Reading Through Crisis: How Lebanon’s Socioeconomic Collapse Has Affected the Teaching and Learning of English Literature in Higher Education

Reading Through Crisis: How Lebanon’s Socioeconomic Collapse Has Affected the Teaching and Learning of English Literature in Higher Education

القراءة في زمن الأزمة: أثر الانهيار الاقتصادي والاجتماعي في لبنان في تعليم الأدب الإنكليزي وتعلّمه في التّعليم العالي

 ريم صلاح الدّين خدّاج Reem Salaheddine khaddaj[1]

  د. هنادي ميرزا Dr. Hanadi Mirza[2]

تاريخ الإرسال: 6-8-2026                              تاريخ القبول: 18-8-2026

Abstract                                                                                      turnitin:10%

The damage Lebanon’s financial collapse has done to its universities is by now well documented, but almost all of that documentation stops where the humanities begin, and English literature has gone unexamined altogether. This study asks what the collapse has done to the teaching, learning and assessment of English literature in Lebanese universities: what students can still get hold of, what their instructors have changed in order to keep courses running, and whether the losses have been shared out evenly. A questionnaire was completed by 240 students at five institutions, and twelve instructors who had taught both before and after 2019 were interviewed. The survey data were analyzed in SPSS and the transcripts were coded thematically. Purchasing of set texts fell from 72.5% to 21.7%, weekly library use and database access each fell by more than half, and the share of students finishing an assigned work dropped from 68.8% to 37.1%. Instructors described substituting out-of-copyright works for texts still in copyright, teaching extracts in place of whole books, improvising with messaging applications and open resources, and replacing long research papers with shorter and more controlled tasks. None of this has fallen evenly. Students whose households earn in foreign currency reported markedly better access than those living on salaries paid in lira, and access rose with the tuition an institution charges. What looks like a general decline in standards is better described as a transfer of cost from institutions to households, and the study sets out what targeted support would have to reach.

Keywords: English literature education; economic crisis; educational access; equity; higher education in Lebanon.

الملخص

لم يعد الضّرر الذي ألحقه الانهيار المالي بالجامعات اللبنانيّة موضع شكّ، غير أنّ ما وُثّق منه يتوقّف عند حدود العلوم الإنسانيّة، ولم يحظَ الأدب الإنكليزي بدراسة تُذكر. تسأل هذه الدّراسة عمّا فعله الانهيار بتعليم الأدب الإنكليزي وتعلّمه وتقويمه في الجامعات اللبنانيّة: ما الذي بقي في متناول الطلاب، وما الذي غيّره الأساتذة كي تستمرّ المقرّرات، وهل توزّعت الخسائر بالتّساوي. أجاب عن الاستبيان 240 طالبًا في خمس مؤسّسات، وأُجريت مقابلات مع اثني عشر أستاذًا درّسوا قبل عام 2019 وبعده. وحُلّلت البيانات الكمّية ببرنامج SPSS، وحُلّلت المقابلات تحليلًا موضوعاتيًّا. تراجع شراء النّصوص المقرّرة من 72.5% إلى 21.7%، وتراجع استعمال المكتبة والوصول إلى قواعد البيانات إلى أقلّ من النّصف، وانخفضت نسبة الطلاب الذين يُنهون قراءة العمل المقرّر كاملًا من 68.8% إلى 37.1%. وأفاد الأساتذة بأنّهم استبدلوا بالأعمال المحميّة بحقوق النّشر أعمالًا خارجها، ودرّسوا مقتطفات بدل الكتب الكاملة، وارتجلوا حلولًا رقميّة عبر تطبيقات المراسلة والمصادر التّعليميّة المفتوحة، واستعاضوا عن الأبحاث الطويلة بمهامّ أقصر وأشدّ ضبطًا. ولم يقع شيء من ذلك بالتّساوي: فالطلاب الذين تتقاضى أُسرهم دخلها بالعملة الأجنبيّة أفادوا بوصول أفضل بكثير ممّن يعيشون على رواتب بالليرة، وارتفع مستوى الوصول بارتفاع الأقساط في المؤسّسة. وتخلص الدّراسة إلى أنّ ما يبدو تراجعًا عامًّا في المستوى هو في حقيقته نقل للكلفة من المؤسّسات إلى الأُسر، وتحدّد ما ينبغي أن يبلغه الدّعم الموجّه.

