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IC NEWSLETTER -
SUMMER 2009 5
revamped, old faculty was let go and a new younger staff
recruited. Among them was Jeha, whose plans to teach in
Iraq had just fallen through.
The Great Depression, however, had hit the Prep School
hard and student enrollment declined considerably. In
1936, Dr Bayard Dodge, then AUB president, invited the
International College in Smyrna to take over its preparatory
school. The “Prep” school soon became known as “IC’ and
welcomed 901 students from 37 countries in its first year.
Jeha, now a history teacher at IC, threw himself into his
favorite task: lobbying for an archives library for the school.
“If it wasn’t for me,”he said proudly, “IC’s history would never
have been documented.”
Jeha vividly remembers the day when he received a call
from Huntington Bliss (his teacher and friend while at the
American School inTripoli) saying that therewere dozens of
documents stored in Rockefeller Hall, about to be burned.
Jeha rushed over there to find the “entire history of IC in
the attic!” he remembered. Much of the documents dated
back to IC’s inception in Smyrna. He spent all his spare
time during the next six months reading and organizing
the papers.
An essential problem soon came up, however: where to
store all the documents?
Actually, Jeha had been lobbying IC presidents since the
establishment of the school for an archives library. But space
was scarce and students were increasing. Jeha lugged his
ever growing collection from building to building as space
became available – with every move he put up shelves
and a filing system. Only to be asked to move again.
Frustrated, Jeha finally packed up the collection in about 20
boxes in stored them in a small room in Sage Hall – waiting
for the day he would be allotted a permanent place.
“Sage Hall Room 112,” he said. “I will never forget it.”
He would check on the boxes frequently and continued
to do so after his retirement in 1977. A few years later, Jeha
arrived to find the door open. Horrified he looked inside to
see a class in session.
Frantic, he looked everywhere for the boxes. They were
nowhere to be found. “They just disappeared,” he said.
It would be months before a janitor located the boxes
in the attic of Sage Hall, drenched with rain water that
escaped from the roof.
Jeha was devastated. He tried to save what he could but
a large part “was gone”, he said sadly. The memory still
haunts him more than twenty years later.
He packed away what he was able to save and handed
them over to the then IC administration.
“I could do no more,” he said sighing.
His eyes suddenly twinkled. “I do have some things with
me,” he said. Jeha, an already established book author by
now, had managed to piece together all the documents
he found and wrote a concise history of IC from its
establishment in Smyrna until its move to Lebanon. But
among his proudest possessions is a book of confidential
memoires written by Cass Arthur Reed (son in law of IC’s
founder and first president inTurkey, Alexander MacLaclan).
The rare book was given to Jeha by Rosalind Reed,
MacLaclan’s granddaughter after meeting Jeha (according
to Jeha, the book was given on condition that no one else
should read it until 50 years after Reed’s death).
Then and now, however, he asks visitors from IC the one
question that still plagues him.
“Tell me,” he said. “Does IC finally have an archives library?”
Inthe1980s,somedocumentswereshippedofftotheUnited
States for safekeeping.The rest arecurrently inthealumni
office.Currentpresident,JohnJohnson,isinterestedincreating
apermanentarchives libraryoncespaceisfound. By2008,
ShafikJehahadauthoredover40textbooksanddozensof
historicalbooks.Amongthem“DarwinandtheCrisisof1882
intheMedicalDepartment”,whichwasoriginallypublished
inArabicthenwasreleasedinEnglishin2004. In1947,Jeha
wasrecruitedbytheLebanesegovernmenttowriteaseriesof
historicalbooksaboutLebanon–stillusedinmanyschools
today. His teaching methods at IC led him to co-author a
seriesoftextbooksaboutethicsandnationalcivics(altarbiah
alwatanieh).Thebooks’successatICledthegovernmentto
adoptthemforitsnationalcurriculumuntilitsabolishment
inthelate1970’s.Heiscurrentlywritingthe
history of schools in Lebanon.