Victor Roudometof, President of the University of Cyprus’ Faculty Labor Union

Historically, Cyprus lacked its own public universities; the first public university was the University of Cyprus, founded in the early 1990s. By 2007, two other universities were added: the Technological University of Cyprus, which focuses on more applied fields of study and the Open University of Cyprus, which offers distance education. In general, between 1993 and 2012 the public universities enjoyed a period of growth; and were able to attract qualified academics from all over the world. In contrast to public universities, the island’s private universities offer considerably lower salaries for staff and heavier teaching loads.

The post-2008 crisis has had an extensive impact upon the landscape of higher education in Cyprus, especially after the passing of the 2011 legislation, the March 2013 EU-imposed “bail in” and the subsequent austerity program. In particular, the 2011 legislation implemented extensive salary cuts and created a two-tied system, whereby those in the lower ranks (lectures and assistant professors) were deprived of money and social security benefits. By 2013, the Cyprus’ parliament forced further salary cuts on senior faculty members, by eliminating the position bonus offered to them as part of their appointment to their respective positions. More than one hundred academics have filed a lawsuit against this decision to Cyprus’ High Court. The case is still pending. Between 2011 and 2013, the various cumulative cuts shrunk salaries between 20 and 45%, depending upon academic rank, salary range and years of service. Up to that point, academic salaries were on a pair with US average academic salaries, and that was a major factor that contributed to the public universities’ ability to operate competitively in the world’s academic market. In the summer of 2014, new legislative initiatives were introduced that would declare the lower ranking faculty members (lectures and assistant professors) to be “non-permanent staff”: that would prevent them from getting university pensions and retirement bonuses.

As a result of the post-2013 parliamentary legislation that froze all new hires in Cyprus’ public sector no new faculty members were hired. Moreover, the 2013 parliamentary decision froze all promotion proceedings. Scores of academics were either deprived of their right to ask for promotion or had their promotion proceedings postponed. For junior academics without tenure (i.e. lectures and assistant professors) the result is nothing sort of having their own lives suspended. The ability to voice their opinions openly has been limited; as job insecurity leads to excessive caution.

The post-2013 EU-imposed austerity program, promptly implemented by Cyprus’ conservative administration, has been at the root of the most of these negative effects. It is uncertain whether the effects of these policies will be reversed, if ever. The public universities’ budget has been ruthlessly slashed, leading to grave and extensive difficulties for researchers who rely on their individual research and travel accounts for attending conferences or paying for related publication and research expenses. The cumulative effect of legislation and salary cuts prompted tens of faculty members to ask for unpaid leave of absence in order to obtain permanent or temporary employment elsewhere. As a result of the hiring freeze and the faculty’s exodus, the total number of academics working in Cyprus’ public universities has declined, and junior academics increasingly have to look elsewhere for employment opportunities.

The Portuguese government decided to overhaul the national science structure by submitting all research centers to a massive evaluation procedure that was commissioned by FCT, the national science funding agency, to the European Science Foundation (ESF). Yet, the procedure went astray and public scandal has ensued. Unfair evaluations due to gross factual mistakes, inconsistent scores, inappropriate panel constitution, unethical statements in experts’ reports and lack of awareness about the Portuguese scientific system, as well as neglect to the track record of the R&D units, have been widely reported. Half of the research units have been excluded at the end of the first evaluation stage (154 out of 322). Contradicting official announcements, the public unveiling of the contract between FCT and ESF revealed that such exclusion was a prerequisite.

Some of the best research centers, according to FCT previous assessments, have failed the very first stage of evaluation. Consequently, they will be deprived of public sponsorship and many are doomed to extinction. Centers such as CIES-IUL (Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology) of ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, the Center of Linguistics of the University of Oporto, the Center of Physics of the University of Minho (CFUM) and the Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT), that had been consistently ranked among the best in their areas, are now downgraded, their scientists demoralized, as merit standards have been turned upside down.

During the first stage, there has been neither personal contact between the evaluators and the research centers nor are there independent instances of appeal. This means that research and institutions are being judged remotely by almighty judges without the chance of being heard before the sentence or appealing it afterwards.

In the case of CIES-IUL, a center that until now has always been classified as excellent and a leading research institution on migration and inequalities, the evaluation report claimed that these topics “are exhausted” in both Portugal and Europe. This statement is not as much erroneous as it is a scientific absurdity. Yet, this is just one of the too many blunders that pervade the evaluation process.

The Portuguese government is about to kill between one third and one half of its research system, which has taken years to build. This means the firing of hundreds of scientists with no place to go in Portugal. Science, fairness and national development are all victims on an equal footing. And yet, it is not completely clear whether this is the result of purposeful strategy or plain incompetence.

The Indonesian Reforms of 1998 brought about massive social change. Ever since then, democratization and liberalization have had profound effects on public higher education, especially the top ranking public universities. The liberalization of public universities in Indonesia emerged, in large part, as the consequence of the Reforms that involved the amplification of academic freedom and at the same time, state sponsored intensification of market penetration.

State Regulations as Instruments of Liberalization

The liberalization of public universities in Indonesia has lasted more than 13 years. The process began in 1999, when the government issued the Government Regulation (GR) No. 61/1999 which stipulated that certain public universities were “legal entities” (Badan Hukum) rather than just “public entities”. Immediately, the government changed the status of seven public universities into legal entities or, literarily, “State Owned Legal Entity Universities” (Perguruan Tinggi Badan Hukum Milik Negara – PT BHMN). The seven public universities were: the University of Indonesia (UI), Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), Bogor Agricultural University (IPB), Gadjah Mada University (UGM), Indonesia University of Education (UPI), University of North Sumatra (USU), and Airlangga University (UNAIR).

