Last update - 00:00 21/01/2008
New industrial dispute looms as lecturers end 90-day strike
By Tamara Traubmann, Haaretz Correspondent
The 2008-09 academic year will not be able take place if the Shochat Committee's proposed reform of the higher education system, which includes more government funding, is not implemented, the Council of University Presidents warned on Sunday.
The cabinet has not yet approved the recommendations, and a lengthy strike by senior university lecturers ended over the weekend without the lecturers promising to accept those parts of the reform related to their terms of employment. Moreover, Education Minister Yuli Tamir announced Sunday that she opposes a key element of the reform: raising tuition. Thus, despite Finance Minister Roni Bar-On's insistence that the reform will be implemented, its fate remains highly uncertain.
At a meeting of the university presidents on Sunday, council chair Prof. Moshe Kaveh said he "expects the cabinet to fulfill its promise to the council to adopt the Shochat report in January or February."
"If the report is not implemented, and the universities are deprived of the funding promised under the reform, this will deal a mortal blow to the universities, and the university presidents will not be able to begin the next academic year," he continued. "The present crisis [i.e. the lecturers' strike] is nothing compared to the expected crisis" if the Shochat reform is not implemented.
The Shochat reform offers the universities an extra NIS 2.5 billion over the next five years, of which NIS 700 million would come from a tuition hike.
Meanwhile, the current academic semester - which was originally slated to end around now - began Sunday, when the senior lecturers entered their classrooms for the first time since the strike began. However, little time remains to make up the three lost months.
Some universities plan to solve the problem by making students attend senior lecturers' courses while simultaneously sitting for exams in courses given by junior faculty, who were not on strike. But students at Ben-Gurion University have already threatened their own strike if the university does not retract this decision, saying this leaves them no time to study for the exams.
According to the revised schedule, the 2007-08 academic year will now end in July or August. That is two months before the start of the next academic year, which some lecturers said refutes the university presidents' assertion that the semester would have had to be canceled had the strike not ended last weekend.