In Britain it was Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s who tried to undermine the universities' autonomy, abolish the raison d'etre of the intellectual elite and subordinate academe to the demands of the marketplace.
In the United States, economic pressures and a consumer culture are endangering academe's autonomy from within. In his book, "The Closing of the American Mind," Professor Allan Bloom wrote that because the university is where reason resides, this may be the most serious crisis faced by modern nations. Bloom explains that modern nations based themselves on reason and therefore, the weakening of academe's autonomous status adversely affects this essence.
According to some, Education Minister Limor Livnat is currently further intensifying certain problematic trends that already exist in higher education in the Western world. The struggle between Livnat and the universities is not merely a fight over money and control, or the allocation of funds and power. In effect, the context of this struggle and its implications run far deeper and stretch wider. It poses a danger to the humanistic (scientific, secular) spirit of society.
Some view the opinion piece Livnat wrote, "End the academic cartel" (Ha'aretz, January 6) as merely the opening shot in a local cultural revolution.
"The article reminds me more of Communist China and the government's complaints there against the intellectuals," says Professor Shlomo Biderman, head of the School of Philosophy of Tel Aviv University. "There, it was a distortion of socialism and here it is a distortion of capitalism, but both are saying the same thing: The spirit is dangerous."
Livnat wrote: "Academe has become an insular world in its ivory tower [...] The academic community has raised a high wall around itself and has entrenched itself in the achievements of the past."
In her view, the role of academia is "to offer higher education and professional knowledge to all seekers, based on a sensitivity toward the weaker sectors of the population," and as she sees it, the universities are not fulfilling that role.
The universities have operated like "a commercial cartel," she says, stating, "Free competition is the most effective tool to force a cartel to revitalize its conceptions and adjust itself to the social milieu it serves." She wants increased representation for colleges, both private and public, on the Council for Higher Education (CHE), the body that controls the higher education system, and to decrease the gap between the budgets provided to the universities and those of the colleges.
The language of Livnat's article is a clear reflection of the approach that views market forces as the essence of everything - as a value, means and goal. "This is a declaration of a cultural revolution," says Biderman. "To say that we are a cartel because we preserve the spirit and are not adapting ourselves, to demand that the cartel be dismantled and to speak in such economic terms - that is a very serious thing. We are not marketing cellular telephones. This must be clear. We are partially responsible for the culture."
Biderman says that the universities' seeming isolation in an ivory tower - that their focus is on research and philosophy without giving in to the frequently changing demands of society and the market forces - is a positive value, a basic requirement of the academe in a democratic society. By definition, research and academic thought must be detached from the present, to learn from the past and envision the future in order to criticize the present. That is why the academe exists.
But even if the openness of the university is viewed as a positive value, and even if the goal is to make higher education available to all and especially to the weaker levels of society, Livnat's ideology and plans guarantee just the opposite result. This is the conclusion drawn by Professor Avraham Yogev of the School of Education and Department of Sociology of Tel Aviv University, an expert in educational policy and the higher education system. In his view, Livnat's plan is "an example of the marketization and privatization of higher education, a trend we are encountering throughout the Western world." In other countries, the counterparts of Israel's Council for Higher Education are those that are expected to stand in the breech and stem the privatization.
If Livnat reduces the level of public support enjoyed by the universities and diminishes the influence of the public universities on the Council of Higher Education, she will be pushing them into the arms of privatization. "That will destroy the public system and thwart the accessibility - the ability of all citizens to go to university regardless of economic status, the very thing for which Livnat purports to be acting," says Professor Yogev.
Today, the fact that the universities are funded by the state means that students' tuition is subsidized, and this enables poorer students to go to university as well. Nonetheless, all must meet academic standards. Livnat, on the other hand, suggests lowering universities' budgets, reducing their public standing, and at the same time placing representatives of the private colleges - which provide expensive education for the rich - on the council, the body in charge of the system. This runs completely counter to the declared goal of higher education for all.
Professor Yogev emphasizes: "The university is a place that preserves and creates culture in the most general sense of the term - criticism, doubt, values as well as an engineering culture, a scientific culture, research culture, a culture of the spirit. If there is privatization, all this will disappear. Livat's plan represents a clear and present danger to the future of the universities. The universities are not a cartel. They are a transaction of Israeli society and the preservation of their independence is vital for our cultural existence."
Biderman adds: "If it is not clear that an academic organization must be the one that decides what it will teach, then we might as well just shut up the campuses and say good-bye."
