Despite the immense challenges, I take pride today in having participated in laying the first foundations for modernizing Iraq's higher education system, proceeding from a deep belief that reform begins with foundations and major policies. I can summarize the most prominent achievements I struggled to realize in the following points:
- Institutionalizing Quality: We succeeded in establishing the scientific foundations for quality assurance, working to introduce the concepts of programmatic and institutional accreditation for Iraqi universities, transitioning them from local to international standards.
- Building the Academic Human: Reform could not be achieved without a competent human element, so I dedicated significant effort to retraining educational leadership and faculty members according to the latest global methods.
- University Autonomy: I struggled to make "university autonomy" a strategic goal and systematic policy, to liberate the campus from bureaucratic and political constraints.
- Modernizing Academic Systems: I take pride in being the first to push for the implementation of the Module-Based Course System (Bologna Process), aiming to align our outputs with the global market.
- Structural and Administrative Reform: I worked on establishing solid foundations for restructuring and organizing universities, with serious attempts to eliminate the "duality of attendance and certificates" that burdened the educational institution.
- Private Education Philosophy: I presented a different vision for private education, not merely complementary to public education but competing with it. However, I warned that this shift might carry seeds of educational decline if competition came at the expense of quality and solid academic standards.
- Changing the Educational Mindset: I fought an intellectual battle to fill the old educational philosophy based on rote memorization, attempting to replace it with an approach based on analysis and scientific criticism.
- Comprehensive Reform: I always maintained and still do that higher education reform cannot succeed in isolation from primary education reform—they are two links in one chain, and the flaw in one inevitably affects the other.