 Thank you, Philip, and thank you, Jeanine and Christina, for the hard work in organising these lectures. It takes an awful lot of energy on the part of Christine to put these things together. And thank you all for coming. I've actually been basis in marriage for the past 12 years. And my daughter, Maryam, has been twice as in marriage, but not my partner, Stephanie. I'm actually looking for her. So, really, I'm so pleased she has finally actually made it to St Mary's. Lifelong learning has become a global issue. Some universities in the UK and even in London, they are setting up department of lifelong learning. The UN and the UNESCO have got programmes in lifelong learning, but they focus on numeracy and literacy, mainly in the third world. Of course, lifelong learning is not just about numeracy and literacy. Our current project is funded by the European Commission. The European Commission, despite the economic crisis in Europe, is actually funding our project in Palestine, and they are strongly behind it. The project is designed as a co-learning project, as a knowledge sharing project. It does involve four Palestinian universities, and that's actually the University of Beirzeig. That's actually the University of Bethlehem, the second university. This is Al-Quds University, and this is the Islamic University of Gaza. Actually, we've got four Palestinian partners in this project. Between them, they have got nearly 50,000 students between these four universities. I will go more about Palestinian universities and what they do and who are these. The European partners are St Mary's University of Glasgow, the National University of Ireland in Maynorth, and the University of Malta. We have eight universities and two Palestinian NGOs involved. We've got really 10 institutions involved in it, and it's a huge project funded by the European Commission. By the way, some of my publications are at the end of this room, and some of my books, I'm not flogging these books, but I'm actually flogging the journal I'm editing. Philip mentioned the journal Hoil and Studies in Multidisciplinary Journal published by University of Edinburgh. I'm actually flogging it on the cheap, just kind of a special offer. Only 10 quid. Just to try to promote this journal. It's actually at the end of the room, so I do suggest people go and have a look at it. Also, I wanted to talk about a number of things. One is the achievements of the universities of Palestine. This is actually something that people know very little about. What exactly the universities of Palestine are doing? There's so much coverage on Palestine, but in fact, the focus of this lecture is on the achievements of the universities of Palestine, and also I've got some good news from Palestine, not just bad news, if you like. In the mid-90s, I taught at BSD universities, and even then I could recognise BSD as a major centre of learning. Even then, the university was becoming an important university, not just in Palestine, but also in the Middle East. I also wanted to talk about actually the pedagogies of Paulo Freire and of Edward Said, two well-known... well-known guys. I just want to remind you about them. Basically, I'm actually trying to cover a number of things here, including talking about Edward Said. I knew Edward personally in the last 10 years of his life when he was already suffering from leukemia, which was a very tough period in his life, but we did show a number of conferences, and I went to him and I said, would you like to serve on the journal Mediting? And he said, are you kidding? I'm getting 70 requests a day. Of course, he was generous, and he became a member of the international board of the journal we set up. So I want to say something about a friend and someone with an enduring legacy. The two guys actually were famous and what Edward Said described as public intellectuals. At one point, they became celebrities, and they also published books which were translated into many languages. So they are, in a way, they don't need to be introduced, but I want to say something specifically about their relevance to lifelong learning in Palestine and the way I'm actually going to try to use them. In what way, what are the key values of lifelong learning and is there any place for it in the contemporary university? In the literature, lifelong learning is associated with adult education. In the 20th century, it became associated with the workplace and the factories in the post-Bolshevik revolution. The Bolsheviks actually made a huge issue out of it, and they said or they proclaimed they wanted to educate the workers in the factories. So this was one of their famous slogans, but lifelong learning is also familiar from our economies here, if you like, capitalist economies. It was always associated with training, with retraining, with professional development, and generally with acquiring practical skills, improving employability, professional development. So it has a distinct practical flavour, if you like. Of course, with the technological revolution, with the rise of the internet, lifelong learning has become even more popularised further. I actually share a vision of lifelong learning as something from cradle to grave, if you like. In Arabic, we call it Ta'alim muslimer, or Ta'alim medel haia, and it's really from almost age zero to kind of, if you like, end of life. It's formal and informal. I think the key value underpinning it is the idea of it's a human right, and it's also guaranteed, human rights guaranteed, under UN conventions, under the European Convention on Human Rights, and that's a fundamental thing to begin with. The right to education is a human right, and human rights derive from the idea that we are all born free, we are equal in dignity, and we are entitled to education. The purpose of it is to try to foster people's capacity to engage with the real world, and to try to influence and transform their environment. Lifelong