Jerusalem
University campuses across Israel were chained shut last week as students intensified their protest, which moved into its fourth week, against proposed reforms in who pays for higher education.
Students held demonstrations in Beersheba, Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.
In newspaper advertisements, the leaders of Israel’s universities had urged students to end their strike and threatened to cancel academic credit for the semester for anyone not showing up for class. The Committee of University Presidents extended that deadline until last week as government representatives, university presidents, and students continued negotiations in a last-ditch effort to reach an agreement.
But talks broke down after student leaders rejected a draft agreement offered by the government. Itay Barda, leader of the National Student Organization, described the proposal as “media spin.”
“The draft is still very far from the demands which we have presented,” he said.
The country’s 250,000 students are protesting plans by the Shochat Committee — a government-appointed panel led by a former finance minister, Avraham Shochat — to raise student fees from their current level of about $2,150 per year.
The Shochat Committee says student fees should be restructured, with wealthier students paying more. But its proposals, to be presented in June, ignore findings by a previous government-appointed commission and the education committee of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, both of which recommended lowering the fees.
The students and faculty are also demanding that the government reinstate some $300-million that has been slashed from the education budget in recent years. The Shochat Committee has agreed to recommend restoring the funds, but only if students accept future increases in fees.
Rabbi Michael Melchior, chairman of the Knesset’s education committee, said a government offer to freeze tuition for students already enrolled while raising fees for new students was “immoral.”
The government and the Knesset had agreed to carry out the previous commission’s recommendations to gradually reduce fees, Rabbi Melchior said.
The two major university-faculty unions back the students’ protest, but Moshe Kaveh, president of Bar-Ilan University and chairman of the Committee of University Presidents, said the students were in danger of losing sufficient class time to complete the semester. He offered to extend the current semester by two weeks but said that might not be enough to make up class time lost.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 53, Issue 37, Page A40
