Back to Life...Back to University?

When I signed the lease on an apartment in the Negev desert city of Beer Sheva for the coming year, I had assumed I would be renting as a Geography Master's student at Ben Gurion University. Besides a solid academic reputation, BGU is also known as the Israeli institution that most closely resembles American college life, because most of the students live near campus and have a robust social life. Classes are supposed to start November 16.

However, BGU has joined the other six public Israeli universities that have threatened to strike unless the Ministry of Finance shells out $125 to shore up a wide budget gap - apparently in the last eight years the university budgets shrank 20 percent even as enrollment increased 10 percent.

If you think it is impossible for universities to strike, look at last year, when the faculty refused to teach for two months, or the year before that, when students went on strike against higher tuition. This has turned into an annual public dance between the universities, which demand more money, and the government, which refuses to give it. The article I linked to above presents a clear, if depressing, analysis of how that process works. It seems to be the fault of the government.

The outcome of this awkward negotiation is that public higher education, a widely accessible rite at $2,400 a year in Israel, is earning a reputation for being unreliable. This leaves a vacuum filled by private colleges, where 61 percent of this year's undergraduates are enrolled. Private colleges charge higher tuition and depend less on government funding. Healthy colleges, which open on time and are not subject to the whims of the Finance Ministry, can attract professors with higher salaries and students with a promise of dependability - which will eventually strip the public schools of their best talent and their strongest students.

Hopefully, this year's strike will not be two months long. But just in case, I am going to start pitching articles the minute I move to my new apartment so that I have a way to fill my days if classes are canceled. Who knows - I may look back on my university years in Israel as the tail end of the era when public universities actually functioned.