From the policymaker’s viewpoint, the status change was needed in order to free universities from the oppressive university bureaucracies and thus to reform university management. With the new status of legal entity, the universities could gain access to state assets, such as land, as well as continue receiving state subsidies. At the same time, the status allowed universities to manage and finance their activities independently of the state, for example, by soliciting financial support from private companies.

Nearly a decade later, at the end of 2008, the House of Representatives and the central government enacted the “Law on Educational Legal Entity” (Undang-Undang Badan Hukum Pendidikan or UU BHP). According to this law, the university would be an “Educational Legal Entity” (Badan Hukum Pendidikan or BHP). As a legal entity, the university now had the autonomy to regulate itself like any other legal subject.  Not only public universities, but all universities were changed to “educational legal entities.” Even though policymakers tried to convince the public that this law would protect educational institutions from commercialization, it was met with massive student-led protests in Jakarta and other cities. The law’s critics worried about the consequences of having “Educational Legal Entities” with autonomous sources of funding. They worried that when a public university has autonomous control over the management of its funds, as the law stipulated, it would be swayed by corporate interests that would pave the way to privatization. Eventually, tuition hikes would follow and make the university less accessible to the poor.

With these concerns, the student-led movement filed a class action suit, requesting the judicial review of the law by the Constitutional Court. The Court decided to annul the law in March of 2010. According to the nine justices of the Constitutional Court, the law conflicted with the Constitution because by changing the legal status of all universities—including that of public universities—to “Educational Legal Entities,” underprivileged people would have reduced access to higher public education.

After the law was annulled, the Government issued a new regulation concerning the amended status of the university. The new regulation turned the university into an entity organized by the Government (Perguruan Tinggi Pemerintah or PTP). The university became a state university, i.e. unit of a government agency under the direction of the Department of National Education. Compared to its earlier status, the new status meant that the university did not have the autonomy to manage its own affairs.

Two years later, in August of 2012, members of the House of Representatives enacted the “Higher Education Law” (Undang-Undang Pendidikan Tinggi or UU PT). This Higher Education Law was concerned with university finances and was similar to the earlier “Educational Legal Entity Law” (UU BHP). But the new law, unlike its predecessor, made a university’s financial autonomy conditional:  whether or not a university could exercise financial autonomy depended on the National Educational Minister’s approval. That approval would be granted on the basis of the evaluation of the university’s performance – an evaluation that was undertaken according to the “Financial Management Code” (Pola Pengelolaan Keuangan or PPK) of the “Public Service Agency” (Badan Layanan Umum or BLU) which would establish a so-called “Public University-Legal Entity” (PTN Badan Hukum or PTN BH). Only a month after the new law was passed, the status of the seven public universities had been changed to “Public Service Agencies” (Badan Layanan Umum or BLU).

In early 2013, the government planned to change the status of seven public universities from “Public Service Agency” (Badan Layanan Umum or BLU) to a “Public University-Legal Entity” (PTN Badan Hukum or PTN BH). “Public University-Legal Entity” (PTN Badan Hukum or PTN BH) is more or less similar to “State Owned-Legal Entity University” (PT BHMN) and “Educational-Legal Entity University” (PT BHP) that had been determined before. The new status made these public universities vulnerable to corporate interests and ultimately, to commercialization. Once again, students and left-wing activists protested the new measure. The protests began long before the law was enacted. After its enactment, the students and some civil society organizations once again filed for judicial review while protests continued against the change of the university status into “Public University-Legal Entity” (PTN Badan Hukum or PTN BH).

The Birth of a Fragmented Movement

The unpredictable situation created by the numerous changes in the legal status of universities over the course of thirteen years has had a negative impact on university performance, campus management and democratic academic life. Ever since their status has been changed into “State Owned Legal Entities”, the seven universities have faced many problems.  Four public universities have been allegedly involved in corruption scandals as well as other scandals including abuse of power, administrative mismanagement, arbitrary tuition hikes, and obscuring university employees’ contracts. All of these events have attracted a lot of media attention.

These developments have also sparked several movements with the stated purpose of saving academic life. One of the biggest movements emerged at the University of Indonesia (UI), the most prominent public university in the nation. “Save UI”, “PELITA UI” (Inter Faculty Women for UI Reformation) and other movements united together to form “UI Clean” (UI Bersih) in March of 2012. The movement was initiated by UI academics who wanted to fight against corruption, by implementing good governance, transparency, public accountability and a more democratic atmosphere in the university.

The movement gained momentum in the summer of 2011. On August 22^nd, the Rector of the University of Indonesia awarded an honorary doctorate degree to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which prompted protest from both UI academics and the public at large. The protestors were outraged by the mistreatment and domestic violence suffered by female Indonesian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. On 2012, members of the “UI Clean” movement published a book entitled Membangun di Atas Puing Integritas: Belajar dari Universitas Indonesia (Building upon Rubble Integrity: Learning from the University of Indonesia). In addition to providing a murky portrait of elite bureaucrats of the University of Indonesia, the book outlined the movement’s vision for change.

