Lizzie Eldridge goes under-cover following up her series on this website on the American University of Malta with a little exploration of her own. It is reasonable to expect Adrian Hillman will now post photo ID’s of Ms Eldridge at the security guard’s desk.
You’ve got to wonder which dumb-ass schmuck head PR person had the incredibly astute foresight to choose the fourth of July as the date for the AUM’s Open Day. I mean, what else would they choose for an historical Maltese building adorned with the stars and stripes and the name Sadeen emblazoned on its bricks? Who wouldn’t want independence when you’re a sham academic outfit owned by a construction magnate who should have had a starring role in a B movie offtake called ‘My Big Fat Jordanian Wedding?’ Who wouldn’t be celebrating freedom when you’ve been sold huge amounts of public land by a government that’s so corrupt we need a new word for corruption and who stage-managed an entire accreditation process for an ‘American university’ that couldn’t even be bothered to put up a decent front on its own Open Day?
I’ve written a lot about the AUM and I’m still looking into some of the aspects of what’s going on there in closer detail, but actually setting foot inside the place was a whole new ball game. Pitch and toss I’d call it – a Yankee pitcher indulging in self-gratification.
On arrival, I was greeted by a young woman from Lithuania – all smiles and sweetness – who asked me to type my name and e-mail address into a laptop. My details were as genuine as the place I was in.
I was then presented with an Open House Passport, laughable given that Malta has been condemned for flogging real ones and that a large number of students supposed to fill the many vacant seats at this esteemed institution absconded into Europe with their newly acquired visas. Add this to the fact that as ‘a recognised tertiary educational institution’, the AUM can recommend Maltese citizenship and the same cynical sense of humour underlying July the Fourth is blatant.
This is taking the piss big time. They’ve got what they wanted and they don’t need to make an effort any more. Why would you when you’ve been handed 18,000 square metres of ODZ land and the historic Dock 1 at Cospicua? Why would you give a shit about what the general public think when the majority of them support the very government who committed this act of daylight robbery?
The Open Day stank of not giving a shit, a mixture of the Mormons meet the Moomins with a dash of Arabic spice thrown in.
There was a disconcerting dewy-eyed delusion about the staff I met, and the number was minimal. A Canadian-Maltese woman seemed very stars and stripey with her unnatural glow of joy. A Maltese woman had lived all her life in England but returned to teach English as a foreign language to students who, by the sounds of it, can hardly speak a word. A Colombian woman also taught English and she proudly showed me the latest editions of Cambridge course books, Cambridge, as she told me, being an excellent publisher.
I wanted to say that unless she was deliberately abbreviating the full publisher’s name then Cambridge is actually a city in England where there’s a real university with real academic courses and real academics who really teach real subjects and really have qualifications and really write books and really do research and really work in offices that are part of an historical university that yes, has a history of elitism, but isn’t only for the privileged and doesn’t have to fake its credentials as a university because it simply is. It may not be perfect but it’s a million miles away from this flimsy charade you’ve constructed out of thin air on huge stretches of ground that belong to the people like that man, for example, who’s quietly fishing in the sea right outside your false door.
When this false door was opened to an exceptionally small number of visitors, there was a tacit assumption you’d either bought into their dream or who cares if you hadn’t. After recording my pseudonym on their computer, I was asked to take a seat in front of a desk replete with American flags just in case you’d forgotten where you were. Waiting excitedly for the other guests, I was placed in a group of 5 to begin our guided tour.
The bushy bright-eyed Canadian-Maltese woman led us into Room 1, or the first ‘workshop’ according to the passport. A surly Jordanian-looking man was there with that ‘distinguished American academic leader, Dr Lewis Walker, President of the American University of Malta’.
Given his stature, you’d have expected more than a couple of mumbled words before being subjected to one of their many promotional videos which flung out figures such as 100 million euro investment and 4,000 students in 4 years. Where all this money is going when I never saw a single student is anyone’s guess which is why a serious investigation into this scam is so crucial.
After the initial endurance test, we received the first stamp on our passport, i.e. a marker pen scrawling dots on a square.
We were led through corridors past empty classrooms, one with some kind of scientific equipment, and through the famous library which, as the librarian told us, has one million online books. Yet no sign of students, even though the sofas where they could relax were constantly pointed. I began to envy the invisible students their invisible chill-out time.