الكلمات المفاتيح: تعليم الأدب الإنكليزي؛ الأزمة الاقتصاديّة؛ الوصول إلى التّعليم؛ الإنصاف؛ التّعليم العالي في لبنان.

1. Introduction

Since October 2019 Lebanon has been living through a financial collapse that the World Bank (2021) placed among the three most severe recorded anywhere since the middle of the nineteenth century, and attributed to a deliberate refusal to act rather than to any external shock. The currency lost most of its value. Depositors found their savings inaccessible. Prices rose at triple-digit rates for several years running (World Bank, 2022). By 2021 more than half the households resident in the country were living in multidimensional poverty, which is to say they were short not only of income but of health care, utilities and schooling (ESCWA, 2021). The port explosion of August 2020 and the closures imposed during the pandemic arrived while all of this was under way, so that institutions absorbed three shocks at once rather than one after another.

Universities absorbed a large share of them. Salaries paid in lira lost most of their purchasing power, and senior staff either left the country or took on second and third appointments to make up the difference. Library subscriptions billed in dollars lapsed. In much of the country the public grid supplied a few hours a day, so light, connectivity and the running of campus buildings came to depend on private generators and on the price of fuel. Students began to weigh the cost of the journey against the value of a single session.

Research on education in crisis has concentrated on enrolment, on financing and on the loss of trained staff. Milton and Barakat (2016) observed that higher education is routinely left out of emergency response even though reconstruction depends on it, and Barakat and Milton (2015) found the same pattern across the Arab region. Work on Lebanon has looked at how the sector is financed (Nahas, 2011), at quality assurance and, more recently, at the emergency move to distance teaching. The humanities appear at the edges of this literature when they appear at all, and English literature has been left out of it entirely.

The omission is hard to defend, because literary study is unusually exposed to a collapse of exactly this kind. It depends on books that must be imported and paid for in hard currency, on criticism held behind institutional licences, on long stretches of quiet reading, which require light, on seminar discussion, which requires small groups in a room together, and on written work, which requires sustained access to sources. Every one of those conditions has become harder to meet since 2019. This study therefore asks what has happened to the teaching and learning of English literature in Lebanese universities, and whether it has happened to everyone equally.

2. Statement of the Research Problem

Academics in Lebanon discuss the effects of the crisis on literary education constantly and have documented them almost not at all. Departments have cut courses. Reading lists have shortened. Assessment has changed shape. What is missing is any systematic record of how far these changes have gone and of who has absorbed their cost. Without such a record, institutions respond by improvisation, and whether a given student can keep up is left to the judgement, and the goodwill, of an individual instructor.

The problem is therefore twofold. There is no reliable account of what has happened to access, teaching and assessment in English literature programmes since 2019, and there is no evidence at all on whether the deterioration has been shared evenly. The questions that follow from it are set out with the objectives in Section 5.

3. Importance of the Study

Three things make the study worth doing. It extends work on higher education in crisis into a discipline that work has so far ignored, and in doing so it tests whether frameworks built to describe access to technology and to institutional resources also describe access to reading, which is not self-evident. It produces a baseline that departments, deans and ministries can use when they decide where scarce money should go, and when they decide which of the adaptations described in Section 8 deserve to be made permanent and which amount to a quiet lowering of standards. And it treats literary education as a question of equity rather than of prestige. Nussbaum (2010) argued that the humanities are what democratic citizenship is built on. If that is right, then a situation in which reading depends on household income costs more than a discipline.

4. Research Hypotheses

Three hypotheses guide the quantitative part of the study. The interview material is treated differently: what instructors have done in response to the crisis was not something the study was in a position to predict, so it is put as an open question in Section 5 rather than as a hypothesis to be tested.

H1. Students report significantly lower access to literary texts, to library and database resources and to literature courses during the crisis than they report for the period before 2019.

