Birzeit University
laboratories in
the old campus
Registration
and Admission
Department
(Sep 1985)
12
Al Ghadeer - Fall 2018
junior college period – that this spirit
blossomed and cemented itself as a
mainstay of the Birzeit experience.
At the junior college, clubs of all
interests facilitated the sharing of
ideas and visions, bulletin boards
and publications, (like Al Ghadeer),
allowed the students to voice their
interests and thoughts, and the
Student Council elections reaffirmed
the values of democracy and
individuality instilled in the students.
Just as the 1948 Nakba indirectly
set the stage for the transition
of Birzeit to a junior college, the
1967 occupation of Palestine (the
Naksa) also indirectly led to Birzeit
becoming what it is now: a full-
fledged university. In 1967 and after,
Israeli military authorities severely
restricted travel and trade in the
occupied territories and harassed
the Palestinian population on a daily
basis. The transfer of students to AUB
or other universities abroad became
difficult. The high cost of tuition,
relative to the economic situation at
that time, made regional universities
unattainable. Travel restrictions
made the shortest of trips uncertain.
Attentive as they were to the needs
and circumstances of the Palestinian
community, Birzeit’s administrators
During the
annual sports
show in 1978
heard a quiet call for a local
university.
It was then-president Hanna
Nasir’s announcement at the associate
degree graduation ceremony of 1972
that signaled the change to come. His
declaration that students could enroll
in a four-year program starting next
September was met with thunderous
acclaim and appraise, with
applications flooding the registration
office’s mailbox.
The first step of the transformation
was to change ownership from a
private foundation to a public one,
with the supervision of an official
board of trustees. The change in
legal structure was accompanied
by a change in the actual, concrete
structures of the college. A new
campus – originally planned for
Al-Tireh, but later changed to
Birzeit because of the refusal of the
Israeli military authorities to grant
a license – was planned to house
the nascent university, with the
Nasir family generously donating
land for the building project. The
Board of Trustees also approved the
purchase of land a few years later,
in preparation for the flood of new
students, but no one could have
envisioned the speed with which the
institution outgrew even the new
campus.
The transformation into a
university wasn’t final until academic
year 1974-1975. In that year, newly-
established academic departments
offered third-year courses, faculty
members from over the world joined
the university, and university facilities
had been repeatedly renovated to
accommodate the ever-increasing
number of students.
The change from junior college to
university was also accompanied by
a change in the student body from
local to national. Students from all
over the West Bank, the Gaza Strip,
and the 1948-occupied territories
applied to attend the university in
1972, imbuing the campus with an
atmosphere of Palestinian unity that
remains to this day. It was, by all
accounts, a “miniature Palestine,” as
the 45-year Birzeit University veteran
Ramzi Rihan puts it. The birth of
the Student Council in 1973 was the
confirmation that the university’s
students, despite their many different
backgrounds, were truly aware of the
value of unity and cohesion.
Birzeit University’s historic rise
from an elementary school to the
most prestigious university in all of
Palestine cannot be done justice
here. There were a lot of hurdles and
challenges that the university had to
overcome to get where it is today.
This brief overview, however, should
help us all appreciate the evolution of
this grand institution and its lasting
impact.
Birzeit University
13