BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) At the entrance to Baghdad's al-Mustansiriyah University, an administration building lies in ruins. Its windows are shattered, its walls charred and its broken floors are covered in rubble.

The student union and the dorms are badly damaged, and the science and computer labs remain unusable.

As Iraq's universities prepare for a new school year more than 16 months after Saddam Hussein's ouster, they are still coping with the damage caused by looters who stole or destroyed more than 80 percent of the universities' infrastructure.

Minister of Higher Education Taher al-Bakaa calls the damage a ''big disaster.''

''We will go ahead as scheduled, no doubt,'' al-Bakaa said. ''But there's so much that needs to be done.''

When Mivan Abdullah returned to Baghdad University after the war, the school was a ''dump,'' she said.

''Labs were looted and burned down, classrooms were destroyed. Even the chairs were stolen,'' said Abdullah, who graduated this year.

Reconstruction efforts started soon after the war, but the damage was enormous and the universities' budgets were, in Al-Bakaa's words, ''destitute.''

''For instance, the operational budget of Baghdad University, the largest in Iraq, is $2 million,'' he said. Nearly 70,000 students attend that university.

The Education Ministry asked for help from the government and sympathetic donor countries.

Qatar offered books, computers and fellowships to professors worth $15 million. France, Britain, Russia and the United States have also offered fellowships and training.

But the need is immense.

Nearly 350,000 students attend Iraq's 20 universities and 50 technical institutes. In the academic year that starts this month, the number of freshmen admissions is expected to reach 90,000.

Sonia Abdel Amir, an administrator at al-Mustansiriyah, where almost 40,000 students attend, showed visitors photos of the university's empty buildings burned and pocked with bullet holes.

''We were all in tears that such a beautiful place was burned down. We started cleaning and rebuilding with our own hands,'' she said.

A few buildings, such as the dorms, have yet to be reclaimed. The biggest challenge, however, is re-equipping the empty computer and science labs.

University head Taqie al-Mousawy said the labs were looted and nearly 5,000 books stolen from the library. When elections were held to choose new deans, there were no chairs, he said.

''It was a horrible feeling, like returning to your house to find it not there, the work of 40 years was gone down the drain,'' al-Mousawy said.

The university also sustained damage twice after the war, al-Mousawy said, when U.S. forces were searching for militants loyal to rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr believed to be hiding on campus.

In addition to the damage, Iraq's higher education system is also trying to recover from decades of isolation and neglect during Saddam's reign.

''Our curricula are backward,'' al-Bakaa said. ''The regime favored (paying for) the canon and the bullet over the magazine, book and pen.''

Finding enough professors might be an issue, too. The starting monthly salary for the increasingly dangerous job is just $145.

Nearly three dozen Iraqi professors have been killed since the war's end. None of the crimes have been solved, and the killings bear no common pattern, al-Bakaa said.

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