An Astronomer's  View of the Future of Israeli Research Universities. (July 18, 2004)

     Eliah Leibowiz, is a former director of the Wise Observatory and served as the chairman of Tel Aviv University's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics until May this year. Below are excerpts of an opinion piece he wrote for Ha'aretz and published on July 12.

[Israel's] research universities ... were created in an evolutionary process that, however, did not go on for thousands of years but only about 90. The process was spontaneous, almost without any intervention by extra-academic bodies. The advisor to the pioneering academics who built the first universities in the land of Israel was neither the head of a department at the Finance Ministry nor the director of a successful industrial plant.

 

This was a Jew who never commanded a military unit in his life and who, to the best of anyone's knowledge, never had a degree in economics or management. His name was Albert Einstein . During the early years of the state the Israeli legislature also recognized these treasures, and set up a narrow protective wall around them in the form of Council for Higher Education Law.

 

[U]p until seven years ago the research universities in Israel were surrounded by invisible ivory walls and towers; a general understanding and national agreement were the secret of their strength.

 

During the tenure of the current government we are witnessing a strengthening of an extreme change in the government's attitude towards the university. The government of Israel, headed by the budget department at the Finance Ministry, decided to take the matter into its own hands.

 

One of the manifestations of this revolutionary change is the government's decision of September 2003, which in effect orders the research universities to adopt an administrative and academic structure dictated by the government. A series of additional actions taken in recent months by government ministers and senior officials, including people from the academic world, and implicit or explicit threats to the universities by elements in the Finance Ministry are further expression of the collapse of the invisible ivory wall that had protected the Israeli universities for nearly four generations.

 

With the beginning of the third millennium, the Israeli entrepreneur, full of boldness and energy, has marched into the stalactite caves¹ he received as a legacy from prior generations, with a pick and a hammer in his hands and a computerized engineering blueprint and technical and economic specifications in his pockets.

 

Thanks to his economic and management knowledge, with the help of the ultramodern technological tools and after the not-particularly-arduous preparation of encouraging public opinion, the entrepreneur will no doubt quickly succeed in turning the complicated and twisting Israeli stalactite caves into efficient, spacious, transparent and light-filled structures.
 

The optimists are saying that with a little bit more effort, it will even be possible to bring the Israeli research universities almost up to the level of the large shopping malls in the country. Almost.

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1. Professor Leibowitz, as an allusion, compares the Israeli research universities to "Stalactite caves -- one of the most beautiful geological phenomena in nature. The stalactites that give them their name are created in an evolutionary process that takes tens of thousands of years."