Summary

When a university closes, more than classrooms are lost. What disappears is a nation’s memory, its imagination, and its capacity to think freely. From Baghdad to Timbuktu, from Córdoba to Alexandria, history shows that silencing centers of learning is an act of epistemicide; this essay argues why that lesson matters now, especially in an age where the youth’s discourse is being diverted into sectarian echo chambers.

The Epistemicide of a University

The silence begins with doors that no longer open. A campus once alive with voices is left to gather dust. Lecture halls grow hollow, libraries are locked, archives scatter. Students do not return the following year. By the time the public realizes what has happened, the university is gone. What remains are fragments, scattered into smaller institutes that train skills but no longer nurture a whole mind.

When a university closes, it is not merely an institution that vanishes. It is a vital part of the human spirit that is stifled. Just as the arbitrary detainment of citizens throughout Eritrea crushes the individual’s ability to think freely, so too does the closing of a university crush the collective imagination of a nation. The detained individual, cut off from family, community, and future, shares a parallel fate with a society deprived of its university, a place where thought is nurtured, freedom is imagined, and memory is preserved. Both are held hostage: one in solitary confinement, the other in silence. Both are casualties of a system that fears the power of critical thought.

Some argue that the closure of a university should not be lamented so long as other colleges train professionals. But here lies the true tragedy. It is in the silence that follows the closure that the nation loses its voice. The creation of isolated technical schools, each standing apart in its silo, suffocates the genius of a society. Where a university fosters the intersection of ideas, where philosophy shapes the perspective of engineers, where law students are informed by sociology, where the humanities breathe life into the sciences; the very structure of separated institutes ensures that no such cross-pollination can occur.

Killing a university kills the spirit of innovation. Students at Mainefhi Institute may acquire technical expertise, but they will never have the chance to debate with peers from other disciplines, from other corners of the country, where ideas collide and grow. Without that exchange, the seed of new thinking is stifled before it can sprout. Innovation requires a canopy where diverse knowledge can meet, question, and transform. The loss of a university is not the loss of a building. It is the destruction of the ecosystem where imagination thrives.

More than that, however, is the loss of the social potential such cross-pollination breeds. In a university, relationships are not confined to one field or background. They grow through shared experiences, clashing perspectives, and unexpected solidarities. Students are not only discovering new concepts; they are learning how to live alongside others whose values and dreams may be entirely different from their own. Love, intellectual and social, grows in this fertile ground. But in the siloed institutes that replace the university, human connection narrows to the same field of endeavor. The richness of diverse thought, and the bonds it creates, dies when education becomes compartmentalized.

Today the consequences are visible in the new public square: feeds and For-You pages where argument is easy and understanding is rare. On TikTok and similar platforms, young Eritreans spar along sectarian lines, mistaking viral certainty for truth. Algorithms reward heat over light; slogans outpace arguments; identity is weaponized for sport. Had critical thinking been cultivated in secondary schools, and had the university remained open as a civic stage, these same young minds might still dispute, but with better tools: logic and evidence, historical memory and media literacy, debate societies and student journals that turn heat into light. The difference is not temperament; it is training. A republic that shutters its university forfeits the very institutions that could refine grievance into argument and argument into insight.

Asmara University once stood as the intellectual heart of the nation. It was not only a campus, but a civic stage. It produced doctors and lawyers, teachers and writers, engineers and poets. It gathered young people from every corner of the country and gave them a mirror in which to see themselves as citizens of a shared republic. To close such an institution was not merely to shut doors in the capital. It was to fracture the nation’s pride, to scatter its intellectual energy into fragments, and to declare that the capital itself could live without an intellectual compass. That loss cannot be measured in diplomas alone. It is measured in silence, in the absence of civic imagination, in the dispersal of young minds. This is epistemicide in its starkest form: the killing of a society’s capacity to know itself.

A university is never only a set of classrooms. It is, as Edward Said wrote, “a place of critical humanism,” where knowledge resists power by imagining freedom. It is, in Derrida’s words, “the university without condition,” the one space where questions must be asked without fear. And as Paulo Freire reminded us, education is never neutral: it either domesticates or it liberates. When such a place is silenced, a nation loses more than an institution. It loses its compass, its memory, and its imagination. The collective wound it leaves behind is not easily cured.

Civilizations have long known this. When the libraries of Baghdad were put to flame in the thirteenth century, the Tigris was said to run black with ink and red with blood. Scholars mourned not only the books but the centuries of continuity that vanished with them. When Timbuktu’s manuscripts were scattered during colonial incursions, families hid them in chests, smuggled them across deserts, and buried them beneath homes, desperate to preserve fragments of memory that otherwise would have been lost to fire and looting. When Córdoba’s schools and libraries fell to conquest, the echo was felt across the Mediterranean, for there Muslims, Jews, and Christians once studied side by side, forging a plural imagination. And when Alexandria’s scrolls disappeared, the absence haunted not only Egypt but humanity itself. Each of these was not only a physical destruction but an epistemicide, an attempt to erase ways of knowing, to sever societies from their intellectual lifeblood. The closure of a university may appear quieter, but it enacts the same violence.

Universities are never closed by accident. They are closed because they are dangerous. Dangerous not with weapons but with questions. Dangerous because they preserve memory. Dangerous because they imagine futures. That is what “political reasons” really mean: to silence questions before they can be asked again, to declare that knowledge must be technical, not critical, that skills are welcome, but critique is treason.

It is here that shallow arguments reveal their poverty. To claim that the closure of a university does not matter because other colleges remain is to confuse the existence of buildings with the presence of an intellectual tradition. It is like saying the burning of Timbuktu’s libraries was inconsequential because scraps of paper survived. To reduce the matter to whether degrees are recognized abroad is to substitute personal ego for civic imagination. A diploma may soothe pride, but a nation needs more than pride. It needs memory, continuity, critique, imagination. To ignore this is to collude in epistemicide: not simply administrative closure, but the systematic killing of a nation’s knowledge.

When a university disappears, continuity snaps. Faculty disperse, archives scatter, networks collapse. A society loses its own reflection. Without universities, nations become intellectually dependent. They import theories instead of generating them. They borrow narratives instead of preserving their own. They produce technical workers but not custodians of history, law, or philosophy.

The wound is not individual. It is collective. A society does not measure itself only by the number of its graduates, but by whether it can think itself free, imagine itself anew, and remember itself truthfully. That capacity dies when a university disappears.

So when people say, “the university was closed,” they are not describing a building. They are naming a wound. They are reminding us that once there was a canopy of thought, and that canopy was cut down. They are warning us that the choice between citizens and subjects, between thinkers and functionaries, is written in whether a society sustains its universities. Every society must decide: will it cultivate questions, or reward obedience; will it raise thinkers, or manufacture subjects? The answer is written in the fate of its universities.

When a university disappears, a society does not just lose a campus. It loses its mirror, its archive, its conscience, and its imagination.