CAIRO, Egypt – They rolled out the red carpet for President Barack Obama on Tuesday at Cairo University – sweaty workmen with measuring tape yelling over one another in Arabic about how to arrange burgundy runners down the main aisle of the conference hall – as Egypt's largest and oldest secular university made the final preparations for his arrival.

"Nobody talks about anything else at the moment," university President Hossam Kamel said, taking time out for an interview in his office upstairs from the work crews. "We are honored that Cairo University was chosen for this historical event. I think it is going to open a new page of relations between the United States and the Islamic world. He's representing change."

Obama's scheduled speech Thursday has overtaken almost everything else. Exams have been rescheduled, so the campus can be closed for the day to all but about 3,500 invited guests. Television screens are being set up in dormitories to broadcast the speech. U.S. and Egyptian security officers and embassy officials are everywhere.

Students gossip about the sudden campus makeover: landscaping, new flags, major cleaning and repairs. Some welcome the improvements, even if the motivation is political, while others complain that the money should be spent in the classrooms.

Professors and activists are using the occasion to draw attention to concerns about academic freedom at the university. Academics and human rights activists have complained for years about interference by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's regime.

They describe a climate in which state police are ever present, the curriculum is overregulated, and self-censorship has weakened instruction in subjects such as politics, religion and literature.

Such concerns are an awkward irony for Obama, who once practiced law at a civil rights firm and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.

In an interview this week with the British Broadcasting Corp., Obama said that democracy, the rule of law, free speech and religious freedom "are not simply principles of the West to be hoisted on these countries" in the Middle East, but "universal principles." How that will affect what he says Thursday is less clear, however.

"The danger, I think, is when the United States or any country thinks that we can simply impose these values on another country with a different history and a different culture," he told the BBC.

Cairo University was founded in 1908 with money from the then-ruling Egyptian royal family as an alternative to the city's religious university, al-Azhar, which is co-sponsoring Obama's speech. The public, secular university now educates 180,000 students on campus and and 70,000 more through Internet programs. Its student population is 52 percent female.

Its professors have taught some of the region's most accomplished thinkers of the 20th century, and a few infamous ones.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat studied there. So did actor Omar Sharif, ex-U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, al-Qaida's Ayman al-Zawahri and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Officials welcomed a McClatchy Newspapers reporter and translator to the campus, but they displayed the sort of wariness that sparks complaints about interference, sending a university employee as an escort to observe several student interviews.

Those students, before and during the escort's presence, reflected the range of local attitudes about Obama's speech.

Many wanted to hear him publicly take a tougher line toward Israel than former President George W. Bush did, to compel Israel to cease settlement construction and military operations that harm Palestinians.

Call Margaret Talev, McClatchy Washington Bureau, (202) 863-2287.