On Dashnye Daloye's Interview - We Need an American University!

by Mahdi Abdullah Murad


In an interview given to Niqash website and published in many other Kurdish media, Dashne Daloye, the student affairs director, said that AUI-S students are not used to freedom and absence of fear. While supporting Ms. Daloye in her thesis, I would like to say something more on the issue.


The first time I heard about opening a university like AUI-S, I was happy more than the happiest person in the world because I had read about the American universities before. The most wonderful thing about them was that were the foolproof place for expressing ideas freely, which a dream is for me. All I hear about the Kurdistan and Iraqi universities is that the students should obey whatever the university officials tell them to do. There is always a red line and the students have to be careful about many things. If students try to raise their voices within their universities, they will be played with fire! Therefore, I refused to study in one of the Kurdish universities, and chose AUI-S to study at comfortably.

What I heard about the American Universities is that there will always be a loud voice that can oblige almost all of the other voices to listen to. Surprisingly, what I noticed during my two year studying at the AUI-S is that we, as the AUI-S students, are poor at having that voice. Now it is the time for us to play our voices and raise its volume over all of the other voices. We shouldn’t be American University students just by name. From now on, we need to join our voices and connect them with one of the biggest speakers. Then, we have to find the highest place within AUI-S and play it to let the university know who we are and what we want.
More to the point, everyone should know that the AUI-S officials have to listen to our voices and appreciate it, and I am more than one hundred percent sure that they will. We should know that AUI-S officials were not the reason behind the absence of that voice. For sure, they have been waiting to hear that voice for a long time, but we, as the students, have not owned that brave voice. Therefore, we must create the real American environment within AUI-S.

Last to the point, I am not saying that this is the sole way that the AUI-S students have had and will have for the future. What I am telling you is that the AUI-S students are just silent and not been those kind of the students who care about their voices to deliver for the other people. Even though they have ways to spread their voices through the public, they just have been inactive in that ground. Now it is the time to change that attitude and shout about what they want.

*Mahdi Abdullah Murad is an Information Technology Freshman at the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani. He works as a journalist for the local media.