learning is actually about life cycles, about responding to changing life cycles. It's embedded in the idea that people can become productive, have a meaningful life, independent. It's about learning with and learning from... It's about the multiple purposes of learning. It's about the life-wide dimensions of learning. It's about opening up new opportunities. It's about something which we say you never close down things. Of course, the universities are still the primary creator and disseminators of knowledge, but today we know the multiple sides of learning. From the office, to the factory, to the family, to the training centre, to the cyberspace, to the community, and also to the public square. Our project itself is actually embedded in this idea of an international network of sharing good practice, sharing knowledge. The project itself involves actually going there, involves talking to a range of groups there, including students, employers, policymakers, older people going to the field, hearing the stories of lifelong learning, if you like. We had a big meeting in Amman, and we are constantly going and coming to Palestine. The idea of the project is to try to enhance the quality of lifelong learning in Palestine, to look at what is being available, what is being provided by higher education institutions in Palestine, and to try to see whether we can learn from as well as actually improve on the situation, and share it globally as well as locally. Also we decided to prioritise certain groups in the Palestinian societies, especially to look at the urban poor, the rural countryside, groups of women, refugee camps. We kind of made a conscious decision that we need to not just look at the provisions of lifelong learning, but also to look at how some marginalised groups in society are actually faring. And also to try to explore the idea of actually having embedded sustainable strategy, long-term strategy, and to try to make some policy recommendations to local people as well as to the Europeans, Europeans funders, as well as internationally. There's something people actually haven't noticed in the past three decades. We have really acquired revolution in higher education in Palestine. This is something people actually don't notice. Palestinian universities in the last three decades have been, really have developed spectacularly in terms of numbers, in terms of what they're doing, in terms of the kind of centres they seem to be operating. They're not just centres of learning. They seem to be developing programmes almost in every aspect of life, from engineering, to medicine, to dentistry, to law. And you see these faculties actually emerging all the time. Since I left Beerset University, there were new and new faculties, and new buildings actually going up. And that spectacular development, that quiet revolution, what I call, with no headlines, is something people don't notice. Of course, if you know something about Palestinian society, we have roughly about 11 million Palestinians in the world, and nearly 60 to 70% of all Palestinians are refugees. Refugees either abroad, either living in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, in Chile, for instance, about 300,000 Palestinians living in Chile, Jordan, 2.5 million. 60, 70% of the Palestinians are refugees. So inside the West Bank and Gaza, we have really a minority of Palestinians. At the same time, we have 23 universities and university colleges in the West Bank and Gaza. This is quite extraordinary. To have 4, 4.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to have 23 academic institutions for 4 million, 4 plus, this is very unusual. More than that, if you take the Gaza Strip, which is a tiny piece of land always in the news, it has got 1.7 million Palestinians, 80% of them are refugees, yet it has 10 universities and university colleges. 10 universities for about 1.7 million, I was actually talking to a Lithuanian friend and he said, we've got 3 universities for about 3 million Lithuanians, he said. I said, well, it's quite interesting to try to compare. So if you have 23 universities for 4.5 million Palestinians, this could translate into something like 300 university and university colleges in the UK. But of course there are problems with this situation. Also, we've got 1.2 million Palestinians in Israel who are bilingual and they tend to study in Israel, in Israel universities, not in the West Bank and Gaza. They are discouraged from studying in the West Bank and Gaza, but we have a new phenomena of some of them going to study in Jordan. Very few people realise, actually, nearly 6,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel study in Jordan. This is a recent development after the Jordanian-Israeli Treaty. So they are actually, the Israelis are encouraging Palestinians in Israel to study in Jordan, but not to study with other Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. And of course there are Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza split between Gaza and the West Bank, which means if you live in Gaza you can't study in the West Bank, but you can't move physically and vice versa. So you've got this actually fragmented situation going on for the Palestinians. Gaza also is quite a spectacular place. It's got 1.7 million people, 80% of them are refugees from what became Israel in 1948. 