Israel's campus community is all upset over something called the Maltz Report. Following one of those regular annual faculty strikes, the government set up a public commission, the Maltz Commission, created by the cabinet in 1997 and chaired by retired Supreme Court Justice Yaakov Maltz, to study the (mis-)management and operations of Israel's universities. The universities are all nationalized institutions, except for a school in Herzliya - the "Interdisciplinary Center". The lion's share of their budgets comes from the poor taxpayer, who more often than not does not have college education himself. Student tuition covers, maybe, a sixth of costs. Israeli university budget allotment across institutions and within institutions is arbitrary, politicized, and downright scandalous.
In addition, many universities have been the scenes of power struggles between the professors and the non-professor interest groups, meaning the trustees, outsider members of the boards of governors, and other officials. Such university power struggles are not unknown elsewhere, of course. Should the head of an institution be an insider academic (meaning a don) or a rep for the financiers and other "trustees" representing assorted public interests? Controversy over the answer has wreaked havoc in recent years at the Technion in Haifa and has created problems in other schools.
The Maltz Commission recommended that, henceforth, a non-professor serve as CEO of each publicly-financed university and have ultimate say over all matters except strictly academic questions (like tenure, promotions or curriculum), while a second-spot ?Rector? have ultimate say over academic matters. It also recommended some changes in the supreme governing body of each institution - that it be a ?steering committee? instead of a board of governors. The steering committee would consist of no more than 20% professors, and that may be what is really behind the cap ?n gown fury.
Since the taxpayers pay most of the university bills, under the Maltz recommendations the representative of the taxpayers - that is, the government - would have a say in who serves as CEO or trustee or member of the steering committees. If the universities are unhappy about this, they have only themselves to blame. They are the ones who agreed to become state appendages and spoon off the taxpayer?s purse in the first place, and so must compete against all other demands on that purse and submit to the indignity of budget review and accountability. They can take control of their budgets and ?governance? tomorrow - by privatizing.
In reality, the Maltz set of reforms is much less earth-shaking than the campus lobby groups would have you believe. It is largely cosmetic and does not really change the university structure all that much. Some Israeli universities have in the past already had outsider (non-professor) CEOs, who were ex-generals or failed politicians whom the system was trying to place into cushy jobs. And, as noted, there have been many clashes between outsider, non-professor CEOs and the campus academic crowds. But there have also been clashes between professor CEOs and the rest of their colleagues.
Bar Ilan University has already announced it is willing to give the new system recommended by the Commission a try and is being denounced for this by some professors at other schools. In any case, the thrust of the Maltz recommendations seems to be the creation of some sort of ?accountability? in Israel?s institutions of higher learning, which, in the past, were by and large unaccountable to anyone. The main job of the ?steering committee? Maltz wants set up seems to be to introduce some law and order into budgeting and costs. The professors were always perfectly content to have the taxpayer pay the piper, just as long as the professors never had to listen to any tunes of accountability.
Yet, Hell knows no fury like a special interest spurned. It is amusing watching the tenured crowd scream that Justice Maltz is a philistine (the Left never liked Maltz anyway, because, as a Supreme Court Justice, he refused to prohibit demolition of terrorist homes. Maltz, however, was appointed to head the commission by the far-left Meretz party?s Amnon Rubinstein).
Since the release of the recommendations of the Maltz Commission, many of the professors have been playing Chicken Little and screaming that such a reform will "politicize" the universities, will end academic freedom, if not cause Armageddon. The charges about "politicization" are laughable of course, since the schools are already highly politicized and some are controlled much of the time by leftist campus ruling cliques. Furthermore, the presumption that accountability and reformed governance at a university spell ?the demise of academic freedom? shows that Israel?s profs need to take a refresher course in understanding what a non sequitur is. Harvard and Princeton have ?corporate governance? and budget accountability, and are privatized and controlled by a board of trustees whose membership is not restricted to professors.