H2. Reported access and perceived quality of learning are significantly associated with socioeconomic position, with students from households living on local-currency income reporting greater deprivation on both.

H3. Reported access differs significantly by institutional type, rising with the level of tuition charged.

5. Objectives and Research Questions of the Study

The study is organized around three questions. What has happened to access, meaning set texts, library holdings, databases and the range of literature courses a department can still offer? What have instructors done about it, in their reading lists, in the classroom and in the way they assess? And who has paid for it, or more precisely, does it matter what a student’s household earns and where that student is enrolled?

Four objectives follow. The first is to measure how far access to texts, connectivity and course provision have changed since 2019, as students themselves describe the change. The second is to record what instructors have altered and why, assessment included, in their own words. The third is to test whether reported access and perceived quality vary with socioeconomic position and with institutional type. The fourth is to say something useful to departments and to policy makers while the crisis is still running, which is the point of the recommendations in Section 10.

6. Literature Review

The literature relevant to this study comes from five directions, none of which quite covers the case at hand. Research on higher education in conflict and crisis explains how the sector is treated when a state is under strain, but stops short of the curriculum. Work produced during the pandemic sets out what emergency remote teaching can and cannot replace. Studies of digital inequality, read alongside older sociology of cultural capital, supply the framework used here for the equity question. Research on the teaching of literature specifies the conditions the discipline needs in order to work. And the literature on open educational resources speaks directly to the substitution instructors have made, although it was written with very different circumstances in mind. Reviewed together, these strands explain both why the humanities have gone missing from crisis scholarship and why literature is more exposed to a collapse of this kind than most fields.

Higher education is deprioritized in emergencies, and it is deprioritized as a matter of course. Milton and Barakat (2016) showed that universities are treated as something to be dealt with after recovery, although recovery depends on the professionals, teachers and administrators they train, and Barakat and Milton (2015) followed the consequences of that assumption through several conflict-affected Arab states. Milton (2018) later drew the evidence together and argued that what is damaged is not only buildings and enrolment but the capacity of a system to reproduce itself. Damage in this literature is counted in infrastructure, in student numbers and in staff losses. What is being taught receives much less attention, and when it does, the fields under discussion are the professional and technical ones whose economic value is easy to argue for.

A second literature came out of the pandemic, and it matters here because Lebanese universities went through emergency remote teaching in the middle of a financial collapse rather than on its own. Hodges et al. (2020) insisted that emergency remote teaching is not designed online learning and should not be assessed as though it were. Bozkurt and Sharma (2020) took the view that in a crisis the object is to keep contact with students, not to optimize pedagogy. Czerniewicz et al. (2020) read the shift less charitably, as a stress test that exposed the inequality already present in a student body and in most cases widened it. Baytiyeh (2018), writing about school closures after earthquakes in the region, had reached a similar conclusion earlier.

The equity question in this study rests on a third strand and on some considerably older sociology. Van Dijk (2020) distinguished successive levels of the digital divide and argued that once physical access becomes widespread the inequality reappears in skills, in autonomy of use and in what people manage to do with the access they have; Warschauer and Matuchniak (2010) arrived at much the same position from evidence on technology in schools. Why this happens is easier to see through Bourdieu (1986), who treated the household library, the quiet room and the parent who reads as forms of capital, and through Bourdieu and Passeron (1990), who described how schooling converts that capital into advantage while appearing to reward merit. Sen (1999) put the problem differently again. What matters is not the resource but the capability, meaning what a person is in a position to do with what is nominally available. A novel that exists as a free file, read by a student who has neither electricity nor a device to spare for four hours, illustrates the distinction well enough.

A fourth strand sets out what literary study actually requires. Rosenblatt (1978) described reading as a transaction between reader and text which takes time and cannot be compressed without losing what it produces. Showalter (2003), and before her Carter and Long (1991), treated the seminar as the basic unit of literary teaching, dependent on preparation, on small numbers and on discussion. Those claims are old, and recent work has kept them in view while renewing the evidence for them. Hall (2015) reviewed research on literature in language education and pointed to the standing tension between extensive reading and syllabus coverage. Teranishi et al. (2015) collected studies of literature teaching in classrooms where English is a foreign language. Bloemert et al. (2016, 2019), working first from survey data with teachers and then with students, found that the benefits students themselves report depend on approaches which assume time with a complete text and sustained talk about it. The adaptations most readily available during a crisis, that is, excerpting, larger groups and shorter written work, therefore cut into the conditions on which the discipline depends.