We only met 2 teachers during our tour. Both teach English as a foreign language, a requirement for and not a degree course. The first teacher – the Maltese-English woman – showed us an ‘installation’ apparently made by her absent language students. You’d gush if this were a kindergarten and I suspect she cobbled the visuals together all by herself. It was an embarrassing example of how not to impress and – the height of imagination – flags were stuck around the walls while suspended bits of card held quotes from Gandhi and Paolo Freire. Yes, that 4th of July prankster was up to his tricks again.
The Colombian who showed off her Cambridge collection told me there are 5 English language teachers with 10-12 students each. This amounts to more than half of the AUM’s current intake of 100 students. In addition, there are 10 week courses in the summer ‘to get the students up to scratch’.
Up to scratch to embark on their degrees in Chinese Language and Culture, Game Development, Electronics and Comm. Engineering (yes, they write it ‘Comm.’).
We were also introduced to Holly, Director of Student Success, who gave us the wrong wifi code while expecting us to participate in an interactive quiz dependent on an internet connection. We sat in a room with a kahoot app on the screen playing tinny computerised repetitive music before trying to guess fun facts about the USA and Malta – a multiple choice game in case you’re really stupid. What’s the connection between Independence Day celebrations and Malta? Fireworks! What’s the name of the Maltese presidential candidate? Is the AUM a real university or..?
Then, with only 4 marker pen blots on my passport, we were inexplicably dumped on a balcony and that’s where our tour came to its unexpected end. I thought I’d lost my group but when I asked others later – not too hard to locate them as there were so few guests – they’d all had the same experience. The balcony was offered to us for the view and then…Pooph! The genie vanished along with its magic!
I wandered past office doors, all closed, but with names, supposedly, of lecturers who displayed their office hours. With so few students and so many hours to waste in a massive building full of vacant space, you’d think the faculty members could be flexible with their time. Or, like everything else, these were simulacra of some trumped-up ivory tower.
My brief glimpse of freedom was interrupted by a Middle Eastern family who, I assumed, were visitors like me, but no. I was politely informed this area wasn’t part of the orientation and could I make my way down by the elevator. I took my time and took the stairs.
I passed posters with quotes from Plato, Socrates, Alexander Graham Bell and Ernest Hemingway, a contemporary of Orwell who likewise fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As I’d been told by the deliriously happy Canadian-Maltese woman, these ‘give our students motivation and they help us, too.’ I’m sure they do in a country where the howl of serenity is heard as houses collapse and men fall from great heights to their deaths and the rule of law demolished in the rubble.
Smoke from a barbecue wafted through my nostrils when I stepped outside. Free hot dogs on presentation of your passport with all 6 stamps!
‘I only have 4 stamps,’ I informed him.
‘It’s enough!’ laughed the American prodding sausages on his grill.
No need to collect anything before passing go. No proof for that one-way non-stop ticket into Europe, but vegetarians not welcome on this meat-packing express.
Nobody flinched to hear that 15 Chinese students were arriving ‘in the fall’. In case you don’t know what Chinese students look like, here they are starring in an AUM video, struggling to articulate the script they’ve been fed.
Maybe the actors cast in the flimsy Open Day drama thought none of the spectators would know about the AUM’s recruitment drive in China or the connections this posits with Huawei, the Belt and Road Initiative, Shanghai Electric and Konrad Mizzi’s blushing bride.
Maybe the extras employed that day thought its audience would be as dumbstruck as they were and they wouldn’t be unmasked as hired hands in the construction of a lie within a lie.
Maybe they assumed we were oblivious to the rumours that ‘Although the AUM was supposedly set up to offer degrees it has ended up as an English language school for foreign students’, with all the irregularities this entails, including granting visas.
I mean what impoverished student wouldn’t pay 2,200 euro per semester for their own room when the bedsheets can remain as good as new?
The AUM is the Mary Celeste, filled up with an emptiness that resounds with pretence. It is a house of illusions, a vacuous casino manned by Hillman and Cardona who clean up the stains from their drunken gambling debts. It is an aching void of nothingness, a blank sheet for invisible ink accounts. It is a hollow shell, a mirror reflection of hidden offshore companies which, comprised of intricate layers of deceit, must, in order to survive, obliterate the last vestiges of the soul.
