Lebanese University contract lecturers speak to the press at their protest site in front of the Grand Serail. (Credit: NNA)
BEIRUT — Contract lecturers at the Lebanese University pitched a tent and began a sit-in Monday in front of the Grand Serail in Downtown Beirut to demand full-time employment at the university. One protester, Ibrahim Srour, a contract lecturer who holds a PhD, told L’Orient Today that the sit-in will continue 24/7 until the contract lecturers’ demands are met.
Here’s what we know:
• “We address the three leaders [president, prime minister and parliament speaker] and the supervisors of the [Lebanese] University and urge them to save this national edifice from collapsing so that it doesn’t fall on everybody,” Hamed Ahmad, a spokesperson for the contract lecturers, was quoted by the state-run National News Agency as saying.
• According to the NNA, Ahmad also called for an emergency meeting “to issue the top-priority files, at the top of which is the employment of contract lecturers at the Lebanese University, which would guarantee stability in their jobs.”
• Agriculture Minister Abbas Hajj Hassan, himself a graduate of the Lebanese University, attended the protest in solidarity with the lecturers. “The teachers’ place should be in their classes and their research centers and their studies, not at a tent in front of the cabinet residence calling for their basic and simple rights,” Hajj Hassan was quoted by the NNA as saying from the protest site.
• Srour told L’Orient Today that the tent installed in front of the Serail “will stay 24/7 until our demands are met.” Srour also said that through employment and job stability “I would not have to worry about a steady salary, I would have an office and I would have time for conducting research and sharpening my skills which would benefit the students.” He added, “Job instability does not create productivity.”
• Contract lecturers at the Lebanese university have protested repeatedly since October to call for full-time employment contracts, under which they would receive an array of benefits, including access to a pension scheme, insurance, end of service salaries and better payment. Monday’s protest is the first time the contract lecturers have escalated their actions to holding a sit-in at the Grand Serail.