Hugh Headlee Oral History

Hugh H. Headlee served as a faculty member teaching biology at the American University in Cairo from 1929 to 193_ as a “short termer” (recent American university graduates hired on 3-year contracts). He recalls being recruited at university in Indiana by Herman Lum of AUC’s Philadelphia office, and his arrival in Cairo. Headlee tells of teaching biology and botany, including interactions with Arabic-speaking staff to procure necessary supplies, and the students he taught including some of AUC’s earliest female “co-eds” and “pre-medics” who later went abroad for medical school. He discusses faculty engagement with students, including visits to their homes in and outside Cairo, and moderating student outings and organizations like the Camera, Travel, and Science Clubs. AUC students are characterized as more politically engaged than those Headlee had known elsewhere, and he speaks of student involvement in strikes and demonstrations near campus, and describes rioting he witnessed around Kasr El Aini Street and Garden City. University athletics like basketball and tumbling were an innovation introduced by AUC according to Headlee, and he relates the short-term faculty members’ involvement, as in competing with students. The adjustment of “short-termers” to Cairo and their experience at AUC (like relations with each other and with permanent faculty) are covered as well. Headlee outlines AUC’s growth in his first years there, especially in the Extension Division’s programming, the School of Oriental Studies’ Arabic language training, and the founding of the Journalism Department and an alumni association, but observes that while the worldwide economic Depression was slow to reach Egypt, when it did the Egyptian pound lost value and AUC faced financial problems that required placing some faculty on furlough and setting aside plans for a suburban campus in Giza. While in Egypt Headlee’s efforts were increasingly dedicated to research work on the disease Bilharzia in Egyptian villages for the Rockefeller Foundation, and he relates his contacts with AUC Physician Gilbert Ibrahim who had a clinic in Cairo’s Musky bazaar district. Headlee later went on to become a doctor of parasitic diseases, and describes the annual “Cairo Dinner” held in New York City as a reunion for former faculty, staff, and students of AUC