44% of them are under the age of 14. Only 3% of them are over the age of 65. So it's a very young population, but it's also a very poor population really. I mean the UN reports about poverty, about unemployment, nearly 60% unemployment in Gaza, yet it has 10 university colleges running there and the Islamic University of Gaza has got nearly 25,000 students. So it's actually a mega university in Gaza and combined with extreme poverty and malnutrition for the young. And of course we know the difficulties about learning when you are very poor. You can't concentrate and you can't learn properly. And I'll say something about Ashley Powell of Rere, and his experience with poverty and how poverty can actually affect learning. The universities of Gaza are under the remit of Hamas, which won the Palestinian election in 2006. The universities of the West Bank under the remit of their PA. So we have that sort of fragmentation between the West Bank and Gaza, which means we don't have a standardised way of imposing higher education on the Palestinians. You've got fragmented universities operating in different conditions. And of course you've got the Palestinians in Israel, basically another category of Palestinians who are not, if you like studying with Palestinians as a whole. If we go back to 1948 and what I call the NACBA, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948 and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problems, when Jerusalem was occupied, the Israelis took West Jerusalem and the Jordanians took East Jerusalem. And there was a famous college in Jerusalem called the Arab College, it was founded by the British in the 20s and it became a centre of education teacher training. It was the most important teacher training for Palestinians. It was really founded by the British, but the Palestinians took it over and they had a very famous principal there called Khalili Sakikini, who was a very important educator. And that college educated generations of teachers, except it was closed in 1948. It was on the border between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem and the Jordanian authorities decided they didn't want to keep it on the border. So they closed it down, they gave the building to the UN and it became the headquarters of the UN in Jerusalem and after that there was no teacher training college on the West Bank. The Jordanians decided they want to emphasize Amman and Transjordan. They diverted all the resources to the Transjordan area. The West Bank itself was downgraded and between 1948 and 1967 practically we had no university in Palestine. That teacher training college, the Kulilaro, could have developed into a brilliant university. It has some of the best brains in it and Palestinians instead of actually staying on the West Bank they went to study in Amman, in Beirut, in London, in Washington and they ended up not coming back to the West Bank but they ended up coming to the Gulf and to Beirut and to Amman. So you have the Palestinians basically sitting up universities in the Gulf and in Jordan and sitting up university centres and academic centres in Beirut but not in Palestine. So we have that kind of brain drain, depletion of resources. A lot of Palestinians also went to America. Now if you actually look at America, America has got the highest number of Arab academics who are Palestinians. The best or the most influential Palestinians actually are living in America, the intellectuals. Really some of the top brains are living in America. Part of the same process of immigration, nothing to keep you in no one trying to encourage local development of academic institutions if you like and of course the middle class actually basically seek jobs and going. So we have actually, we as Palestinians, we built up universities in the Arab world and the Arab world kind of was kind of blessed with our kind of talent if you like but I think it was catastrophic for Palestine and the closing that Arab college was one of these kind of strategic decisions. The situation is beginning to change in the 70s and early 70s when Palestinians are more restricted from going out. So you have this movement of sitting up universities in Palestine beginning in the 70s, Bethlehem University and you have local colleges which were secondary schools actually developing to universities in order to keep people inside. Really the main purpose, the beginning of this university is just to keep people inside, to stop immigration, to keep people on to survive in Palestine and these universities gradually becoming huge institutions and becoming more and more professional if you like. But I think the main objective of these universities was just to keep people to provide opportunities for people to train locally and to keep people inside. So this was kind of a primary objective and it did work and today in the last two decades the number of students actually enrolling in the last 15 years has quadruple really, quadruple. This is a spectacular development if you like. Now we have nearly 150,000 Palestinian students who are studying inside Palestine. This includes the Opinion University of Al-Quds which has got a large number, but even our four partners, four Palestinian partners, four universities, they've got between them about 50,000 students and that revolution, that academic revolution is not in the news. It's not celebrated, it's not mentioned, rarely mentioned. Of course we have the continuing conflict going on, Israeli expansions and Israeli settlement expansions. Of course the wider context of living under occupation and developing universities under occupation has got to be a framework to consider things. In the last one and a half decades we really had a dehumanising occupation, dehumanising at an individual level. The conditions of the Palestinians under Israeli occupation are well known and the fracture of the Palestinian society and the fragmentation of higher education under Israeli occupation is also widely known. We have Israeli settlement expansion which means actually they fragment the Palestinian areas into pockets if you like and for students to travel from one city to another city, from one locality, from one town and village to their university. Sometime it's quite an ordeal. You have to dot a lot of checkpoints, you have to... So the reality of the walls and the barriers and the closures and the checkpoints is that university, when I was teaching there in the mid 90s it was closed down on a regular basis by the Israelis. Before