CAIRO: Cairo University Mass Communication professor Mahmoud Khalil denied Monday that any faculty members incited students to hold a sit-in that called for sacking the dean. Students demanded the ouster of the faculty dean Sami Abdel-Aziz, accusing him of belonging to the overthrown regime and a member of the policies committee of the disbanded National Democratic Party (NDP). “This generation who revolted and took the lead during the January 25 Revolution do not need anyone to tell them what to do. It just happened that both students and professors called for similar demands with no prior planning,” Khalil told Daily News Egypt. “We all believed in the inevitability of sacking Abdel-Aziz like all officials who belonged to the NDP,” he added. On Saturday, Cairo University president Hossam Kamel referred Khalil and two other colleagues to a displinary panel after they had been accused of halting the educational process and provoking students to hold a sit-in on campus from March 21–24. The initial internal investigation accused the three professors of disrupting the educational process as well as inciting students to hold a sit-in. “Five teaching staff members were supposed to be questioned. None of us showed up and we officially addressing the interrogator to define our charges and he refused to receive the letter,” Khalil said. “So the interrogator depended on the testimonies of some witnesses, recommending that we be referred to a displinary panel. And the university president referred only three of us,” he added. Khalil said that the investigation depended on contradictory information and unconfirmed testimonies. “For example, I was accused of not giving a lecture on a subject I don't even teach this semester,” he said. “The dean himself did not teach a number of classes and was not referred to a displinary panel,” Khalil added, describing the university president's decision as being “authoritarian.” The faculty dean could not be reached for comment at time of press. On March 23, the military police forcibly dispersed the sit-in after failing to convince the students to end it using cattle prods, leaving many students hospitalized. However, the army denied these accusations later in a press conference saying that it intervened to end the sit-in peacefully, as the protesters prevented Abdel-Aziz, and other professors from leaving the faculty or receiving any food or water.
