On the Faculty That Was

The room had no door for the first two weeks. We taught around that absence — a fact that, in retrospect, was instructive. A journalism faculty is not a building, and in those weeks I watched students arrange themselves into something more durable than furniture: a habit of attention, a register of voice, an agreement about what was worth taking down.

We started in 2013 with a syllabus drafted on a kitchen table in Kabul. The first cohort numbered fewer than forty. Some of them had never written for publication; most had never read a style guide. What they had was a kind of attentiveness particular to people who had grown up reading the news for what it left out.

I do not want to romanticize it. There were mornings when the lecture hall doubled as a waiting room for power; afternoons when the assignment was simply to read aloud, slowly, a single press release. But what was built there was real — a curriculum, a small library, a method — and the loss of it is not the loss of a building. It is the loss of a sequence of decisions, made by a particular group of people, in a particular order. That sequence is what a faculty is.

Reconstruction, when it comes, will not begin with bricks. It will begin with a syllabus.