The fifth strand is the literature on open educational resources, which is where a good many of the instructors interviewed here have ended up. Hilton (2020), synthesising work published between 2015 and 2018, found that students using open materials do at least as well as students using commercial ones and spend a great deal less, and UNESCO (2019) recommended their adoption. That evidence comes from systems that were not in difficulty. It has little to say about materials adopted under pressure, without institutional support, in a discipline where what is available free of charge is, for the most part, whatever has fallen out of copyright.

What these literatures share is a finding and an absence: crises distribute their effects unequally, and evidence from the humanities is missing. No study, as far as the present researcher has been able to establish, has examined the teaching of English literature during the Lebanese collapse, set what students say beside what their instructors say, and tested whether the effects differ by socioeconomic background. That is the gap this study addresses.

7. Research Methodology

7.1 Design

Students were surveyed and their instructors were interviewed, both within the same data collection window, which ran from March to May 2026. The two sets of data were analysed separately and brought together only at the point of interpretation, which is the convergent parallel design described by Creswell and Plano Clark (2018). The reason for using both is practical rather than methodological. A questionnaire shows how far a problem extends and whom it reaches; it cannot explain why an instructor dropped a novel from a syllabus in March and put three chapters of something older in its place. That had to be asked directly.

7.2 Population and Sample

Two groups took part. The first was made up of undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in English literature courses at Lebanese universities, the second of the staff who teach those courses. Sampling was purposive and stratified, arranged so that the public sector would not be swamped by the private one and so that campuses outside Beirut would be represented alongside those in the capital. Two hundred and forty students at five institutions responded: 95 at the public university, 87 at private institutions charging lower or middle tuition, and 58 at the more expensive private institutions. Twelve instructors agreed to be interviewed. All twelve had taught before 2019 as well as after it, which was the condition of inclusion, since the whole study turns on their being able to compare.

7.3 Instruments

The questionnaire was written for this study and runs to five sections. The first establishes who the respondent is and where they study. The second asks what the household lives on: whether income arrives in lira or in foreign currency, whether relatives abroad send anything, whether the student works. The third covers how texts and resources are obtained, from purchased books to photocopies, shared files, the library and the databases. The fourth deals with the physical conditions of study, meaning electricity, connectivity, devices and the journey to campus. The fifth asks what students make of the courses on offer, the size of their classes and the quality of what they are being taught. Items in the last three sections use a five-point scale and are phrased as comparisons with the situation before 2019. Three specialists in applied linguistics and literary pedagogy reviewed the items for content validity. Cronbach’s alpha for the instrument as a whole was .87, which counts as good internal consistency.

The interview schedule is semi-structured and covers four areas: reading lists and course design, the classroom and contact with students, assessment, and the instructor’s own working conditions. Interviews lasted roughly forty-five minutes. Participants chose whether to speak English or Arabic, and all agreed to be recorded and transcribed.

7.4 Data Analysis

The survey data were analysed in SPSS. Descriptive statistics give the distribution of the access and perception measures. Independent samples t tests and one-way analysis of variance compare groups defined by socioeconomic indicators and by institutional type, chi-square tests handle the categorical associations, and multiple regression estimates the contribution of socioeconomic position to reported access with institutional type, year of study and paid employment held constant. Significance was set at .05. Effect sizes are reported with every significance test.

Transcripts were analysed thematically, following the six phases set out by Braun and Clarke (2006): familiarisation, initial coding, the search for themes, review, definition and naming, and writing up. Codes were built out of the transcripts rather than brought to them, and a second coder worked independently through a subset of the interviews so that the two readings could be compared.