The most urgent question should be: How can we guarantee a high level of academic research and teaching - unrelated to market and work demands - with a proper allocation of limited public funding, while at the same time providing education for all in order to train people for the job market? However, Livnat has not even raised these issues.
Professor Yaakov Bergman of the School of Business Administration at the Hebrew University suggests examining the California public higher education system and the public system in Britain in this context. The basic assumption is that there, the autonomy of the higher education system is preserved, while at the same time, there is a mechanism that guarantees that this autonomy will not be abused. In California, there are three public higher education systems (alongside private universities such as Stanford and Cal-Tech). The parallel to the Israeli system is the system of the nine campuses of the University of California (UC), with their 160,000 students (equivalent to students at all of Israel's institutions of higher learning) and budget of $15 billion. Alongside this system, there are the 22 campuses of California State University (USC) with 330,000 students and a $5-billion budget. The third part of the system involves the community colleges, which do not give degrees, with another million students. Their overall budget is $6 billion. These budgets include state support (the University of California, which excels in research, receives about five times as much state funding as California State University, which specializes more in teaching, like most Israeli colleges), support from private institutions, and a small proportion from tuition, which is relatively low for the United States (about $5,000 a year).
The fact that a large proportion of the students there study in colleges, like in Israel, is taken for granted and does nothing to detract from the elitist status of the universities. On the contrary, only high school students with excellent school records - the top 4 percent in each age group - are accepted into the universities. But the students that study in the community colleges and the second level of public university and who do very well can be accepted for further study at prestigious universities.
Much has been done in California to improve this accessibility and to strengthen the ties between the colleges and universities in terms of improving the level of study in the colleges and adapting them to academic requirements, and there is a declared commitment to guarantee that indigent students will receive support and will not be prevented from attaining a college degree.
Professor Nehemia Lev Zion, chair of the Council for Higher Education, California is a positive and relevant example. "They have succeeded in constructing a system that has proven itself. They have the best research universities in the world and at the same time full accessibility to higher education. This is attained by means of stratification, separation between the colleges and the research universities."
Each of the systems in California has a separate budget. The governor of California distributes funding among the three systems but does not intervene in the internal allocations in each system. He can appoint the 25 members of the body that supervises the University of California - meaning that the political establishment has influence - but a member of the council can be replaced only after 12 years (always more than the number of years a governor can serve). The entire council can never be replaced all at once, as Livnat now seeks to do.
Additionally, in the United States there is an academic assessment system for scientists, which creates a uniform standard to assess the various departments in all disciplines and ranks them by academic quality. The principle of competition is preserved in the academic context. The good departments recruit the best researchers and teachers, while the poorer departments are in danger of being closed. That is what happened, for example, with the obsolete department of librarianship in one of the state's universities. The faculty did not move with the times and refused to learn how to computerize archives. The department was closed, and the tenured faculty members were dismissed (tenure of professors is valid only as long as the department exists) and a new department of information sciences with an up-to-date faculty was opened.
In Israel, "the most autonomous system in the world," as Lev Zion says, government support and the support of the Budgeting and Planning Committee (Vatat) are generalized. The government passes on a global sum to the entire system and the Budgeting and Planning Committee passes on global sums to each university. There is no way to oversee the details.
There is something to be learned from the British model as well. Lev Zion believes that it is a basically negative model, but that it is an intriguing experiment. Following the Thatcher intervention in the higher education system, a mechanism for the budgeting of departments in accordance with research and teaching quality in Britain was established. Every five years, researchers are required to give the assessment body four articles that have been published in journals. The articles are judged according to academic standards by academics from various fields. The departments in all institutions of higher learning in Britain are rated by grades. The rating is made public, on the Internet and in newspapers (in The Guardian, for example). This system, which is 15 years old, challenged the previously undisputed status of universities like Oxford and Cambridge. Some departments in these universities do not lead the national rating scale and therefore do not receive the maximum budget.
Students, researchers and lecturers today in Britain can now choose a university not only according to a reputation that may no longer be valid, but in accordance with their interests and up-to-date information. The system is not perfect. Professor Yogev notes, "The Thatcher basis of this mechanism - placing universities and colleges in the same category - and the motivation that was behind it, which is hostility to academic elitism, are considerably problematic. The assessment mechanism also costs a great deal, it employs a large number of people, making it next to impossible for Israel. But I would not dismiss this model out of hand."
