Last update - 00:00 24/07/2007
Still on the bottom rung
By Na'ama Sheffi
In the heat of the criticism about the Shochat Committee's recommendation to increase tuition fees at institutions of higher learning, important parts of the committee's report have been ignored. Proposals for dealing with those on the margins of Israeli Jewish society - most of whom live in the country's periphery - were given considerable mention in the 200 pages of the report, and those dealing with the margins of Arab society were given but a few pages in the report.
The increase in the demand for higher education in Israel, from roughly 25 percent of those aged 20 to 24 at the end of the 1980s to 43 percent in 2003-2004, was answered with the rapid establishment of the college system, some of which is funded by the state. But this answer was not adequate. The colleges were established as institutions that specialize in teaching and not in research, and from the word "go" they decreed their students would make do with little. A lecturer who has been trained for research but who does not engage in it on a regular basis will end up degenerating and give his students an education inferior to those a more active colleague could offer.
The Shochat Committee realized this constitutes a problem and dealt with it in the report, but its recommendations are not sufficient. The college lecturers bear a teaching burden 50 to 100 percent higher than that of their colleagues at the universities. Their pay, however, is lower by several tens of percentage points. The Shochat Committee solved this problem easily: The college lecturers will kindly engage in research alongside the researchers at the universities in return for a reduction in the teaching burden.
In a small country like Israel it is indeed better to pool resources and initiate investment-intensive research only at a limited number of institutions. However, to decree that for lecturers at the colleges research will be marginal to their work means decreeing a low level of teaching for the colleges.
Moreover, in assuming that the current tuition fees (NIS 8,600 a year) at state-funded institutions do not constitute a barrier to entry, the report's authors are in effect saying that the relatively small number of students from the periphery derives from a failure to meet minimum academic standards. In their opinion, the reason lies in the low level of education at the high schools in the periphery. Determining that the colleges will concentrate on teaching and assigning them a narrow research scope will not improve the situation.
The committee's recommendation to lure college lecturers to the periphery so that the level of education there will be raised is nothing short of throwing sand in the public's eye. Monetary compensation will not lure anyone for whom access to university libraries, laboratories and colleagues is important. The committee's readiness to recognize the social contribution of the lecturers at the colleges in outlying areas is yet another stepping-stone on the path toward permanently fixing the status of the periphery, which currently sits at the bottom of Israeli society's list of priorities.
It is not standards of academic quality but rather a measure of social contribution that will afford a lecturer his status in the periphery. The proposal, which is radioactive with political correctness, is an academic failure. What will happen if a lecturer wants to pursue his research abilities and move to a university? Will his contribution to society factor into whether he is accepted? Does the distinction between the ladders of advancement at the universities and those at the colleges, and especially in outlying areas, condemn the periphery to make do with those who have been cast out of traditional academia and receive a second-rate education?
The committee considered the academic level of those teaching at the colleges. Therefore, it recommended that university professors in their last decade of work (that is to say, individuals 58 and over), be able to exchange their work for teaching at the colleges. Will those who have tired of traditional academia be able to nurture the younger academics? How will members of the academic elite communicate with those who attended lesser schools?
Despite the Shochat Committee's welcome awareness of the problem of the colleges, its members have not suggested a satisfactory solution. Their proposals are a fig leaf obscuring the periphery's crude and continuous weakening.
The author is head of the communications school at Sapir Academic College.