Near to the Madding crowd

Yet as demonstrations began and then quickly spread across nearby Egypt, media attention shifted away from Bouazizi and the phenomenon he encapsulates. The conventional understanding of the protests in Cairo is that dissidents on the ground are demanding rights: freedom of the press, of assembly, to petition the government for redress of grievances and to live free from the fear of a ruthless security sector. What’s been underreported is a widespread demand for opportunities: jobs, economic mobility and the hope of a better life.

The Wall Street Journal described this desire aptly in a piece last weekend, explaining that governments across the Middle East — Egypt’s included — have made a serious strategic miscalculation in sending millions of citizens to college but failing to provide jobs for them once they graduate. Economists Yasser Abdih and Anjali Garg of the International Monetary Fund have found that unemployment in the Middle East increases with education level. And this fact, while it may sound counterintuitive, presents an opportunity for the United States.

American relations with undemocratic governments around the world, policymakers tell us, often lead to a choice between security and human rights. Both have downsides: a focus on security mortgages away the freedom of millions of repressed people, while a focus on human rights increases the likelihood that anti-U.S. forces will come to power, or risks economics consequences. To a certain extent, this is a false dichotomy, but it approximates the truth.

Given that, it’s sometimes difficult to prioritize human rights in countries such as Egypt. For all the unpleasantness of his regime, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has been a valuable U.S. ally and a greater friend to Israel than Iran or Syria. But instead of sitting on our hands while millions suffer, there’s a third way, as the Egypt and Tunisia protests have demonstrated: to focus on education with an aim toward fomenting movements for democratic reform. And though the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development are already engaged in public diplomacy to that end, American universities can help the project in two ways.

The first is greater expansion abroad. U.S. universities such as New York University and Cornell have been roundly criticized for opening satellite campuses in Abu Dhabi and Qatar. Detractors argue that, for instance, the quality of education offered by NYU Persian Gulf is vastly inferior to that offered by NYU Greenwich Village. In some cases, granted. But whatever the differences between core and satellite campuses, offering young people in the Middle East a Western-style college education is a boon, because the baseline quality of domestic universities is so low. If anything, American education should be pushing outward, not retreating inward.

Second, we should increase the ease with which foreigners can come to the United States to study and then send many of them back once they’ve finished academic work here. This is, to a degree, at odds with President Obama’s plan to “Win the Future” as laid out in his State of the Union address last month: “[Foreign students] come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain [degrees], we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.”

But in some scenarios, it makes a great deal of sense. Obviously, we’d like the next Google, Microsoft or Facebook to take root here, but if an American university can educate the next Aung San Suu Kyi, by all means send her back to her home country.

Education is, by its very nature, rarely a short-term solution. And it also could very well backfire: these suggestions are predicated on the assumption that unemployed graduates of American colleges would push for Western-style reforms rather than a fundamentalist revolution. But the correlation between moderate views and education level is much higher for students educated at Western institutions. And as The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s reporting has demonstrated, freedoms given by autocrats, no matter how limited, are hard to take away.

Politics, it’s said, is the art of the possible. Despite Mohamed Bouazizi’s sacrifice and its aftermath, American policy toward undemocratic but strategically important countries in the Middle East and beyond is unlikely to change. But the most effective counter to autocracy in the 21st century may have nothing at all to do with weapons or diplomacy. It might be as simple as building classrooms. Because as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character observed in “Inception,” the most resilient parasite known to man is an idea.

Charlie Metzger is a Wilson School major from Palm Beach, Fla. He can be reached at cmetzger@princeton.edu.