Last update - 00:00 03/08/2007
Tamir seeks to neutralize West Bank academic institution
By Tamara Traubmann, Haaretz Correspondent
Education Minister Yuli Tamir (Labor) told Haaretz on Thursday that she would work to annul an education institution in the West Bank after it unilaterally decided to turn a college in the settlement of Ariel into a "university center."
She said she would do so by incorporating the institution into the Council of Israeli Higher Education (CHE), the body responsible for all academic institutions in Israel.
The Council of Higher Education in Judea and Samaria (CHE-JS) is responsible for Jewish academic institutions in the West Bank. It decided last year to upgrade the Academic College of Judea and Samaria from a college to a "university center."
The college declared itself upgraded on Wednesday, a declaration Tamir deemed "insignificant," saying that the classification of an academic institution as a "university center" did not exist.
Chair of the CHE-JS, Professor Amos Altschuler, said in response to Tamir's comments on Thursday that while he agrees that CHE-JS and CHE should be unified, he believes Tamir's sole motive is to annul the decision to turn the college into a university center.
The CHE-JS was established in the early 1990s, when three new colleges in the West Bank were being founded: the Academic College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, the Orot College for Women in Elkana and the Herzog College of Education in Alon Shvut. The institution operates independently of the CHE because the law governing the CHE in Israel is not valid in the Occupied Territories.
In response to moves by the CHE-JS to turn the Ariel college into a university, the CHE decided last year that all its members would also serve as members of the CHE-JS, effectively replacing the latter's membership and merging the two bodies.