Striking lecturers to increase protest measures, partner with junior staff

Striking senior university faculty members are planning to increase coordination with junior staff members and students, and to take more visible protest measures, as their strike enters its fourth week today.

The Coordinating Council of Faculty Associations is planning steps including shutting down the Tel Aviv University and Hebrew University campuses for a day this week.

Student representatives said they hope these the plans mean the senior staff is changing the nature of its strike, which had been generally quiet and without protest activities.

On Monday, students will lock the gates of both the Mount Scopus and Givat Ram campuses of HU for 24 hours, barring students and faculty from the libraries, laboratories and classrooms. In addition, students and teachers will conduct a public lecture on the state of higher education in Israel in front of the Prime Minister's Residence.

On Wednesday, the TAU senior and junior faculty unions, along with the student union, will shut down their campus.

On Thursday, students and teachers from colleges and universities around the country plan to converge at TAU for a demonstration.

The protest activities are coming after students put heavy pressure on lecturers, said Shlomit Atzava of the HU student union. Students at a few universities told striking faculty members, "We still have the chains from our strike last year, just say the word and we'll shut down the campus," but the teachers preferred a quiet fight.

Students, junior faculty members and some senior faculty have complained that the protest has not been broad enough, and is focused only on the erosion of senior faculty members' salaries.

"We support their struggle, it's the method that bothers us," Atzava said. "They told us they must reach their objectives through negotiations and see no reason for demonstrations, but we have been telling them that it's not enough. More than 2,000 students signed a petition saying, 'Teachers, this is your struggle, go into the streets and fight!'"

"The faculty is still asleep," said the chair of the Technion student union, Zvi Zitter. At other universities as well, the main force behind the protest is the student associations, he said. "We sent lecturers a letter telling them we expect them to take the lead, and that they shouldn't expect us to lead them," Zitter says. "At the Technion, we decided we would have no problem going to war - if we bind our fates together. That means the teachers must denounce the recommendations of the Shochat Committee (calling for increasing tuition - T.T.), and they didn't do that."

Students and teachers at TAU, however, say their cooperation is strong. They formed a joint headquarters, and plan to raise their demands with the cabinet and the university administration this week. These include increasing higher education budgets; changing the injurious hiring policies for adjunct faculty, junior faculty, contracted cleaning and maintenance workers and cafeteria workers on campus; increasing access to academic studies; and giving students and faculty a greater say in how the universities are run.

However, in response to a question about changing the nature of the fight, the chairman of the Coordinating Council of Faculty Associations, Zvi Hacohen, said, "There is no essential change. We feel we are approaching critical moments and thus must apply maximum pressure. The students and the junior faculty are more willing to cooperate, so there are more things [happening]."

The negotiations ran aground once more last week. Prof. Ben Tzion Munitz, chair of the Senior Faculty Association at TAU, said regarding meetings with Cabinet Secretary Oved Yehezkel and officials from the Prime Minister's Office prior to the Annapolis summit last week, "Reasonable ideas were raised that could serve as the outline for serious negotiations. The talks did not continue last week because [the parties] went to Annapolis. The message coming from the treasury last week was the exact opposite, with proposals that set us back thousands of kilometers before the starting point," Munitz said.

Finance Ministry officials told faculty representatives that if they insist on a double-digit salary hike, then they must accept measures enabling greater administrative flexibility at the universities, such as personal contracts and higher-than-usual salaries for certain teachers, or the option of firing unproductive researchers. The faculty unions halted negotiations with the treasury in response.