Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – A New “University” in Israel: Depth Without Breadth
This week Israel officially granted University status to the Inter-Disciplinary Center (IDC) situated in Herzliyah, to be now called Reichman University in honor of its founder Prof. Uriel Reichman. This isn’t just another institution of higher learning, but Israel’s first-ever private university, not dependent on government subsidies. There’s a lot of good news here – and one piece of less than good news.
First, the really good news. In less than thirty years, the IDC has managed to gather a very large number of top-rate scholars – researchers and lecturers. I personally know several and they are all well-respected professors in their field (full disclosure: I taught and researched at Bar-Ilan U for 40 years.). The students are getting among the best that Israel has to offer; indeed, many of them – with tenure – left their “home” universities in Israel to teach at the IDC. So there’s no problem of “quality” here; the newly named Reichman University (RU) competes well with Israel’s other universities in scholarship, and certainly in teaching.
Second, the pretty good news – although many will disagree with me on this. As mentioned, RU is private. This essentially means that most of it students will come from the better off segments of Israeli society. (I will ignore another IDC contribution: it was the first Israeli institution of higher learning to make serious efforts to have overseas students do a complete B.A. or M.A. in Israel, taught in English.) To be sure, a private university is somewhat jarring in social-democratic Israel that still prefers to see itself as adhering to an egalitarian ethic. However, as long as Israel enables even students from the lowest socio-economic stratum to study (and there are plenty of such scholarships to go around., not to mention a huge increase in colleges offering a B.A. degree), this shouldn’t be a reason to stop wealthier students from some form of public/private choice (Israel’s public university tuition is laughably low by world standards: about $3500 a year – for only three years). After all, there are those who can afford cars and others who have to use public transport – are we to stop that differentiation too? In short, virtually every other western country has such a two-track system of higher education; Israel need not be any different.
And now for the bad news. There’s a reason we call such institutions “university” – because they are designed to provide study in a very wide range of subject areas. Perhaps not “universal” in totality, but certainly at the least incorporating the major fields of human knowledge. Indeed, that’s exactly why two of the very best, world-class institutions in Israel are not called universities: the Weizmann INSTITUTE of Science, and the Technion – Israel INSTITUTE of Technology. They specialize in a very few fields (and do that exceedingly well!), but because of this “narrow” purview, they are not “universities.”
It is here that RU doesn’t make the grade. It offers only nine disciplines – none in the Humanities (!), and none in the Physical Sciences (!!). All these nine departments share one common denominator – they are very popular, vocational areas of learning: Law, Business, Government, Communications, Economics, Entrepeneurship, Psychology, Sustainability, and Computer Science. Of course, there’s nothing at all wrong with teaching something popular and useful (quite the opposite), and these disciplines are taught by most other universities as well. However, such students will not receive any broad perspective on the world or even their own field of study. No history, no philosophy, no archeology, no literature & the arts, no “Physics for Poets” nor any other rudimentary understanding of any hard science.
The real “culprit” here is not RU but Israel’s Council of Higher Education (that has to license any new university or even department) – and to a large extent, Israeli society that has become overly “utilitarian” minded: almost the only thing that counts for Israelis today is a good livelihood, even if the student/citizen turns out to have no intellectual breadth or depth. Unfortunately, this is a long way from the glory years of the Life of Spirit that so characterized the early years of the state, one that in large part was a product of the Jewish heritage.
From a broad historical perspective (there is no direct “connection” here), it is ironic but altogether “fitting” that the IDC has become a university the same summer that Israel got its first successful businessman Prime Minister (Naftali Bennett)! The “Start-Up” nation has proven that it has a brain (and so has the IDC); what both need now is a bit more intellectual “heart” – what makes life (not just a livelihood) worth living.
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