The research, published in the journal Higher Education by Helen Murray of King’s College London, traces the history of the Lebanese University from its expansion in 1959 through to 2019, spanning periods of mass student protest, the civil war of 1975–1990, and the neoliberal reconstruction that followed. Drawing on 52 semi-structured interviews with current and former students, faculty, and administrators, alongside a review of more than 400 newspaper articles from publications including Al-Nahar, Al-Safir, The Daily Star and Al-Hayat, the study follows a longue durée approach motivated by the Braudelian attention to slow-moving structural forces and by the fact that many interviewees leapt across decades within single narratives. From this analysis, four interlocking conditions of “publicness” emerge: difference, autonomy, accountability, and space and place. The suffix “-ness” is deliberate, the author argues, because these are not fixed institutional attributes but shifting conditions through which the university is continually made and unmade as a public sphere.

The theoretical stakes are considerable. Despite a rich tradition of public sphere theory running from Dewey through Arendt to Habermas, the question of what makes a university public has remained surprisingly under-theorised, usually reduced to economistic questions of funding and access. Murray engages instead with political theorists who foreground conflict itself: Chantal Mouffe’s account of the “ineradicability of conflict” as a precondition for radical democratic politics, Bonnie Honig’s argument that “public things”—hospitals, parks, schools—are what hold societies together in agonistic citizenship, and Seteney Shami’s insistence that publics in the Middle East and North Africa are historically created through political turbulence and remain inherently fragile, needing to be continually “constructed, buttressed and protected.” In this framing, the university is not a stable site of rational consensus debate in the classical Habermasian sense, but a terrain of clashing hegemonies and counter-hegemonies.

Lebanon makes an improbable setting for such a study on the surface. Of the country’s 49 higher education institutions, all but one are private, an anomaly in the Arab region rooted in a colonial past in which the English-speaking American University of Beirut, founded by US Protestant missionaries in 1866, and the French Catholic Université Saint-Joseph dominated the sector. Under the French Mandate, investment in public education was negligible; by 1943 there were 1,534 private schools against just 177 public schools, disadvantaging Muslim communities in particular. Article 10 of the 1926 Lebanese Constitution entrenched this arrangement by safeguarding the right of religious sects to establish schools, setting, as the education historian Munir Bashshur put it, “the stage for a long and serious polarisation in education.”

The Lebanese University, founded in 1951 and expanded with four new faculties in 1959 during President Fouad Chehab’s developmentalist era, broke this pattern. Crucially, its rise was not championed by the state but driven by one of the largest social movements in Lebanon’s history, as students and faculty waged more than two decades of strikes and protests, often met with repression. The movement was embedded in wider leftist, anti-imperialist and Palestinian liberation politics, and the university posed, in the words of sociologist Halim Barakat, the most direct challenge to the existing social and political order of any of Lebanon’s four universities. For excluded populations—including the Shi’a, women, and the poor of all backgrounds—it became both a vehicle and a symbol of social transformation. “We were witnessing, basically, the transformation of these areas and villages, bringing not only educational but sociological change,” one former student from the south recalled to Murray.

The study’s first condition of publicness, difference, captures what made the pre-war university extraordinary. Bringing young people from different regions, sects and classes together, often for the first time, it created an arena of conflicting ideologies unmatched elsewhere in Lebanese society. Significantly, former students remember this not as consensus-building but as intense, even cherished, conflict. “It was really healthy, for me, healthy and natural that some conflict will evolve,” one participant recalled. Weeks before civil war erupted in April 1975, university president Edmond Naim described the institution as a “miniature image of the Lebanese community,” and in February of that year Phalangist and Syrian Nationalist student representatives signed a pact committing to democratic dialogue, then reportedly “shook hands and embraced.” In Honig’s terms, the university functioned as a “holding environment” that sustained conflict without fragmentation—the very definition of a democratic public sphere.