But soon afterwards the movement seemed to fragment. Some senior lecturers with more stable positions in the university had directed the movement around the issue of university autonomy, but their interest in the issue began to dwindle and they were soon replaced by others. The university autonomy movement gathered support and organized not only inside UI but also outside together with other public universities. The movement published a book entitled Otonomi Perguruan Tinggi Suatu Keniscayaan (Campus Autonomy: An Inevitability). The authors defended campus autonomy. They argued that autonomy could only be achieved with a change in the university’s status to a legal entity. Many of the authors argued not only for academic autonomy but also for the university autonomy over its financial affairs. They reasoned that only financial autonomy would allow a university to raise both the public and private funds necessary for high quality education. The book summed up the campus autonomy movement’s worries and vision for change. The authors expressed disappointment with bad governance practices and they feared that government intervention in public higher education life would further endanger academic autonomy. They also worried about government regulation which, following the annulment of “Educational Legal Entity Law,” ended up creating an unpredictable situation for public universities.

On the other side of the issue, several junior lecturers, university administrators and students wished to restore the university’s status to a “public” entity. The Public perceived that they were in opposition to their senior colleagues. They founded the “UI Worker Association” on October 2011. The association struggled over the status of workers in the university and demanded that they be given the status of civil servants as though they were state officials. Members of the Association, especially lecturers and junior researchers, began to build networks of support, using social media. They connected with students, lecturers and young researchers in other public universities, particularly in the seven other universities that had been affected by the laws. The Association built a movement by conducting public forums, and actively appealing to university bureaucrats and government officials.

The fragmentation of the university movement deepened with the negative public response to the “Educational Legal Entity Law” (UU BHP) and later the “Law on Higher Education” (UU PT). Most of the students and young lecturers, with populist ideas, became supporters of the judicial review against both of these laws. According to them, the laws had been infused with a neoliberal agenda. On the other side, the supporters of the university autonomy movement had a less populist endeavor. For them, the annulment of the “Educational Legal Entity Law” (UU BHP) by the Constitutional Court and now the judicial review suit against the “Higher Education Law” (UU PT), were setbacks for the university autonomy movement.

The Future of Indonesian Public Universities

The liberalization process has created many problems for the future of higher education in Indonesia. Basically, all parties agree that the autonomy of scholarly activities in the university should be preserved. Under Suharto’s rule, university activities had been subject to surveillance and censorship. The government controlled what was taught and academic freedom was rare, especially when it came to the interpretation of political history and government policy. In a word, academia was shackled.

Today, however, university liberalization has been hijacked by market interests and elite university bureaucrats. If the current state policy continues to stay in effect, and universities continue to be privatized, four problems will emerge. First, underprivileged groups will have reduced access to higher education. This goes against the ideals of public education. Second, the university will become an arena of the capitalist market which will be exploited by elite university bureaucrats for profit-making. In reality, at the moment, good university management is still far from being realized in the universities whose statuses have been changed to “legal entity”. Third, the gap among Indonesian universities—particularly between the seven universities that have experienced status-change and other public universities—will widen. Fourth, the creation of future academics, including lecturers and researchers, will further stagnate.

The Indonesian people have mandated the State to protect every Indonesian citizen’s right to education. At the level of higher education, the government’s duty is to undertake the management of public higher education in the public’s interest. However it seems that the Government and members of the House of Representative  are enacting policies for the liberalization of universities. Meanwhile, the public-minded academy and civil society have a fragmented movement. All of this will surely create a significant impediment to the quality of higher education in Indonesia.

References

Achwan, Rochman. 2010. The Indonesian University: Living with Liberalization and Democratization. http://isa-universities-in-crisis.isa-sociology.org/?p=767.

Badan Pekerja Paguyuban Pekerja Universitas Indonesia. 2013. PPUI, Gugatan PTUN dan Islah. http://www.facebook.com/notes/paguyuban-pekerja-ui/ppui-gugatan-ptun-dan-islah/297558363707876.

Irianto, Sulistiowati. (ed). 2012. Otonomi Perguruan Tinggi Suatu Keniscayaan. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia

Toha-Sarumpaet, Riris K., Budiman, Menneke., and Armando, Ade. (eds). 2012. Membangun di Atas Puing Integritas. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia.

Methodological Problems and Political Implications of the CHE University Ranking

German Sociological Association Statement

June 2013 (long version)

The results of the CHE (Centre for Higher Education Development) University Ranking, a subject-level classification covering a range of academic disciplines, have been published each spring since 1998. The ranking has acquired high public visibility by virtue of the fact that it has been published in the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT and in the annual ZEIT Studienführer (Study Guide) since 2005.

Doubts about the professional quality of the CHE Ranking have been voiced repeatedly within the field of sociology since it was first implemented. However, in view of the informational needs of prospective students of sociology, sociological institutes have participated in the data collection for the ranking. Rather than neglecting to mention it here, we self-critically acknowledge that sociology and the social sciences have been officially represented on the CHE Advisory Board in the past and that they may not have exercised, and availed of, their influence and their supervisory responsibilities – or at least may not have done so effectively enough.

However, since the middle of last year, mounting professional and science-policy-related misgivings on the part of a number of sociological institutes have led to a rethink. In June 2011, the Institute of Sociology at the University of Jena – which had consistently received very good ratings from the CHE – decided that it no longer wished to participate in the CHE Ranking. This prompted the Board of the German Sociological Association (GSA) to undertake a thorough analysis of the CHE Ranking. After studying the available documentation and conducting a lengthy discussion with the representatives of the Centre for Higher Education Development responsible for the ranking, the GSA Board arrived at the appraisal and the recommendations documented below. At its meeting on 20 April 2012, the GSA Council endorsed this appraisal and unanimously adopted the recommendations ensuing therefrom.

Professional and Science-Policy-Related Appraisal of the CHE Ranking

Firstly, the CHE Ranking has a number of serious methodological weaknesses and empirical gaps. Secondly, the summary assessment practice and the specific publication formats of the ranking systematically invite misinterpretations. Both aspects will be discussed in greater detail here.