7.5 Ethical Considerations

Participation was voluntary throughout, and informed consent was obtained before any data were collected. Respondents were told what the study was for, that they could withdraw at any point, and that nothing identifying them would be published. Names, student numbers and contact details were not recorded with the responses. Institutions are reported by category rather than by name, and instructors are identified by code.

8. Results

8.1 Access to Texts and Resources

The most conspicuous finding is the disappearance of the purchased book. Because the comparison with the period before 2019 rests on what respondents remember, the direction of the change is more reliable here than its precise size, and that caveat applies to the whole of this section. Before the crisis, 72.5% (n = 174) said they normally bought the texts set for their courses. At the time of the survey, 21.7% (n = 52) did, p < .001. Editions are imported and priced in foreign currency, and a single novel can take up a visible share of a month’s income paid in lira. What replaced buying appears in the same table: reliance on photocopies and shared files rose from 28.3% (n = 68) to 78.8% (n = 189). The library absorbed none of the difference. Weekly use fell from 54.2% (n = 130) to 22.9% (n = 55) and reported access to academic databases from 61.7% (n = 148) to 34.6% (n = 83), which leaves secondary reading to be assembled out of whatever can be reached without a license. The last row of Table 1 bears most directly on the discipline. The share of students reading assigned works in full fell from 68.8% (n = 165) to 37.1% (n = 89), so that fewer than two students in five now finish the texts their courses are built on.

Table 1

Students’ retrospective reports of access to texts and resources before 2019 and during the crisis (N = 240)

8.2 Infrastructure and Conditions of Study

Owning a text and being able to read it are separate problems. Asked what limits their study time, respondents named electricity and connectivity ahead of everything else. Reading is organised around generator hours, and the subscription that supplies those hours, like the mobile data package, is paid for by the household rather than by the university. Where teaching moved online, taking part depended on bandwidth that a good many respondents did not have, and cameras stayed off for reasons that had little to do with reluctance. Transport works in the same way. At current fuel prices each trip to campus is a small calculation, and several respondents said they now attend only the sessions they consider indispensable.

8.3 Course Provision and Class Size

Departments have contracted, and students and instructors describe the contraction in the same terms: electives and specialised courses cancelled, particularly where a period or a genre was covered by one member of staff, and sections merged into larger groups. For literary study this is a specific loss rather than a general inconvenience. A seminar of fifteen, in which everyone is expected to have read and to say something, becomes at forty or fifty a lecture with a few questions at the end. Instructors added that written feedback has thinned out for the same reason, since detailed comment on drafts is not possible at that volume.

8.4 Instructor Adaptation

Four themes emerged from the interviews.

The first, raised in almost every conversation, was substitution. Works still in copyright have been replaced by works in the public domain, which pulls reading lists back towards earlier periods and away from contemporary and postcolonial writing. More than one instructor named this as the change they regret most.

The second was compression. Chapters stand in for novels and extracts for chapters, and several instructors described the odd business of trying to convey the shape of a whole book through a fragment of it. They were candid about what this costs. Sustained attention, which literary study is supposed to build, is the first thing to go.

The third was digital improvisation. Messaging applications, cloud folders, recorded sessions and open resources have all been pressed into service, generally without an institutional platform, without training and without additional pay. What the research literature presents as a considered pedagogical choice looks from here like unpaid infrastructural work undertaken to keep courses running.

The fourth was assessment. Long research papers, which assume steady access to sources, have given way to shorter papers, in-class writing, presentations and group work. Instructors gave two reasons, one about students and one about themselves: the resources such essays require can no longer be assumed, and classes of that size cannot be marked properly at that length. A few also mentioned the difficulty of judging unsupervised written work when there is little way of establishing how it was produced.

8.5 Unequal Effects

The third question concerned distribution, and the answer is consistent across every measure taken. Students whose households receive income in foreign currency, or remittances from relatives abroad, reported better access to texts than students living on salaries paid in lira, M = 3.62 (SD = 0.69) against M = 2.31 (SD = 0.74), t(238) = -12.71, p < .001, d = 1.80. The same gap appears for connectivity and devices, t(238) = -11.30, p < .001, d = 1.61; for attendance on campus, t(238) = -5.74, p < .001, d = 0.81; and for perceived quality of learning, t(238) = -8.43, p < .001, d = 1.20. Differences of this magnitude describe two quite separate sets of study conditions.