that the Israelis deported the head of the university to Amman. So the guy was trying to run Bezzet University from Amman. How could you run a university? I mean you'd have to run... It's like running university in London from... not from Paris which you can, but I don't know from Ecuador or Salvador if you like. He actually spent 20 years trying to run a university from Amman not from Bezzet itself. So he was the head of the university and he had deputies on the ground but no one wanted to replace him. And a phenomenal figure. But the restrictions, the closures, I mean when I told there, some of my students actually were actually on the run from the Israeli army so they were sleeping in different places. So that situation did sound crazy to me and it's still unrealistic in terms of how people actually managed to get through these 600 checkpoints throughout the West Bank just in order to get to campus. Sometimes you have to make a detour of two hours to get to the university and of course it's just crazy. So the whole idea of human rights international has got to be central to this project and you can't, you know, if you deny Palestinians much of their right education you deny much of their humanity, talent and creativity. Of course the universities of Palestine cannot actually provide panacea for their conflict in Palestine. It would be wrong to think that the university of Palestine can actually somehow solve the conflict. The conflict is political, moral. It's got to be solved kind of, if you like, the solution has got to be. So we mustn't actually treat them as provided in panacea. Yet against all odds they have actually done quite a spectacular job. They continue to expand, flourish, develop new faculties, medicine, law, engineering. How range of things actually you can see them across actually and being taught. And also they have actually kept a lot of, also they have attracted some academics from America back. Really they began to reverse the trend of people moving out and began to bring people back inside. And after they began to work against the idea of fragmentation and isolation, you know, you fragmented the Palestinians into, if you like, pockets. And I think the universities actually are actually trying to overcome this. And I think our project is trying to create a network between them and trying to connect them together and to be able to overcome the reality of fragmentation and the Israeli occupation. But I think they are a spectacular story of success. It's something we need to mention and we need to celebrate. There's another story of success is the rise of literacy in Palestine in the last 15 and 20s. It has risen by about 10%. I was also surprised by the statistics because when people talk about Palestine, they talk about it in Tifada's, uprising, constant closures, not to be able to do things. But in fact the literacy has been growing and has been rising and it's quite spectacular among young female, among women. 98% of young women are literate. This is a spectacular success. It's actually slightly less among young males, about 96%. And the reason for that is because young males actually go out to work and say there's an advantage going on. But this is another story of success in the last 15, 20 years. And I think the angels in Palestine, the explosion of angels in Palestine, have contributed to the rising literacy among young men and women and to stop people actually dropping out. So this is actually another story of, if you like, spectacular success. Now I want to move on very quickly to talk about Freyre and Edward Said. And Freyre was a Brazilian liberation theologian, a Catholic liberation theologian. And he was a teacher by profession. He was rooted in the Catholic tradition of social teaching and what I call also Catholic humanism. Also he was influenced by many other things including the Second Vatican, including liberation theology in Latin America, including the rise of the indigenous, a voice in Latin America. Said was a secular humanist, really. He kept reminding everyone that he's secular, a humanist. And Said was influenced by many traditions. But he kept saying he's a Palestinian Christian with an Arab Muslim identity. He kept reminding people about this multiplicity of identity. That he actually belongs to Palestinian, but also an American. He's a Palestinian Christian, but also he's born and brought up in that Arab Islamic traditions. Said, of course, wasn't essentialist about identity. And he thought, you know, we all have multiple identities. Both guys were also optimistic about human nature. And this is something important to mention about their approaches. Both, they had distinct approaches to education. Said was an intellectual, an academic. He published reentalism, which was translated into about 50 languages, if you like. And he became a celebrity after that, 1978. He became very much in demand when he came to London. He got about 500 people trying to cram into the hall trying to see him. Much, much, much more famous than Norm Chomsky, if you like. But Saddam Freire emphasised different things. I think Freire's book, Peter Goges of the Oppress, is probably the most important, actually, book to be written about adult education in the last maybe half a century. And the book itself became an iconic book for American teaching training colleges in America. Perhaps even more than in Latin America. Even in America, his book, Peter Goges of the Oppress, published in 1968, translated into English in 1970, translated into something like 50 languages, it became his trademark. Many of his ideas were not very original, but they popularised adult education, popular education, student-centre approaches education. He also emphasised the practice, or the praxis, what he called, like liberation theologians, not just a theory, you need both. He emphasised engagement with the realities of inequalities in Latin America, going to the slum, working