Professional Appraisal: Research Indicators

For a number of years, at least, the quality of the research conducted at the individual faculties was measured on the basis of publication databases that not only the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), but, meanwhile, also the CHE itself, deems to be an unsuitable, or – in the case of sociology, at least – an insufficiently meaningful indicator. As an alternative, the CHE now measures research performance on the basis of external research funding per (budgeted) academic staff member. When doing so – and without any further differentiation – Higher Education Pact positions, for example, which were created expressly not for research purposes but rather to cope with teaching loads, are also included in the divisor of the external funding values. In effect, this means that – in purely arithmetical terms – as the teaching load of an institute increases (in the area of teacher training, for example), its per capita research performance, which the CHE claims to “measure”, deteriorates. It is obvious that the universities particularly affected are those that, because of the region in which they are located, have taken in a large number of students within the framework of the Higher Education Pact. Thus, the “burden of proof” of the quality of research of an individual institute is borne almost entirely by the subjective criterion of that institute’s research reputation among fellow academics at other  – in the logic of the ranking, rival – institutions. Anyone who has ever participated in the CHE survey of professors will be aware of its lack of methodological sophistication and the undifferentiated nature of its contents. The informational value of such sweeping faculty-specific judgements for prospective students, as the intended target audience of the ranking, is definitely questionable.

Professional Appraisal: Teaching Indicators

For this specific target audience the central criterion for the choice of a possible study location is obviously the quality of teaching at the various sociological institutes. However, this indicator is measured by the CHE largely on the basis of a student survey characterised by (a) low response rates (19.3% in sociology in the last round), (b) a small number of participants (at every third university, less than 30 students from the subject area in question), and (c) completely unexplained survey selectivity, with the result that the danger of responses biased by careless or inattentive response behaviour is correspondingly high. The CHE is well aware of the fact that by no means all universities draw a genuinely random sample with a calculable probability of selection. Moreover, a self-administered questionnaire survey with no systematic reminders and no nonresponse study can claim practically no validity. By the end of his or her basic training in methodology at the latest, any student of sociology would recognize that the survey is simply absurd. Therefore, massive doubts must be expressed with regard to the results of the CHE student survey – which is often described in discussions about the ranking as an opportunity for student participation qua evaluation.

Moreover, important, if not decisive, parameters for the assessment of the study situation – parameters that cannot be influenced by the teaching staff – are not included in the analysis (or the evaluation) at all. These parameters include, for example, (a) the respective faculty-student ratio (the ratio of the teaching load of faculty employed in budgeted positions to the number of students), (b) the associated arithmetical (and actual) class sizes, and (c) the efficiency of examination offices. Furthermore, the CHE forgoes the collection of qualitative data that are, or would be, extremely relevant for the assessment of the quality of teaching at the individual locations and for prospective students’ choice of study programmes, for example, the areas of focus and specialization offered by the various sociological study programmes, and the systematic linking of teaching with the research conducted at the institute in question – irrespective of the external-funding intensity or reputational standing of that research. Such an inadequate, extremely selective, and factually misleading data situation renders absolutely untenable the construction of a ranking of institutes with regard to their teaching performance.

Science-Policy-Related Appraisal: Evaluation Practice and Publication Formats

The basic problem with the university ranking is that the Centre for Higher Education Development aims to construct a ranking of institutes with regard to their teaching performance, and actually “succeeds” in doing so, namely by dividing sociological institutes on the basis of extremely doubtful data into “good” and “bad” – or “better” and “worse” – institutes, and listing them hierarchically with spurious accuracy.  Because of the sweeping evaluation practice and simplistic modes of presentation, the publication formats of the ranking invite systematic misconceptions about the situation in sociology.

The CHE collects data for a total of approximately eighteen indicators of research and teaching quality in the field of sociology, and these indicators are also published in the online version of the ranking. However, for a description of the individual indicators and their derivation, readers are referred to the small print, which most people are unlikely to understand. In the print version published in DIE ZEIT and in the ZEIT Studienführer (Study Guide), however, these eighteen indicators are not combined to form indices. Rather, only five or six indicators are selectively presented. This fact is neither discernible from a cursory reading, nor is any explanation given for the selection that has been made. Moreover, for both the quality of research and the quality of teaching, only the subjective evaluations from what we have shown to be methodologically extremely questionable surveys are presented. In particular, the simplistic ranking by means of traffic-light symbols (recently modified to green, yellow, and blue) obscures the remarkable paucity of the database; in some cases, a single binary-coded response to a questionnaire item can yield a traffic light symbol signalling “good” or “bad” performance. The CHE Ranking – willingly bowing to the presentational demands of the mass media – gives the impression of unequivocal, reliable assessments, which are by no means covered by the available data. Here, systematic differentiations and thick descriptions would clearly be indicated and appropriate.

It is indeed disturbing in itself that the CHE Ranking thus misleads the very group whose interests, according to its authors, it is primarily supposed to serve, namely prospective students of sociology, who could, indeed, benefit from having accurate information about individual study locations when choosing a university and a study programme. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise, therefore, that – as far as teachers of sociology can ascertain – hardly any of the students who are now studying sociology at German universities, at any rate, allowed themselves to be decisively influenced by the CHE Ranking. Obviously, only a small minority of prospective students take serious note of the ranking – and that is a good thing.

On the other hand – and quite apart from its lack of informational value – the CHE Ranking has a very problematic effect on science policy. Therefore, if we are to believe the declared intentions of its authors, the ranking serves de facto a purpose for which it was not “actually” intended. However, in higher-education-policy reality, the CHE Ranking invites – or, indeed, practically demands – extremely simplistic interpretations on the part of faculty- and university management and ministerial bureaucracies. This may lead to structural decisions that have grave consequences for sociology, as an academic discipline, and its study programmes at individual locations – decisions that may well be objectively unfounded.

