Faculty strike enters fourth week amid mutual recriminations - Haaretz

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Tue., November 13, 2007 Kislev 3, 5768

Israel Time: 03:33 (EST+7)

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Faculty strike enters fourth week amid mutual recriminations

By Tamara Traubmann

Scientific researchers at universities have been bitter for years over the decline in the quality of infrastructure in their field. Last Thursday, they set aside their petri dishes, left their lab mice unaccompanied and set off to protest. They are demanding increased public funding for science, and protesting "the government's contempt for Israeli research."

At the same time, there is also a growing feeling that the status of academia in general in Israeli society is in a steep decline. However, some say that the academic world itself is part of the problem, because it is elitist and cut off from society, and has therefore made itself irrelevant.

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Faculty from various fields say the high social status that once adhered to the title of professor has been eroded. "Today," says Prof. Danny Zamir, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the organizers of the professors' protest, "every mother wants her child to be first a lawyer, then a doctor, and much less, a scientist."

Meanwhile, the strike of senior faculty at the universities yesterday entered its fourth week. The National Student Union yesterday sent a letter to the university presidents with a demand that tuition be refunded for courses cancelled or those that will be cancelled. The union had so far refrained from taking a stand on the strike, but yesterday, National Student Union Chair Itai Shonshein said, "it is inconceivable that students pay for services they are not receiving. This is an elementary demand and we are determined to fight for it."

Faculty members say they feel the public is indifferent to their strike. They note that the claims of the Finance Ministry and media reports branding them as parasites who teach six hours a week reveal a lack of understanding of their work. They say their research requires time for thinking and study, time that in the past was theirs, no questions asked, but that is now considered a luxury. The veteran academic elite also feels embattled, in the face of the mushrooming number of colleges, which they feel are siphoning off resources that would otherwise be theirs.

"Priorities have changed," says Prof. Joseph Hirschberg, of the Hebrew University, who is also among the organizers of the strike. "While in the past, policy-makers recognized the importance of basic research, even if it had no immediate application, now everything is seen through a financial prism."

The humanities in particular has been shunted aside, which is a trend in Western countries as well, Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar, who until recently was chairman of the humanities division of the Israel Academy of Sciences, says. "More students are gravitating to the 'money professions' that they can earn from in the future. The prestige of the humanities has declined in the universities, too," he adds.

One of the main arguments of the veteran professors is that the decline of the humanities is partly due to a post-modernist trend "that has given a bad name to the humanities, because they have eschewed their task of presenting a clear scale of values," one critic of the trend says.

But is society no longer willing to listen to academics, or is it academics that have made themselves irrelevant?

Prof. Yehouda Shenhav, a sociologist at Tel Aviv University says, "the university and the faculty are cut off from the other levels of society." This, he says can be seen in the composition of the faculties. Women constitute one-quarter of the senior faculty, according to research conducted by a student of Shenhav, teachers of Mizrahi (Jews of North African or Middle Eastern origin) backgroumd make up only 9 percent, and Arabs - 1 percent. Other than in the natural sciences, Russian immigrants are also rarely to be found, and the number of Ethiopians university students is negligible.

Shenhav, whose research was published in August in the journal "Israeli Sociology," also found a lack of political involvement among faculty: Only 18 percent signed a petition of any kind in 2002-2003; only 5 percent signed two petitions, and only one sociologist taught a course on Israel's occupation of the territories, despite the centrality of this issue in Israeli society.

Shenhav said the present strike is another sign of the alienation of the senior faculty, who launched their protest without bringing in the junior lecturers and outside faculty. "The struggle will not be a moral one until it takes into consideration the weaker populations on campus," he said.

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