On Tuesday July 20th, I spoke with Dr. Aliza Shenhar, courtesy of VMW Corporate & Investor Relations. It looked like just another interview about a Utopian solution to the Arab-Israeli “problem,” so I brought a friend who knows much more about Israel than I, and who also happens to care much more. I figured an interested decoy might absolve me.
I was wrong; the talk proved quite interesting, and I needed no decoy. As the first female rector of an Israeli university (U. of Haifa), the president of Emek Yezreel College (also a first for a woman) and a previous Ambassador to the Russian Federation, Shenhar somehow found room on her resume to achieve distinction as a candidate for mayor of Haifa, as well as several other merits. Her views were not Utopian, fanatical or irrevocably racist, as I have found in many in her chosen field.
Emek Yezreel College (EYC) lies on the road between Afula and Nazareth, in the Galilee region in northern Israel. Shenhar describes the local landscape as dominated by low-income families and what she called, “undevelopment towns. By drawing students from such a devastating neighborhood, EYC has forged a student body of 3,300 first generation students. This number is up from 700 students in 1997 when Shenhar jumped aboard the EYC ship, which refuses to sink despite government cutbacks on educational funds.”
“We are not going to imitate a research university,” Shenhar insists. “I felt that I wanted to make a change. This place is off-off-off-off Broadway.” Shenhar’s interest lies in solidarity amongst the Arab and Israeli student population, and realizing a situation in which the students live “a different kind of life from their parents.”
This student body dynamic translates into a curriculum that remains heavy on the social sciences and communication studies, while attending far less to the less pragmatic humanities. In fact, the communication program—which combines print, online and radio media—boasts 700 students, and a newspaper in both Arabic and Hebrew, the only of its kind.
Shenhar’s banner that “higher education is not only for the elite” comes in the wake of efforts across American and Europe to pry open the traditionally exclusive doors of the Ivory Tower university world. In her March 23, 2004 article for The Guardian, Lucy Ward noted “mounting pressure on elite universities to do more to earn the right to charge new top-up fees by reaching out to non-traditional students.” Surely EYC’s interest in non-traditional students is not financial: tuition is 10,000 NIS (about 2,000 dollars and change), and the additional costs are absorbed by the government, but it certainly follows the contemporary model.
But beyond its curriculum, Shenhar sees EYC as important in another way – for the role it can play in ensuring a Jewish majority in the Galilee. I asked her what her Arab students felt about this goal. “They don’t like it,” she said, unsurprisingly.
The EYC model of inclusiveness, expansion of the educational facilities to benefit the destitute, and intercultural dialogue, is refreshing in the Middle Eastern territory—too often characterized by lack of respect for others, desire for understanding and communication. But the agenda of preserving an unequal population balance ensures that mutually advantageous models of peace linger far out of sight.
For more information on VMW, visit http://www.vmwcom.com/
For more information on EYC, visit http://www.yvc.ac.il/