with the poor. I think the context of Freire, Saïd, is about the whole question of engagement. To take you back to the Prince of Machiavelli written 500 years ago, Machiavelli thought education should be not immoral and not moral, he called it amoral, basically neutrally moral, what we call technocratic education. We really need to educate the ruler to be more technocratic, if you like. It's got nothing to do with morality or immorality. I think Machiavelli misunderstood people thinking he actually encouraged debauchery and immorality and this and that. He really wanted to separate morality from education from politics, and this notion that education can somehow be morally neutral, this is central to his idea, and today we can actually see it in the rational, if you like, realistic approach to education. Now, to bring you back to Earth and to the Palestinian situation and to current Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Feir. Salam Feir did his PhD at the University of Austin in Texas, and he did it in economics, and then he went to work for the International Monetary Fund, and then he went to teach for a university in Jordan. He became an academic, but also he was an ex-official of the International Monetary Fund, really an economist by education, and then he was brought into Palestine by Mahmoud Abbas to form a technocratic government with a certain amount of achievements. Now, Feir really does embody that technocratic approach. I mean, I'm not dismissing him. I'm not saying he's wrong, but his approach is well known to Palestinians and local Palestinians, and to try to separate completely education from politics. Now, the whole approach of the Palestinians in 1940 to try to combine both, if you like, professional, as well as being engaged with their society. But also we have Palestinian ill-refugee camps basically acquiring skills, becoming engineers, becoming doctors in order to escape poverty. So the whole idea of having occupation, a profession, I think we shouldn't actually mis-under-estimate to call George Bush actually the idea of professional development. I think Palestinians, because they were a refugee society, professionalism, law, medicine was actually very popular among them. In order to get out of poverty, in order to get out of refugee camps, we have to acquire education. So education was incredibly important in terms of pulling out of poverty. And I think we mustn't actually underestimate this approach to education in terms of self-improvement, in terms of professionalising, in terms of one way to get out of your desperate situation is to become a lawyer, become engineer. We have really spectacularly mobility among refugees because of that professional development. The idea of trying to separate education from morality and from engagement with the situation and the reality of the Palestinians, this notion that education can be completely amoral, if you like, is very problematic. And I think Said and Freire recognise that. You can't really divorce adult education from the social, political, moral, and social economics, if you like. So I think this notion that education should be just one thing is quite a problematic idea. Education has many things. And I want to go back to Edward Said and to try to conceptualise his idea. Edward Said lived most of his life in exile. He came from West Jerusalem and his house was taken over by the Israeli authorities. Initially, the Israeli authorities gave it to a Christian fundamentalist group. But we know the house and I went to have a look at it there. The house is occupied by another occupant now. The International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem moved to another much posher powerhouse in Jerusalem in this one. It belongs to a Palestinian Christian refugee from the Catamorne neighbourhood of Jerusalem. But you can see there's also a spectacular house that should be in the 20s, one of these sort of palatial houses. So they gave up on the house of Edward Said, which was fairly modest for them. But Edward lived most of his life in New York. And exile was part of his life, physical exile part of his life. But I think Edward Said was one of those people who tried to reconfigure exile in terms of mental exile and intellectual exile and spiritual exile. And he came up with the idea of exile being basically a state of mind, almost kind of central to the human condition here. And I think Edward came up with the idea of what he called contrapuntal notion. Edward actually played piano and he played extremely well piano. And he thought in piano you end up actually with different voices there, but you don't need to harmonise them. So he came up with the idea that you can actually take contrapuntal music, different voices in piano, and it could actually apply to different voices in society and give people different voices. You don't need to, as an academic, as a scholar, you don't need to homogenise everything. You don't need to harmonise everything. You don't need to speak for people. Edward thought you really don't need to speak for people as an academic. What do you do as an academic? You speak off people. You don't speak for people. You allow people to speak for themselves. And you have a range of voices. When you explore, when you interview people, when you explore society, you allow a range of voices to emerge. You don't have to impose a particular point of view. As an academic, you don't have to be too much representative, if you like. You don't have to be representative of power. You talk about people. You talk of people. But you don't speak for people. That's a difficult thing to do. As an academic, you remain more or less as a critic, as a moral critic. You can transform society as a moral critic. You don't have to be pretending to represent everyone. You don't have to impose authority, intellectual authority, on people. You allow a range of voices to emerge. You can talk about people