Some dons have been screaming that the Maltz reform amounts to little more than "corporatization", whatever that is, something like converting the universities into "businesses", responding to the "market". Curiously, most professors think "responding to the market" and "business-like" management of the schools are bad things. The Maltz recommendations have aroused special fury among Israel?s extremist Left and have been demonized by Baruch Kimmerling, Avirama Golan, and others. These have ranted against creating ?corporate structure? for the universities, as if that is a bad thing (for years, Israel has been trying to introduce a ?corporate structure? and cost accountability into Israeli hospitals, and few think that is bad). I suspect the leftists are really worried that their hegemony over higher education might some day weaken if Israeli universities are ever properly operated.
The best Chicken Little warning comes in a guest Op-Ed in Haaretz (Dec. 11, 2002) by one Dr. Ilan Gur-Zeev, a senior lecturer in the "philosophy of education" at the University of Haifa, my own stomping grounds. Gur-Zeev decries the Maltz reforms as "The End of Academic Freedom", also the title of his screed. He speaks for many of the Tenured, as a fast survey of internet chat sites for professors reveals. Now, the fact that young Gur-Zeev is effectively the spokesperson for the anti-Maltz camp is interesting. This "philosopher of education" espouses a philosophy that essentially holds that education, or at least schools, are things that we should all do away with. Besides being an anti-Israel, pro-terror far-left extremist, Gur-Zeev is perhaps best known for his "book", which declares that schools are dungeons of oppression and that violence by students in these schools is something very positive and creative, even a protest against school oppression. He has denounced the Likud as fascists worse than Jorg Haider in Austria (Ha?aretz, Feb. 20, 2000). In addition, Gur-Zeev crayoned a piece in the Israeli Marxist "journal" Theory and Criticism (get it? "critical" as in the Marxist sense), in which he denounced his own university as a large penis thrust into the sky (because of its 30 floor central tower), symbolizing the oppression of Israeli Arabs (Theory and Criticism, Spring 2000, pp. 239-244). Really.
The fact that Gur-Zeev was hired, tenured and promoted at one of these universities on the basis of such ranting does indeed prove the extent to which they are "politicized", although not quite in the sense that most of the Tenured Crowd mean.....
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Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa and is author of The Scout (available from Gefen Publishing House: http://161.58.167.199/shop/indi_scout.htm).
In addition, many universities have been the scenes of power struggles between the professors and the non-professor interest groups, meaning the trustees, outsider members of the boards of governors, and other officials. Such university power struggles are not unknown elsewhere, of course. Should the head of an institution be an insider academic (meaning a don) or a rep for the financiers and other "trustees" representing assorted public interests? Controversy over the answer has wreaked havoc in recent years at the Technion in Haifa and has created problems in other schools.
The Maltz Commission recommended that, henceforth, a non-professor serve as CEO of each publicly-financed university and have ultimate say over all matters except strictly academic questions (like tenure, promotions or curriculum), while a second-spot ?Rector? have ultimate say over academic matters. It also recommended some changes in the supreme governing body of each institution - that it be a ?steering committee? instead of a board of governors. The steering committee would consist of no more than 20% professors, and that may be what is really behind the cap ?n gown fury.
Since the taxpayers pay most of the university bills, under the Maltz recommendations the representative of the taxpayers - that is, the government - would have a say in who serves as CEO or trustee or member of the steering committees. If the universities are unhappy about this, they have only themselves to blame. They are the ones who agreed to become state appendages and spoon off the taxpayer?s purse in the first place, and so must compete against all other demands on that purse and submit to the indignity of budget review and accountability. They can take control of their budgets and ?governance? tomorrow - by privatizing.
In reality, the Maltz set of reforms is much less earth-shaking than the campus lobby groups would have you believe. It is largely cosmetic and does not really change the university structure all that much. Some Israeli universities have in the past already had outsider (non-professor) CEOs, who were ex-generals or failed politicians whom the system was trying to place into cushy jobs. And, as noted, there have been many clashes between outsider, non-professor CEOs and the campus academic crowds. But there have also been clashes between professor CEOs and the rest of their colleagues.
