News & Views item - March  2005

 

 

Protests Get Serious at Israeli University. (March 25, 2005)

    The March 24 editorial in Israel's liberal paper Haaretz:

For the first time in years, students are protesting something other than tuition. Their energetic activity has been defined this time as a campaign for the future of higher education, and, indeed, it is higher education that is at stake these days in setting Israel's priorities, as well as the approach to the future - in the long term and not just the upcoming budgetary year.

At the University of Haifa on Wednesday nineteen students were arrested as protests continued into a fourth day. Concurrently staff members announced they will strike Monday, cancelling all classes "to protest the dramatic cuts to the higher-education budget in the last few years."

 

Haaretz reports that some 1,500 students and faculty members from colleges and universities across the country protested at the University of Haifa yesterday in what the National Student Union called "the mother of all demonstrations." Police arrested 19 protesters after violent clashes broke out when students tried to block a major road.

 

Prof. Asher Cohen, who heads the National University Faculty Association, said, "This is a joint strike of lecturers and students; as one community, we all fear for the future of higher education." While Haifa's Technion 2004 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Prof. Avraham Hershko, told the Haifa rally that the future of higher education in Israel is in danger. "I won a Nobel Prize - but it was for research that was done 30-40 years ago, when the state had its priorities right," and went on to say the shaky position of higher education will cause damage to "everything that is based on knowledge, including hi-tech and biotechnology."

 

Haaretz also reported that during the past five years, the higher education budget has been cut by about NIS 1 billion (A$300 million) to its current size, NIS 5 billion (A$1.49 billion). Last year, the committee responsible for university budgets reached an agreement with the Finance Ministry, according to which the universities would receive increases totalling NIS 2.6 billion (A$776 million) over five years. The first increase will be given this year and will be for NIS 285 million (A$85 million).

The universities say the increase won't solve the budget crisis, since it will only be restoring the money that had been cut earlier. After the full amount has been dispersed, the higher education budget will be similar to what it was before the budget cuts began, while the higher education system continues to grow.

 

Haaretz' editorial is by no means one-eyed:

    Institutions of higher learning in Israel have been badly rattled in recent years. Improper administration of some of them, complacent free spending, concentration of the decision-making process in the hands of too few, and furthermore, a fraying of, and poor management by, the overseeing establishment - all of these factors brought them to a severe financial crisis. Of the seven universities, at least two arrived at a state that forced the government to review the use of public resources.

    In 1997... then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed a committee headed by retired Supreme Court justice Yaakov Meltz. In 2001, the committee submitted its recommendations for extensive organizational reform of university administrations, to reduce the independence of the academic decision-making process and subordinate it to a university's economic management. The government accepted the committee's recommendations, but met with opposition from the university heads. This resistance prompted the establishment of another committee, which led to the compromise now being implemented.

    The organizational reform is therefore a fact. Even its outright opponents - among them many of Israel's leading intellectuals and scientists - know this. It is to be hoped that the new balance between academic considerations and business-administrative considerations will not harm higher education, and will contribute to the system's streamlining and recovery.

But the paper warns:

Nevertheless, it is difficult to shed the troubling impression that alongside the efforts at streamlining, and perhaps even under their auspices, a hidden hand is seeking to intervene in the universities to the point of dealing a severe blow to academic freedom.
    Academic freedom is reflected in fostering research, establishing a new generation of lecturers and researchers, expanding libraries and research facilities, and more. The deep cuts in the universities' budgets are now reflected in fewer options, less direction for theses and dissertations, fewer books and reduced library hours, fewer classes, and, on the other hand, more junior faculty members who do not belong to the university, more catalysts for shortening study programs, and more encouragement for the administrations to be dragged into competitive marketing at the expense of academic quality.

And it is perhaps a sign for Australian universities to be wary; the price of academic freedom like liberty is vigilance.

 

Follow up:

                March 26: Students threaten to intensify struggle

               

                March 29: The national students' association announced Monday an end to its protests after NIS 315 million

                (A$93.4 million)    was promised to the Higher Education Council as a result of Shinui [Liberal, Zionist,

                Democratic Party] Chairman Yosef Lapid's negotiations with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.