as a range of... You don't speak for people. You don't represent people in terms of authority. You represent their conditions, their suffering, their situation. But you don't speak for people. You speak off people. You don't harmonise voices. You don't impose a single authority. You keep multiple voices. You encourage people to speak for themselves. I think this is central to education, higher education. This notion of the need not to harmonise everything, but to allow voices to emerge. I think this is relevant to the context of Palestine and the Palestinians. Again, to go back to Freirea and Said. Both were prophetic in their positive tradition. This notion that the prophets speak on behalf of God. I made by this idea. But I think prophetic in telling truth, speaking truth to power, if you like. The intellectual... He's not there to represent power and authority. He's there to reflect reality, if you like. He's there as a critic of society. You can transform society from being a moral critic. You don't have to be the authority. You don't have to be too much claiming representative power, if you like. And I think Said also came up with this idea of the academic both being, if you like, detached and engaged. I think we have a tendency to construct detached and engaged in a kind of, if you like, abstract way. We have a tendency for a binary way of thinking. We think feminine qualities somehow are opposite to masculine qualities. We construct binaries and we think binaries represent reality. We think academics should be detached or engaged. These are abstract binaries. In fact, in reality, they don't really... They don't work. In reality, really, you can be engaged as well as detached. And I see Said came up with this idea. Again, it comes from this idea of exile, intellectual, if you like. Endeavour is about journey out and journey back in, if you like. It's a journey out and in, i.e. journey out to the outside, but also journey back to the centre, journey out from the self-reference, if you like, to the outer, but then journey back to the centre if you want to influence things, if you want to be part of the debate, if you want to influence the public square. In and out is fundamentally what we do in education and academic life. It's not being detached completely. It's not being engaged completely. It's this notion of detach and engage. Detach, basically, to be able to see things from the outside, engage to be more passionate, to want to change, to have a moral voice, to be part of it, to want to... This notion of being detached and engaged, I think we need to kind of reconfigure it and to try to put it back into, if you like, education. Education is about being professional, but also being passionate, being caring. Being professional is being able to look at things from the outside, being competent. That also came up with this idea of being professional, but also being amateur, and he didn't really mean to be amateur is to be diligent, is not to be unprofessional, but to do it because of the love of it, if you like. It's a bit like amateur sports, if you like. You do things not just as a professional, but you do things because you love it. I think creation comes from this idea of being passionate about it, doing it for the love of it, if you like. Not just being professional, skill, competent, excellent, but also wanting to do it because you really enjoy doing it. Glenn enjoys working on Henry VIII. He really loves it. That creativity is essential to the way we do things, and I think this kind of artificial binary between kind of detach, if you like, and being engaged, wanting to have a say, wanting to be part of the debate, wanting to have a moral voice critic. These two things are not dichotomous. They're not contradictory. They're not binary. The binary is actually in our head. They're not actually in reality. In reality we can be both detached, professional, as well as passionate about the moral side of it, about the ethical side of it, and I think we can't really hear, we can't separate education from ethics, and this is something which I actually learned from Edward Said to be passionate, but to be, not to be kind of narrow minded in terms of expertise, to be detached and engaged at the same time. What makes us less egoistic to be passionate and to be engaged is actually what opens up things. It doesn't close down things. I think this is actually central to also the whole idea of education in Arabic. It's about bringing up. It's about incubating, it's about nurturing. It's about actually things from the grand up, if you like. I think it's probably in Arabic, and to educate, you know, that word, education, which is kind of English, Latin, if you like, is about actually nurturing things from the bottom, from the grand up. This is another idea which I took from Freire, the notion of bringing up, if you like. That's education for you from the grand up. Of course, Freire and Liberation Theologians went to the base communities and went to the slums. They wanted to learn from the slums also, not just to bring into the slums, but they wanted to learn from older people. This notion of from the grand up also could be relevant to the way we could develop higher education in Palestine. Both Edward and Freire were genius, but not elitist. You know, sometimes I notice Lester University says we are elite, but not elitist, if you like. You know, you can be highly professional, but not elitist in the political elitism, if you like. You can still be from the grand up. In what way all this stuff is irrelevant to higher education in Palestine? Of course, we have the Palestinian authorities set up in Ramallah. We have a lot of the donor aids that are going to Ramallah. Thousands of NGOs are operating from Ramallah. A lot of the resources are being diverted from their periphery, from their poor peripheries in Palestine, from Gaza into, if you like, the capital, into the middle classes. I