Last update - 00:00 13/01/2008
University presidents' chairman warns academic year may be canceled
By Tamara Traubmann and Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondents
The Council of University Presidents' chairman said Sunday he would announce the cancellation of the academic year, should the National Labor Court not issue back-to-work orders for striking senior university faculty.
Prof. Moshe Kaveh said if the Jerusalem court did not issue the injunctions, "we will declare the cancellation of the academic year, and in a matter of days."
The university presidents later Sunday met with Cabinet Secretary Oved Yehezkel and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's economic advisor, Professor Manuel Trachtenberg, over finding a solution to the senior lecturers' strike.
Earlier in the day, the National Labor Court ended its hearing on a request submitted by the university presidents to issue the back-to-work orders, stating it would soon come to a decision.
Earlier Sunday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed a government meeting with striking lecturers, telling them not to waste opportunities to reach a compromise that will allow for university studies to resume.
Olmert told the lecturers assembled that "we have experience with work stoppages that have lasted far too long. The finance and education ministers have presented far-reaching offers to the faculty, and you must take steps so that you are not forced back to work by court orders."
"Go back to school and back to work now," Olmert added.
Representatives of the striking lecturers and the presidents of the country's universities failed to make any progress in a last-ditch effort Saturday night to salvage the fall semester and avoid the potential issuing of injunctions to force the teachers to return to work.
"We're at the 11th hour before the cancellation of the academic year, which would be a national disaster for the universities and the economy as a whole," said Prof. Kaveh, who is also the president of Bar-Ilan University, on Saturday night before the meeting which was held at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
"We both want to prevent that," Kaveh said, referring to the teachers and the universities.
The immediate goal of the meeting was to reach an understanding between the university heads and the lecturers, Kaveh said "an outline that would lead to the withdrawal of the request for injunctions, and both of us together will make every possible effort to persuade the cabinet to accept it."
A source in the Council of University Presidents said that if such a framework agreement is reached, the presidents would withdraw their requests to the court even if the treasury officials rejected it, and the university presidents would put pressure on the Prime Minister's Office to intervene to force the treasury to accept the compromise.
However, a representative for the lecturers that took part in the meeting, Professor Asher Cohen, said that the presidents' offer on Saturday was 12 percent lower than the offer they themselves put forth on Friday. The presidents' offer, he said, did not ensure that salaries would not erode in the future.
In any case, the universities withdrew Friday's offer, saying the Treasury would not agree to it. That deal would have offered a 16-percent wage hike in compensation for the erosion of their wages from 1997 to 2006, as opposed to 35 percent, which the professors say represents the real ersion of their salaries during that time. In addition to the 16 percent, the university presidents offered to add an additional 5 percent if the teachers agreed to the Shochat Commission recommendations on faculty wages.
The lecturers were willing to accept the compromise and to reduce their demand for a wage increase from 35 percent to 21 percent.
The university heads said they will cancel the fall semester if no resolution is reached by Sunday. The lecturers countered that a semester's worth of studies can still be salvaged even if the labor stoppage is not settled by today. Both sides have a window of up to two weeks to come to an agreement enabling studies to resume without the academic year interfering with next year's calendar.
"January 13 is not some holy date," said Dr. Lev Grinberg, the head of Bar-Ilan's Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
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