In view of the danger of such political uses of the CHE Ranking, it appears all the more remarkable that the persons responsible for the ranking at the CHE are unwilling to limit themselves to an informational function – however incomplete and unsatisfactory its implementation may be. They maintain that they cannot do without the construction of a ranking of the sociological institutes in Germany. At the preliminary meeting with those responsible for the ranking at the CHE, the German Sociological Association representatives were told quite openly that it would not be possible for the discipline to satisfy its own informational intentions within the framework of the procedure organized by the CHE, while at the same time avoiding the obligatory assessment and ranking. Thus, it became quite clear to the GSA that the CHE at least accepts the possibility that the university ranking will be politicized. The authors of the ranking claim that it merely depicts existing differences in quality between the sociological faculties. However, in the opinion of the German Sociological Association, there are strong grounds for assuming that the CHE Ranking contributes significantly to the construction of “difference” and, thus, to creating divisions in the university landscape in the field of sociology.

In the worst case, therefore, the ranking will act as a self-fulfilling prophecy in the long term. Faculties labelled on a supposedly sound empirical basis as “good” or “bad” may actually become so in the long run because of the structural policy decisions and – perhaps one day, after all – changing student flows prompted by their rankings. More than any other academic discipline, sociology is aware of the way in which such social definitions of situations influence action. It therefore feels both a scientific obligation to draw attention to the far-reaching consequences of actions based on incorrect definitions of situations, and a scientific responsibility not to contribute to such consequences any longer.

Recommendations Concerning the Handling of the CHE Ranking

Firstly, because the CHE Ranking has serious methodological and empirical deficiencies, secondly, because it withholds vital information from prospective students, as its declared target audience, and, thirdly, because it gives rise to wrong decisions on the part of science-policy decision-makers, sociology must take a stand against this presentation of its teaching and research performance in the public sphere constructed by the media. On the basis of this appraisal and the justifications thereof outlined above, the Board and the Council of the German Sociological Association have arrived at the following recommendations:

1.  Because our analyses and the discussion of the considerable methodological deficiencies with the CHE representatives responsible for the ranking yielded no prospect of significant improvements in the CHE Ranking in the future, we hereby declare that this evaluation does not meet the basic quality requirements of empirical social research. As a professional sociological society, we call on the sociological institutes at German universities not to give the impression any longer that they support an empirical procedure that sociology must reject on professional grounds. In concrete terms, this means that the sociological institutes should defend and explain this resolution and its professional justifications vis-à-vis their faculty- and university managers and their students, and, in particular, that they should not take part in the collection of data for the next CHE Ranking of sociology.

2.  The GSA calls on science-policy decision-makers at university and ministerial level not to rely any longer on appraisals and information derived from the CHE Ranking when deliberating on, and undertaking interventions for, the development of sociology at the discipline’s various university locations. More reliable information than that provided by the ranking already exists; in individual cases, occasion-specific evaluations should be conducted, for which both suitable concepts and unbiased institutions are available.

3.  As an empirically oriented social science discipline, sociology claims to be particularly competent in the assessment of all kinds of empirical social research – including evaluations such as the CHE Ranking. In the present case, this competency implies a responsibility to recommend other disciplines, which are perhaps less sensitive in this regard, not to participate in the CHE Ranking any longer. After all, the grave deficiencies and misuses of this ranking that have been observed in the case of sociology are equally characteristic of its application to other disciplines.

4.  Sociology is a discipline that is proficient in evaluation in every sense of the word. For this reason, it made itself available in 2006 for a pilot study on the rating (and precisely not the ranking) of research performance conducted by the Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat). In a process characterised by considerable social and technical complexity, this scientific rating demonstrated in an exemplary way the minimum requirements that a reliable and valid scientific evaluation must fulfil. To further meet the specific and justified desire on the part of prospective students of sociology for assistance in choosing a course of study and a study location, the GSA will develop a publicly accessible information package, which will also feature descriptions of the sociology programmes offered by German universities.

This statement, a summary thereof, and the latest information on the GSA’s science-policy initiative launched herewith are available online at www.soziologie.de/che.

When neoliberal policies in Australia began to bite in the sphere of higher education, towards the end of the 1980s, a common reaction among university staff was astonishment and then dismay. To see staff of other universities as opponents rather than colleagues, or to prove the economic value of courses never designed to be sold, seemed bizarre if not mad requirements, and morally offensive too.

Today we can see how the policies brought in by John Dawkins[2] and his advisors, and deepened ever since, made sense in neoliberal terms. Universities were redefined as competitive firms, rather than branches of a shared higher education enterprise. Deliberative planning was quickly replaced by struggle for advantage, and a scramble for amalgamations produced our current odd collection of universities.

Numbers in higher education were increased, without a major increase in central state funding, by commodifying access: fees were re-introduced, and step by step increased. Federal government funding as a proportion of the higher education budget collapsed, from around 90% to under 50%. The national university system, in the 1970s remarkably uniform in quality and resources, became self-consciously unequal. The emergence of the “Group of Eight” [3] crystallized the new stratification, as positional advantage was leveraged.

Higher education was increasingly seen by government as an export service industry in which Australia could find comparative advantage, the cultural equivalent of iron ore. High fees for overseas students monetised this idea, replacing an earlier regime where Australian universities offered modest development aid to South-east Asia for free. De-regulation is currently being deepened to include domestic students.