Table 2

Access and perceived quality by source of household income (N = 240)

Institution does not compensate for this and appears to compound it, F(2, 237) = 16.84, p < .001, eta squared = .125. Mean access rises with the level of tuition, which leaves students at the public university, the institution teaching the largest share of the country’s students, reporting the tightest conditions of the three strata.

Table 3

Access to texts by institutional type

The association holds once the other variables are entered. The model was significant overall, F(4, 235) = 31.62, p < .001, and accounted for 35.0% of the variance in access, R2 = .350, adjusted R2 = .339. Socioeconomic position remained the strongest predictor with institutional type, year of study and paid employment controlled, beta = .46, p < .001, and institutional type contributed independently, beta = .21, p < .001. Paid work alongside study was negatively associated with access, beta = -.14, p = .012. That coefficient admits of more than one reading, and a cross-sectional design cannot settle between them. Year of study predicted nothing at all.

Table 4

Multiple regression predicting access to texts and resources

Note. N = 240. F(4, 235) = 31.62, p < .001; R2 = .350; adjusted R2 = .339.

Instructors see the same division from the other side of the room. Several said they can no longer assume a common level of preparation, and they connected whether a student arrives having read the text to what that student has at home.

9. Discussion

The first question asked what has happened to access. The survey answers it without much ambiguity: buying set texts has become the exception rather than the rule, weekly library use and database access have each fallen by more than half, and fewer than two students in five now finish the works their courses are built on. The second asked what instructors have done in response, and the interviews produced four answers: substitution of out-of-copyright works, compression of what survives on the reading list, improvised digital provision, and assessment rebuilt around shorter and more controlled tasks. The third asked how the losses are distributed, and they fall hardest on households paid in lira and on students at the public university. H1, H2 and H3 are supported. The mechanism behind them is the more interesting matter.

A standardised difference of 1.80 in access to texts, between households earning in foreign currency and households earning in lira, is a wide gap by the standards of educational research. What it describes is not a general decline in quality but a transfer of cost. When a library subscription lapses, the requirement to read criticism does not lapse with it; the requirement is moved onto whoever can pay for connectivity and a device. When two sections are merged, close reading stays on the syllabus while the conditions that made it possible are quietly withdrawn. Sen (1999) drew this distinction between resources and capabilities, and van Dijk (2020) had something similar in mind when he located digital inequality in use and outcome rather than in access alone.

The findings also sit awkwardly with the optimism of the literature on open educational resources. Hilton (2020) reported good outcomes for open materials and UNESCO (2019) recommended them, but the Lebanese case shows what happens when the move is driven by scarcity rather than by design. In literary study, what is free is largely what is out of copyright, so a reading list shaped by cost drifts back towards the nineteenth century and away from the contemporary and postcolonial texts in which students might recognise something of their own circumstances. An adaptation that is neutral in a well-funded system becomes here a narrowing of the canon.

The same point applies to what has changed in the classroom. Rosenblatt (1978) treated literary meaning as something produced over the course of an extended transaction between reader and text, Showalter (2003) and Carter and Long (1991) treated the seminar as the place where that transaction is opened up and examined, and Bloemert et al. (2019) found more recently that the gains students report from literature courses depend on the same conditions. Excerpting, larger groups and shorter assessments do not simply reduce the quantity of work. They remove the time and the company on which the discipline’s characteristic outcomes depend. The instructors interviewed here understand this perfectly well, and described what they are doing as damage control rather than innovation, which distinguishes these findings from accounts of emergency remote teaching that read crisis adaptations as a rehearsal for future practice (Hodges et al., 2020).

Finally, the pattern reported here supports Czerniewicz et al. (2020) on the tendency of crisis provision to reproduce the inequality that preceded it, and it does so in a field nobody has looked at before. What this case adds is how literally that reproduction now works. A household able to supply a book, a quiet room, a charged device and four uninterrupted hours is supplying most of what the curriculum assumes, which is cultural capital in Bourdieu’s (1986) sense operating with no metaphor involved at all.

