The AUB campus: a “no fly zone”?  By Kamal Sanjakdar ---            Have you ever thought about the social aspect of the AUB campus?  Have you ever considered it through a dimension other than the geographical one?  What role does the AUB campus play in the city of Beirut and how do we as students or as ordinary citizens perceive it?       I think that the idea most of us have about the AUB campus is related to the leading role AUB  has played in the past and is still playing in this region.  The most prominent Arab leaders are AUB graduates who formed their political beliefs and movements on campus. This same campus witnessed several historical student strikes, demonstrations and speakers' corners.  AUB is also the university with the highest tuition fees and academic standards in the region: in a word the most prestigious university in the region. This prestige is also due to the cultural diversity the campus offers: Arabs, Americans, Asians and others have long interacted on the campus grounds.     But wait a minute. . . . . Isn't the campus itself a border?  Isn't it also a limit, a frontier that one has to cross to reach this island of freedom of expression and of cultural diversity?     I think the role AUB  has always played as a center for interaction among political and social forces has always been undermined by the presence of those borders.  The AUB campus with its gates, security officers, closing hours, and routine checks of identification cards, is indeed an inhibiting factor reducing the University's role as a center for emancipation and fostering of liberal thought.    Why should all our activities such as lectures, exhibitions, campaigns, demonstrations, and strikes be conducted away from the rest of the world?  What is the importance of our involvement and engagement if not conveyed directly to society?  Aren't students the spearhead of democratic change as was the case in the United States or France in the '60s or more recently in Indonesia or Iran?      The answer is definitely, yes, and being restricted to a campus reduces considerably the effect of student activism and commitment.  A conspiracy theorist might be tempted to suggest the hypothesis that campuses were introduced to restrict the effect of student activism at large.     Taking the issue from another perspective, I think that most people see our campus as an ivory tower that we as AUBites refuse to leave.  I see this in the eyes of every taxi driver or mendicant I encounter on Bliss Street.  Are we a bunch of elitists who perform art for art's sake and who have their own clubs and intellectual movements?     "Society is corrupt; we should avoid it," would be a very good slogan to justify the existence of a campus for AUB.  I think that any education we get is futile if not "applicable" directly in society, any society.  We also need to interact and learn from the real world, the rest of the world.  Isn't the street an important source of education by itself?  Don't we need it to learn more about Lebanon?  Ever since the Lebanese civil war and the constant tuition increases, the AUB student body has become more and more homogeneous;  diversity on campus is fading away.  Where are engagement, commitment, volunteer work and community service?       Most American universities consist of buildings without a restricting compound surrounding them.  The campus consists of an open area accessible to everyone. University buildings are naturally the only restricted area.  Don't magnetic cards in College Hall and "Fortress Marquand" provide enough security measures?  Why don't we make AUB a national patrimony: the campus might be a park on weekends and the library might admit non-AUB subscribers.      Allow me to be even more idealistic: Why not simply abolish the campus and open this area to everyone seeking interaction and diversity?  In a word why not make our campus a sanctuary for freedom and diversity?  This is the role I would like AUB to be playing in the coming century.  By abolishing campus borders AUB will regain its status as the premier cultural center in the region.