At the same time, universities have been re-shaped on the model of corporations. Traditional hierarchy (remember the God-Professor?) had been partly broken down from the 1960s to the 1980s. Ironically this opened a space, in new conditions, for growth in managerial power, with Vice-Chancellors and Deans increasingly understood as entrepreneurs, being paid like corporate managers, and – together with their officers – actually having more autonomy. The price is greater social distance, and often distrust, between university managers and academic staff. Corporate techniques of personnel management along fractal lines (performance management, auditing regimes) have been introduced. Older forms of collective deliberation, such as the departmental meeting, have declined, and no new ones are created; hence we see a Vice-Chancellor addressing his staff, on a grave issue, by sending them a video.

The nature of work in universities has been changing too. The impact of ICT [4], the changing character of libraries, and the return to mass teaching are familiar. Significant fractions of non-academic labour in universities are outsourced. Some support functions close to teaching staff are deleted from organization charts (e.g. the departmental secretary), while new ones close to management are added (e.g. marketing). The expansion of student numbers has been handled with rising class sizes and a cheaper labour force.

Though universities do not care to publicize the issue, and the data are opaque, it seems that about 50% of Australian undergraduate teaching is now done by casual labour (euphemised as “sessional”). Among permanent or tenure-track staff another stratification is emerging, between research-only, research-and-teaching, and teaching-only posts. Embedded here is a division between internationally-mobile and locally-confined careers, an important inequality in a globalizing profession. Though it is difficult to be precise about such things, I believe there is a widespread sense among academic staff that the demands of the job have become more relentless, the benefits more uncertain, and the level of trust lower. (For parallel trends in the UK see Gill 2009.)

Competitive markets require visible metrics of success and failure; this is tricky to do in education. Neoliberal policy-makers have solved their problem in the school sector by means of NAPLAN and MySchool [5] – to the dismay of most educators, aware of the distorting effects of high-stakes competitive testing on the broader curriculum in schools. Powerful metrics are still lacking in the Australian university system, with opaque international league tables an unsatisfactory substitute. But Canberra has launched attempts, clumsy so far, at quality assurance and competitive assessment (witness ERA round I) [6]. We can be confident there will be fresh attempts to measure “performance” by universities, and attach rewards and punishments to the measures.

Some implications for knowledge

A first-order effect of the neoliberal turn is to instrumentalize research and teaching. Research that benefits a corporate or organizational interest, or fits a politician’s definition of national priorities, is encouraged: the ARC’s Linkage grants embody this [7]. Australian businesses’ dismal interest in research has limited the effects locally, so far as research is concerned. But a strong effect is visible in teaching. Under market logic, degrees that seem to offer economic pay-offs to the student attract higher enrolments and become more important to universities; the distribution of full-fee-paying students across programmes provides one map of this effect. The difficulty that philosophy departments around Australia have in the new regime is worth pondering. Philosophy was central to the idea of a university, but no longer is; we don’t have to be nostalgic to think this a significant shift.

To look more deeply, if anything has replaced philosophical reflection at the heart of university life, it is performativity (Lyotard 1984). Showing auditable output within the logic of the system and its measures becomes the requirement; no-one is simply trusted to be doing valuable work. We have proliferated within the university, sometimes with and sometimes without external pressure, many mechanisms of surveillance and reporting under the rubric of accountability. In my view many are Potemkin devices of no substantive worth, but they institutionalize distrust of staff, while adding to the time pressure in academic jobs.

The most striking sign of performativity is the obsessive quantification of research output, both individual and institutional. We are seeing right now a startling proliferation of journals, peer-reviewed so they meet the audit requirements, which exist essentially to lengthen c.v.’s. A very large proportion of papers submitted to existing journals are unreflective repetitions of existing research designs. This is also true of a large proportion of PhD theses, under the pressure of funding-driven time limits and formulaic controls. For researchers to stop and think deeply about what they are doing, perhaps feeling their way towards a new paradigm, would be unwise: if you did that for two or three years in this university, you would become liable for the sack.

In neoliberal theory, competition drives innovation; so market-savvy universities make large claims to be innovative. In fact, in all sectors of education, competition and auditing drives standardization of curricula and pedagogy, a convergence on the market leader. I have been told by a publisher that writers of new textbooks are instructed to have 80% of their content in common with the market-leading book in their field, and looking at texts in my field, I believe it. Standardized curricula are needed with a large casualized workforce to make the job of teaching-on-the-run practicable. Our sessional teachers do not have time or support for serious curriculum innovation. External auditing (e.g. in teacher education, with the new accreditation Institutes) also tends to standardize content. When Canberra develops high-stakes tests of the “effectiveness” of university teaching, as with NAPLAN there will be irresistible pressure to teach-to-the-test. Australian universities are losing control of their curriculum and the logic of neoliberalism is that we will lose more.

Three effects of the neoliberal regime in the realm of knowledge most concern me – and should be considered by anyone concerned with the foundations of the university curriculum in the contemporary system of knowledge.

First is the reproduction of global dependency. We are positioned in global as well as local markets, and the global market leaders are Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge and their peers. Their curricula serve as the gold standard. Australian universities were created as colonial institutions, and Australian academic life remains markedly extraverted (Hountondji 2002). We import our keynote speakers from the USA and UK, we send our bright students to Cambridge and Chicago, we try to publish in the American Journal of Orthology. Neocolonial dependence is built into performativity through international rankings of journals, departments and universities, even in small details such as the “impact factors” (based on citation counts overwhelmingly in metropolitan journals) we now see in job candidates’ publication lists. Local intellectual cultures are undermined, and the potential wealth of global diversity in knowledge formation is shrunk to a single hierarchy of centrality and marginality.