think there is something good about Palestinian NGOs and what they do, but also you diverted resources actually to centralise it. You give it to a small number of people that are operating from Ramallah, instead of actually looking at what's happening across the country, if you like. I mean, how do you move resources from the elite, from the centre, from the middle classes, from the universities, which are close to, if you like, Ramallah, to across Palestine. This is actually a major challenge for Palestinian higher education and for developing community projects. Now, what we have been doing, we've been through the first stage of benchmarking. We have just concluded the benchmarking. What we did, we went out there and people interviewed a lot of people. They heard stories and we're doing the benchmarking, but the way we are doing the benchmarking, which is benchmarking is about excellence, isn't it? We agree on that, don't we? It's about the good practice. It's about the best thing actually. The way we're trying to understand actually the reality of the Palestinians is actually what is the best thing about Beir Zaid University? What is the best thing about Bethlehem University? What exactly the Islamic University in Gaza is doing best? I think we're trying to come up with some sort of benchmarking from within by interviewing people, by looking at the pockets of excellence throughout, and by not trying to homogenise things. I think we came to... We have just concluded the benchmarking, but we don't have the official report. I have kind of a report about the benchmarking, and we came to the conclusion that different universities are different things, and they are good at certain things. It depends actually who is running the university and the history of the university. Bethlehem University was created by the Lassal brothers. They're largely based in America, and they are... It's a small university, but highly dedicated, and the Lassal brothers decided that small business is an important thing actually for the university. So they have really some excellent projects which promote, they call them incubation, promote setting up businesses, going to the community and setting up businesses. Maybe there are, if you like, Obama-type influences going on there. Maybe there is kind of influence, but I think actually we have discovered through the benchmarking that some of their projects are actually worth listening to. Bethlehem University is one of the oldest, most powerful university. It probably is the most developed university on the West Bank. It's got 93 projects across the West Bank. I mean, this is quite an extraordinary thing for a single university in the UK to have 93 projects across the UK, and a lot of them are with some with Jeanine, the other end of the West Bank, some with Melchalil, Hebron, really 93 projects running 93 projects, which means a lot of funding going on. A lot of them are to do with small farmers, to do with women in refugee camps, but to be able to have 93 projects with the community, this is also an achievement. So we are trying to assess which one is working and how you could replicate some of these ideas, how you take an idea done, tested, working for Bethlehem University and take it to the University of Gaza. So really we are trying to come up with a benchmarking way of looking at the nuggets of excellence in Palestine and trying to replicate them, not try to impose on Palestine a single standard, not try to impose benchmarking from above, but to look at benchmarking as growing up from below, as unifying, as linking up these communities, as overcoming their situation fragmentation and also bringing the Palestinian partners together. Sometimes they can't meet on the West Bank, so we meet in Amman sometimes, we meet through video conferencing, but I think this idea of them sharing knowledge about their situations and their universities and replicating some of the excellent work they are doing. So this way you grow projects throughout the country. I think we have concluded the best part of this year in terms of benchmarking, in terms of looking at excellence, in terms of having good picture about what I had. I mean I actually taught for Bethlehem University I mean in and out of the place, but I had no idea about what each one is doing, what exactly the university, the Islamic University of Gaza is doing, in what area it's good. I mean one of the problems with the Islamic University of Gaza is it's got hundreds of projects, but they are more aspirational, they're more ambitious activities if you like. When you look at them, of course the restriction, the siege, the fact that people can't move in and out easily, it's a problem of restricting the kind of attainment of these objectives. But I think we are there in terms of mapping out, in terms of benchmarking, and in terms of also beginning to make recommendations if you like in the next stage. I think this is actually one way to grow things from below what we call, one way to share knowledge. The international partners, the European partners are not coming to impose things on Palestine, they're coming to share their own expense, there's a lot of learning for them in it, and also we can learn from each other when you have 10 partners and the knowledge sharing, and the whole idea of knowledge sharing, this is actually a publicly funded project by the Europeans, so you've got to share it and you've got to share it freely by the way. This is an important thing, but I think we have moved from the idea of a quiet revolution maybe into something which we might call an Arab spring in Palestine University, academic spring, the idea is very familiar to people here. They seem to be kind of using it all the time, so I'm actually using this cliché about how you can create an academic spring through replicating excellence across the country, and at this point, thank you for being good listeners. Thank you so much.