US model wrong for Israel

In recent weeks we have witnessed a wild attack on Israeli universities and their staff. Almost every day we see screaming headlines, while tendentious bits of information, often taken out of context, are thrown into the air without substantive analysis or a genuine attempt to understand their meaning and implications.

The conclusion that emerges is that the universities are strongholds of mediocrity and failed management, and the immediate reason for this is the fact they are public institutions that do not meet competitive market conditions. From there, there is a short distance to the final conclusion – universities must undergo some kind of privatization.

One of the main figures that critics are premising their arguments on is the prestigious Times Higher Education ranking of the world's leading 200 universities. Based on this ranking, only three Israeli universities made it into the top 200 last year: Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Haifa's Technion Institute of Technology. All three are in relatively low spots: 77, 188, and 194 respectively.

This is seen as the ultimate proof of the mediocrity afflicting Israeli academia. However, other details in the ranking change the picture almost completely. For example, in the ranking of leading universities when it comes to humanities, Hebrew University is up in 34th spot, in social sciences it climbs to 54th spot, while Tel Aviv University is in 68th spot. In the science ranking Tel Aviv is up to 57, while among the best technological universities Technion is in the prestigious 25th spot, ahead of all German technological institutes, for example.

Regardless of the Times' ranking – and there are many esteemed observers who highly doubt its value – there is no doubting that none of the universities in Israel is in the same league as Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, and their American counterparts. And here, another significant figure comes into the picture: Higher education in general, and scientific research in particular, are things that cost plenty of money. For example, the average sum of annual donations received by Harvard stands at USD 800 million (!) – Close to the entire higher education budget in Israel.

Harvard's budget stands at roughly USD 3 billion a year, while Cornell's stood at USD 2 billion and 660 million this year, and so forth. With such huge gaps, the achievements of Israeli universities in the Times ranking are an impressive accomplishment by all means.

Size does matter

And what about the other universities in Israel that did not make it into the top 200? In the highly respected ranking of Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, which ranks the top 1,000 universities in the world, Ben Gurion University was ranked in the 301-400 category, Bar Ilan was in the same category with slightly lower scores, and the University of Haifa was ranked in the 401-500 category. Considering the budget gaps detailed above, and also taking into account that those are young institutes that are still establishing themselves (Ben Gurion, for example, was only established in 1969,) these rankings also mark a significant accomplishment.

So how did some universities from developing countries still rank ahead of Israeli ones? It appears that here too money plays a central role. If we take the Chinese case for example, then compared to the massive cutbacks imposed on Israeli academia in recent years, there the government earmarks huge resources to research and development – experts are divided on how to estimate the exact sums, but in any case we are talking about billions of dollars and resources that are boosted by about 20 percent every year. And still, in the ranking of universities outside Europe and the United States, where the University of Beijing took the top spot, Hebrew University ranked 20th.

Most of the foreign universities I mentioned are American, and for good reason. It appears they constitute the model which the Treasury would like to adopt. Yet based on the budget gaps, those US universities cannot serve as a model for Israel. It is also important to recall that in a higher education system, size does matter – and the huge academic market of a wealthy country with 300 million citizens is not the same as the tiny market of a resource-poor country with seven million citizens. Privatization and free market competition of the type that exists in the American academic world simply do not fit Israeli reality.

Privatization is not at all relevant for the maladies afflicting higher education in Israel. The main problem here is the budgetary cuts, which slowly push it to the edge of the abyss. The result of the cutbacks is a disastrous reduction in teaching and research staff, acute shortage in research budgets, lack of funding for research students, and a growing brain-drain.

If the cutback trend will not change drastically, we will quickly find ourselves off the global university map. Self-examination is a desired thing, and it would certainly not hurt Israeli universities, but those who are in need of an even more in-depth and thorough process of self-examination are Treasury officials, who through blatant short-sightedness are gradually cutting down higher education in Israel.

Dr. Yakir Levin is a lecturer at Ben Gurion University's philosophy department