The civil war shattered this. In 1976 the university opened a second branch in east Beirut, formalised by Decree No. 122 of 1977, splitting the institution along sectarian lines: the first branch in west Beirut became predominantly Muslim, the second entirely Christian. Further “branching” across the country, initially framed as regional decentralisation, increasingly followed sectarian logics, producing today’s 68 branches, many tied to particular political-sectarian affiliations. Protesters in 1977 called the unified university a “symbol of the unity of Lebanon,” while proponents of the new eastern branch, including leaders of the Christian Lebanese Front, seized the division as a political opportunity. Interview accounts from the war years are visceral: one former faculty director recalled students arriving at exams with guns on the tables, noting that twenty to thirty per cent of those present belonged to militias. Yet the data also reveals stubborn defence of public purpose—at personal risk, professors refused to let political affiliations shape teaching, and in 1982, even as Israel invaded, the university opened a public medical school explicitly rejecting partisan or regional allocation of places. That school remains a leading institution today.

The postwar period brought a third dimension into focus: accountability. The Ta’if Agreement, which ended the war in 1990, unusually prioritised reform of the public university, and many believed it could anchor national reconciliation. Instead, political sectarianism and neoliberal policy intertwined to block reform. Spending cuts from the mid-1990s were accompanied by rapid licensing of for-profit private universities—described in the press as “growing like mushrooms”—while the university presidency and senior appointments were redistributed along confessional lines, with faculty positions secured through political connections. The professors’ union Al-Rabita fought for governance reform, producing a major 1999 report that invoked both accountability and responsibility to wider publics, but its authors faced a severe backlash. By 2001, the journalist Samir Kassir was writing of a “mercy bullet” being fired at the “national university,” accusing Lebanon’s government of issuing a death sentence on the institution. Crucially, Murray notes, this “death” was not driven by declining numbers or even funding alone—student numbers kept growing—but by the erosion of the interlocking conditions of difference, autonomy, and accountability. As one faculty member put it: “Sure [the university is still publicly funded], but it’s locked, it’s not open. The Lebanese University today is now a series of ghettoes.”

The fourth condition, space and place, runs through the entire sixty-year arc. “We are university students, but with no university,” a student told a reporter during a 1962 protest for a campus—a demand that persisted for over three decades. When the government’s postwar “reunification” agenda was reduced to building a single new campus at Hadath, the territorialisation of university space continued regardless. A twelve-year ban on student elections from 2007 to 2019, justified as preventing sectarian conflict, froze political control over faculties and blocked spaces for dissent. In response, students carved out marginal, improvised spaces: one 2018 graduate described holding open seminars in gardens and beneath a small dome between faculties controlled by opposing parties—”something like an agora,” she called it, “the only space that connects the two, it’s symbolic.”

The study’s postscript underscores how timely these questions remain. Months after data collection ended, the October 2019 uprising erupted across Lebanon against failing public services and sectarian corruption, described as a revolution of public space, with the Lebanese University a major site of mobilisation under banners reading “Universities of Lebanon Unite.” Since then, the country has endured COVID-19, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, economic collapse, and, since October 2023, sustained Israeli military attacks. On 12 March 2026, the Lebanese University itself was directly targeted in an Israeli drone strike that killed two academics on campus, prompting international condemnation of attacks on academic institutions in violation of international law.

Murray’s central conclusion is stark and portable far beyond Lebanon: publicness is never a fixed property of an institution. It is constituted through fragile, contested conditions—difference, autonomy, accountability, and material space—that are built and defended through political action, and dismantled through political decisions, including inaction and neglect. As universities worldwide face intensifying conflict, polarisation, and market-driven restructuring without a political language to articulate their democratic significance, the Lebanese University’s sixty-year trajectory offers both a warning and a resource: the public university is part of the material and institutional infrastructure of the public sphere, and whether it remains one depends entirely on whether its conditions are sustained, contested, and renewed.