost two of those weeks and probably will lose more.  
When are those classes going to be made up?

Anderson acknowledged the fact that they can’t make the semester longer at the end because the international students already have flights home.
 
We have Tuesdays off normally, so classes can meet then, but many of us have weekends booked with travel from now until finals.

Will we have to choose between academics or travel?

The administration has been in meetings with the students for several weeks now. The only remaining points of contention are the tuition raise of 7 percent for this school year and the disciplinary action that will be taken against students in the protests.

Protesters demand that the tuition increase be taken away for the current year, which the school cannot do because it’s already part of the budget. Protesters don’t want disciplinary action to be taken against the students at all, but those students directly violated the school’s policies.

Violence has erupted in the protests at AUC. Students have attacked staff and vice versa. Students protesting even attacked students who attempted to hop the locked gates to get to class.

The school cannot stand back and just let that happen without consequence.
But if they don’t appease the protesters, classes might never resume.

There’s no way to win, and I have no idea what the school should even do in this situation.

My fellow international students and I are staying out of it, but it’s fascinating to see. Things like this just don’t happen in the United States.

I simply cannot imagine IU shutting down because of a student demonstration.

Here, the students managed to get enough power to make negotiations possible.
It was interesting for a while, but international students, myself included, came here to go to school.

It would be nice if we could actually do that.

But this is all part of the study abroad process. Coming in, we knew things were going to be different.

Maybe we’re learning as much by not having class as we would from classes themselves.