The Finance Minister and university lecturers are on the verge of an agreement that will allow universities to reopen Sunday.

Early reports that the agreement had been finalized Friday morning were denied by the Finance Ministry, which says that lecturers are still insisting on a clause guaranteeing that the proposed 15% pay hike will also apply retroactively to future lecturers. That issue, they say, is proving to be the last major obstacle to an agreement.

The Coordinating Council of Faculty Associations announced Friday morning, however, that it had come to an agreement to end the 89-day strike, which has threatened to cancel the academic school year altogether. Thirteen hours of straight negotiations took place overnight, surrounding a compromise agreement outlined by Histadrut Labor Union chairman Ofer Eini.



"I'm very pleased that both the lecturers and the Finance Ministry were responsible enough to accept my offer," Eini said. "I would hate to imagine what would have happened should the semester have been cancelled. It would have caused irreparable damage to the lecturers, the students, all of academia and the economy as a whole."



The agreement:

* Lecturers will receive a 16.8 percent wage increase as compensation for the erosion of the value of their wages.

* The wage increases will be take place in three stages over the next two years.

* An additional 4.7 percent in line with the rise in public sector’s wages will be added.

* A wage-drift mechanism of another 1.5 percent will be in place to prevent future wage erosion – to be reevaluated in 2015.

* In earlier drafts of the agreement, but unclear whether it is included in the final version: a 5 percent wage increase should the Shochat Committee’s reforms on higher education – the subject of last year’s student strike – be put into effect.

Students say they will strike once again if clauses regarding the Shochat recommendations are included in the agreement.

Protests Intensify in Recent Days

Dozens of university students demonstrated on Highway 1 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in a long convoy of cars inching along the road Thursday morning.

The students were protesting the ongoing strike by senior lecturers and the possibility that the entire school year would be cancelled if the two sides didn’t come to an agreement by Sunday.

At least 300 students demonstrated outside the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa Thursday morning as well. Those students were reportedly protesting the decision by Technion faculty to initiate a work slowdown in sympathy with the semester-long university lecturers strike. The faculty decided Thursday not to hold exams due to the strike.

On Wednesday hundreds of Ben Gurion University students locked themselves inside a campus building, calling upon Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign. They charged that he ignored "a national crisis" by allowing the strike to continue for such a long period of time. The students did not let anyone enter the building.

University presidents decided Tuesday night that all universities will close on Sunday if the senior academic strike has not been resolved, and will remain closed until the strike is over.  The decision would mean that classes taught by the junior academic staff would no longer be held.

In addition, lecturers would no longer be able to access university facilities in order to conduct their research.  Members of the senior academic staff have continued to conduct research throughout the strike, and also have continued to receive most of their paychecks.  The lecturers rejected an offer to begin teaching again while refusing to do research, saying that pausing their research would hurt the country more than canceling the semester.

Scholarships Donated in Honor of Fallen Soldiers

A donation from a Los Angeles, California couple has provided 119 scholarships for University of Haifa students in memory of the 119 soldiers who fell in the Second Lebanon War. The families of the soldiers met at a Wednesday ceremony at the university, where the scholarships were donated by the Ima Foundation and Younes and Soraya Nazarian of Los Angeles.

Students met the families of the soldiers in whose memory they were awarded the scholarships. "The recipients will establish a personal connection with the family of the soldier in whose memory their scholarship is named," said Prof. Aaron Ben-Zev, President of the University.