Bar Ilan University has already announced it is willing to give the new system recommended by the Commission a try and is being denounced for this by some professors at other schools. In any case, the thrust of the Maltz recommendations seems to be the creation of some sort of ?accountability? in Israel?s institutions of higher learning, which, in the past, were by and large unaccountable to anyone. The main job of the ?steering committee? Maltz wants set up seems to be to introduce some law and order into budgeting and costs. The professors were always perfectly content to have the taxpayer pay the piper, just as long as the professors never had to listen to any tunes of accountability.
Yet, Hell knows no fury like a special interest spurned. It is amusing watching the tenured crowd scream that Justice Maltz is a philistine (the Left never liked Maltz anyway, because, as a Supreme Court Justice, he refused to prohibit demolition of terrorist homes. Maltz, however, was appointed to head the commission by the far-left Meretz party?s Amnon Rubinstein).
Since the release of the recommendations of the Maltz Commission, many of the professors have been playing Chicken Little and screaming that such a reform will "politicize" the universities, will end academic freedom, if not cause Armageddon. The charges about "politicization" are laughable of course, since the schools are already highly politicized and some are controlled much of the time by leftist campus ruling cliques. Furthermore, the presumption that accountability and reformed governance at a university spell ?the demise of academic freedom? shows that Israel?s profs need to take a refresher course in understanding what a non sequitur is. Harvard and Princeton have ?corporate governance? and budget accountability, and are privatized and controlled by a board of trustees whose membership is not restricted to professors.
Some dons have been screaming that the Maltz reform amounts to little more than "corporatization", whatever that is, something like converting the universities into "businesses", responding to the "market". Curiously, most professors think "responding to the market" and "business-like" management of the schools are bad things. The Maltz recommendations have aroused special fury among Israel?s extremist Left and have been demonized by Baruch Kimmerling, Avirama Golan, and others. These have ranted against creating ?corporate structure? for the universities, as if that is a bad thing (for years, Israel has been trying to introduce a ?corporate structure? and cost accountability into Israeli hospitals, and few think that is bad). I suspect the leftists are really worried that their hegemony over higher education might some day weaken if Israeli universities are ever properly operated.
The best Chicken Little warning comes in a guest Op-Ed in Haaretz (Dec. 11, 2002) by one Dr. Ilan Gur-Zeev, a senior lecturer in the "philosophy of education" at the University of Haifa, my own stomping grounds. Gur-Zeev decries the Maltz reforms as "The End of Academic Freedom", also the title of his screed. He speaks for many of the Tenured, as a fast survey of internet chat sites for professors reveals. Now, the fact that young Gur-Zeev is effectively the spokesperson for the anti-Maltz camp is interesting. This "philosopher of education" espouses a philosophy that essentially holds that education, or at least schools, are things that we should all do away with. Besides being an anti-Israel, pro-terror far-left extremist, Gur-Zeev is perhaps best known for his "book", which declares that schools are dungeons of oppression and that violence by students in these schools is something very positive and creative, even a protest against school oppression. He has denounced the Likud as fascists worse than Jorg Haider in Austria (Ha?aretz, Feb. 20, 2000). In addition, Gur-Zeev crayoned a piece in the Israeli Marxist "journal" Theory and Criticism (get it? "critical" as in the Marxist sense), in which he denounced his own university as a large penis thrust into the sky (because of its 30 floor central tower), symbolizing the oppression of Israeli Arabs (Theory and Criticism, Spring 2000, pp. 239-244). Really.
The fact that Gur-Zeev was hired, tenured and promoted at one of these universities on the basis of such ranting does indeed prove the extent to which they are "politicized", although not quite in the sense that most of the Tenured Crowd mean.....
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa and is author of The Scout (available from Gefen Publishing House: http://161.58.167.199/shop/indi_scout.htm).