Second is the entrenchment of social hierarchies in knowledge production and circulation. Access to elite education is a very important form of privilege today, available mainly to the children of the privileged, as the “sandstones” in Australia show locally, and the Harvards internationally. Access to the means of producing knowledge is also concentrated – one measure is the institutional distribution of ARC grants, another is the scale of our casual teaching workforce, not resourced for research despite being trained for it. The rise of Intellectual Property regimes under neoliberalism creates fences around knowledge itself.

I don’t doubt the Dawkins-era intention to make university education available to more people; that indeed happened. But it happened through neoliberal mechanisms that undermined the democratic potential of social investment in higher education. Rather than opening out the knowledge system in participatory ways, our power-holders have systematically fenced and stratified the republic of knowledge to the point where there is no popular ownership of science or humane knowledge. It’s a speculation, but I think the dangerous success of the climate-change deniers is partly due to this.

Third, and perhaps most serious, is the impact of market logic on our relation with truth. A university’s responsibility is, ultimately, to be a practitioner of reason and bearer of truth. Research workers in all our fields know how hard it actually is to establish truth. This is not a responsibility one can take lightly, and it is contradicted by the public presentation of a fantasy university. When I walk down Eastern Avenue and see my university hanging up vainglorious banners saying how wonderful we are, my heart sinks. Marketing logic has pushed Australian universities (like others) to invent selling points and halo effects, an imaginary world of breakthroughs and great minds and blue-sky payoffs. To be blunt, it pushes universities into a realm of calculated misrepresentation that is hard to distinguish from lying.

And in conclusion…
The purpose of this paper is to invite a discussion of issues that are fundamental to the future of the university. I don’t have an immediate solution to propose, except discussion itself. To invite this, of course, is to assume that there are alternatives worth talking about.

Neoliberalism is the dominant policy logic in our world. One can of course embrace it, as the Vice-Chancellor at Melbourne has recently done with evident joy. But it is not the only possible logic, and there is more than one way to respond to the neoliberal pressures that exist. Neoliberal policymaking, once brutal, now prefers to govern indirectly, through regimes of incentives and disincentives. The rewards and costs are real, and reckoning with those regimes is inevitable. But in doing so we are not obliged to treat staff ruthlessly, we do not have to construct fantasies about ourselves, we need not defer to Harvard, and we need not pretend to be BHP [8].

It seems to me that a viable alternative to MyUniversity [9] will have to grow from an understanding of knowledge production and higher education as a distinctive form of work – in my discipline’s jargon, from the intellectual labour process itself. Modern intellectual labour involves complex forms of cooperation requiring trust and reciprocity; it involves both a critical and affirmative relationship with existing knowledge, so the process is cumulative and educative; and it is inherently unpredictable and open-ended, therefore in an important sense ungovernable. Shaping institutions to foster and support such labour (by students as well as staff) is not easy, but it is a task worth our intelligence and commitment. It will require some nerve, it will have costs, and it will require confidence in ourselves as a university.

ENDNOTES

[1]Raewyn Connell is University Professor at the University of Sydney, a member of ISA and a former President of TASA (The Australian Sociological Association).  This paper was prepared for discussion at the Academic Board of the University of Sydney. More of Raewyn’s writing can be found at www.raewynconnell.net.

[2] John Dawkins was the Labor Party minister who took over the Education portfolio in 1987, and shifted policy dramatically away from nation-building and social equity towards human-capital formation and neoliberal competition.

[3] The Group of Eight, also known as “the sandstones”, are the universities, mostly older and bigger, who have tried to exploit the turn to neoliberalism at the expense of other public universities and have formed a separate lobby group to do so.

[4] The common local term for computerisation plus the Internet.

[5] NAPLAN is the national testing programme for language and mathematics “achievement” which all schools are compelled by the federal government to undergo.  MySchool is a federal government website listing all schools in the country and giving their test results, which the media immediately convert into league tables treating schools as competing firms (or football teams).  This was launched by the current Labor Party Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, when she was minister for education.

[6] The Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative (the corporate/nationalist title alone shows there is something wrong with the thinking about research here!) is an official attempt, begun under the Labor Party government, to make competitive rankings of departments in the same field across different universities.  It is widely condemned by academic staff but used in publicity by university management – when their departments come out well.

[7] The Australian Research Council is the main national funding body for university research, in all disciplines except biomedical (which has its own fund). To its credit, the ARC has tried to remain independent. Governments keep trying to impose “national priorities” on ARC decisions, and under a more right-wing government some years ago there was an attempt to impose a political test. “Linkage Grants” are an attempt to link university research to corporate users of research, with limited success.

[8] BHP is the Broken Hill Proprietary company, Australia’s biggest firm, which has a very long history of anti-union stances.  It was a miner, then a steelmaker, now with neoliberal de-industrialization is entirely a miner again, amalgamated with Billiton (then owned in South Africa, formerly Dutch) to form what is currently the biggest mining firm in the world, exporting huge quantities of iron ore and coal from Australia.

[9] MyUniversity is the federal government’s website giving information about all the universities in the country.  It does not yet have the toxic effect of MySchool given by competitive test results, but that is only a matter of time.

References
Connell, Raewyn. 2011. Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge & Global Change, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, chapters 5 and 6.

Davis, Glyn. 2012. National Press Club address: Glyn Davis on the quiet revolution in higher education. The Conversation Media Group, document CONVAU0020120307e8370000c.

Gill, Rosalind. 2009. Breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of neo-liberal academia. In R. Flood and R. Gill, ed., Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, London, Routledge.

