Education Minister Yuli Tamir said Wednesday that a college in the West Bank settlement of Ariel was misleading the public by declaring itself a "university center."

The minister from Labor said the announcement by The Academic College of Judea and Samaria (ACJS) earlier Wednesday was "insignificant" and that the classification of an acadmic institution as a "university center" did not exist.

Tamir added that the institute will not receive increased governmnet funding as other institutions classified as universities do, and that the degrees it is entitled to issue will remain unchanged.

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Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, however, ignored opposition by Tamir and the Council of Israeli Higher Education (CHE) to the decision by the ACJS and congratulated its president.

In a letter to Professor Dan Meirstein, Olmert praised the ACJS head for his decision that would create a "broader basis of higher education...and contribute to Israel's society and economy."

In reaction to the statement, MK Barakeh of the Jewish-Arab party Hadash said the college at Ariel was "a colonial enterprise born out of the occupation."

Last year, the Higher Education in Judea and Samaria (CHE-JS) decided to turn the college into a "university center."

Former minister Paz-Pines (Labor) called it at the time "a kind of trick."

"This is blunt intervention by politics in the research and development considerations of the Israeli educational system," he said.

The CHE-JS decision means that after five years, if the university abides by certain criteria set by the CHE-JS, it will be recognized as a full-fledged university.

Requests by other colleges in Israel to receive recognition as universities have been turned down by the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) on the grounds that there is no academic need for another university in the coming few years. The CHE-JS, however, is independent of the CHE.

Pines-Paz attacked the CHE-JS, saying that it was supposed to be a mere technical solution to the fact that the law governing the CHE in Israel is not valid in the territories. But the CHE-JS said the decision was completely in order, since a committee had been set up to examine the question, in accordance with legal procedure, and it made the recommendation.

Though the committee was approved by the deputy attorney general, it consisted of professors with rightist views.