9.1 Limitations

Four limitations qualify what has been said. The first concerns the measurement of the period before 2019, which depends on recall and is open to the distortions recall brings. The interviews corroborate the direction of the changes students report but not their magnitude, and no institutional records were available against which the figures might have been checked. The second is the sample. Stratified purposive sampling produced coverage of the public sector, of private institutions at several tuition levels and of campuses outside Beirut, but it is not a probability sample, so the percentages given here describe the 240 respondents and not the national student population. Participation was voluntary in both strands, which may have drawn in those with most to report. The third concerns the design, and the regression in particular. The data were collected at a single point in time and the comparison with the earlier period is retrospective, so what the analysis supports are statements about association rather than about cause. Socioeconomic position is significantly associated with reported access; the model cannot show that it produces that access, and the coefficients in Table 4 should be read with that restriction in mind. Variables that were not measured may be operating within them, among them geographical location, household size, prior attainment and the differing levels of support individual institutions provide. The fourth concerns the outcome measure. Quality of learning here means what students perceive and what instructors judge, not examination results or assessed writing, so what the study documents is the conditions under which literary study is now taking place and how the participants read those conditions. Socioeconomic position is approached just as indirectly, through the currency of household income, remittances and paid work, indicators that make sense in Lebanon but that do not measure household wealth as such.

10. Conclusion and Recommendations

This study set out to record what the collapse has done to the teaching and learning of English literature in Lebanon and to establish whether the damage has been shared evenly. It has not been. The proportion of students finishing their assigned reading has fallen from 68.8% to 37.1% and the proportion buying set texts from 72.5% to 21.7%, and those averages conceal a sharp division by household means. The adjustments instructors have made are defensible one at a time and add up to a narrower discipline. Literary education in Lebanon is not collapsing. It is being stripped back quietly, and the students who began with least are losing most.

Four recommendations follow. Universities should treat access to texts as core provision rather than as a private expense, which means consortial licensing, a shared national digital collection and departmental text banks, and they should protect small-group teaching in literature courses even where the efficiency argument points the other way. Departments should make the adaptations described in Section 8 deliberate rather than improvised: platforms, training in the selection and adaptation of open resources, and some recognition of the additional labour instructors are currently absorbing unpaid. Policy support should be targeted rather than uniform, since a uniform subsidy distributed across a stratified population preserves the stratification; device loans, help with connectivity and assistance with transport, allocated by need, would reach the mechanism this study has identified. And the picture needs extending, over time and across fields, to establish whether these adaptations are reversed when conditions ease or settle permanently into the curriculum, and whether Arabic and French literary studies in the same institutions show the same pattern.

Notes

1. The crisis is dated here from October 2019, when informal capital controls were imposed and nationwide protests began. Several respondents dated the deterioration of teaching conditions to the academic year that followed.
2. Deposits held in foreign currency became payable only in local currency, at rates well below the market rate. The distinction between such deposits and cash in foreign currency is central to the household income measure used here.
3. The Lebanese University is the country’s only public institution of higher education and enrols the largest share of students nationally, which is why it is treated as a stratum of its own in the sampling design.
4. Comparisons with the period before 2019 rest on retrospective recall and are therefore subject to recall bias and to imprecision in the estimated size of the change. The instructor interviews corroborated the direction of the reported changes, particularly the fall in purchased texts and the growing reliance on photocopies and shared digital materials, but they do not independently verify the percentages students reported.
5. Institutional names are withheld and replaced by categories, in accordance with the consent conditions under which access was granted.

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[1] – Master student، English literature، Lebanese University، Faculty of Education، Beirut، Lebanon. Email: Reemsalahkhaddaj@gmail.com

طالبة ماستر ، اللغة الانكليزية وادابها، الجامعة اللبنانيّة، كليّة التربية، بيروت ، لبنان

[2] – Doctor and Advisor، English literature، Lebanese University، Faculty of Education، Beirut، Lebanon. Email: [supervisor email]

دكتورة ومشرفة، الجامعة اللبنانيّة، كليّة التربيّة، بيروت، لبنان