Hountondji, Paulin J. 2002. Knowledge appropriation in a post-colonial context. Pp. 23-38 in Catherine A. Odora Hoppers, ed., Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems, Claremont, New Africa Books.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Marginson, Simon. 2006. Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education. Higher Education, vol. 52 no. 1, 1-39.

May, Robyn et al. 2011. The casual approach to university teaching: time for a re-think? Pp. 188-197 in K. Krause et al., eds, Research and Development in Higher Education: Reshaping Higher Education, vol. 34. Gold Coast, Australia, 4-7 July 2011.

Olssen, Mark and Michael A. Peters. 2005. Neoliberalism, higher education and the knowledge economy: from the free market to knowledge capitalism. Journal of Education Policy, vol. 20 no. 3, 313-345.

For more photos and accounts of the explosion, look here.

For the Youtube video taken right when the second explosion occurred, look here.

image courtesy of reuters

“Israeli academic freedom is under severe attack”. This was written in a petition signed by staff members of several Israeli universities protesting against a proposal made by the Subcommittee for Quality Assessment of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) to bar the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University (BGU) from admitting students for the 2013-14 academic year. This proposal follows a report prepared by an international committee appointed by the CHE to scrutinize political science departments in Israel. This is seen by some as a “conclusive step toward closing the Department, which is known in Israel for the political activism of some of its professors, some of whom are vocal and sharp critics of the Israeli regime” (Adi Ophir)

While this petition was signed in September 2012, freedom of expression in Israeli universities has been policed by the Zionist ideology of the State of Israel since its establishment in 1948. The apartheid and racist nature of this ideology has been institutionalized in the different public agencies of Israel and has guided the occupation practices in the Palestinian Territories, challenging people’s identity and regulating their everyday life activities. As a Palestinian who has lived the first 24 years of his life under occupation, writing about academic freedom evokes meanings beyond its common definition, “the freedom of students and faculty members is essential to the mission of the academy,” and uncovers the apartheid nature of the State of Israel.

I remember the stories told by students who came from outside Nablus city, West Bank, to study at An-Najah University. During my Bachelor program in architectural engineering, I used to meet with some classmates in Al-Hamra Square after the submission of a design studio project. It was October 2000 when we sat in the square talking about our experiences from the previous night as we finished AutoCAD drawings for the course, Architectural Studio IV. We talked about our classmate Ahmad, from Gaza city, who didn’t submit his drawings. Just before we left the square Ahmad showed up with a furious face. We asked him about his drawings but he replied by asking whether any of us could provide him with accommodation for a few nights. He wanted to hide from the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) who had gathered all students whose permanent address was in the Gaza Strip. After security screening, the students were either forced to return to Gaza or kept in jails. Upon their arrival, the students searched all possible means to return to their universities in the West Bank, or join the Islamic University in Gaza. Some gave up education and worked in their family businesses.

I graduated in July 2001 and found a part-time job in a consultancy company as an architect. On the 3rd of April 2002, the IDF enforced a curfew and carried out heavy incursions into the whole city of Nablus. They gradually entered the refugee camps and the historic city by tunnelling through inside walls to move from house to house. From September 2000 to April 2005, more than 522 people were killed (locally revered as martyrs) in addition to the 900 houses that were destroyed and thousands of others damaged throughout the Nablus governorate (UN 2005: 2-3). The whole city was surrounded by the Israeli checkpoints until the 29th of June, 2007. During this period, people stayed inside their houses for more than 312 days without education or work. Through Internet, which was my only window to the outside world, I managed to receive a scholarship to a University in Germany. Because of the curfews it took me three months to reach the Embassy of Germany in Ramallah city, which is about 50km away from Nablus. The Embassy rejected my visa application because I was late. Instead I managed to join the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden without a scholarship.

In 2004, my friend Amal who is a Palestinian citizen of Israel defended her master’s thesis about contemporary Arab-American poetry in the English Department at Tel-Aviv University. Among the poems Amal analyzed was Lisa Suhair Majaj’s “ Fifty Years On / Stones in an Unfinished Wall” (1999) which commemorates the Palestinian Nakba – the Palestinian Catastrophe, the loss of historic Palestine, ethnic cleansing, displacements, death of families and friends, loss of lands, and other Palestinian massacres by the Zionist militants before 1948 and by the Israeli occupation forces since 1948. It also commemorates the foundation of the State of Israel as a Jewish State. When Amal presented her thesis, both Jewish-Israeli thesis advisers expressed strong objections to [her] reading of the poem. They asked [her] to “explain what [she] meant by Nakba and include the Zionist perspective in order to contextualize the history of the actual massacre” (Eqeiq 2012). Their strong reaction against Amal’s thesis is explained by the fact that discussing Nakba in Israeli academic environments is taboo. In fact Nakba has been removed from the Israeli history books. In March 2011, ‘the Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law, stating that institutions who receive state funding are not to permit any commemoration of the Palestinian catastrophe in 1948’ (Sheizaf 2012). It would also fine anybody who denies that Israel is a Jewish state. According to Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, this Nakba Law “severely damages freedom of political expression, freedom of artistic expression, and freedom of protest.” This legalized oppression has intensified the political memory of Nakba by promoting the gap between the outlawed traumatic memory of the Palestinians and the legitimated myth of the Jewish-Israeli “victory” (Eqeiq 2012).

Yusef, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, a student of the University of Ben Gurion, and among the leaders of the Arab Student Committee on campus, lost his life when challenging the Jewish-Israeli myth and promoting the commemoration of Nakba. The Israeli police, together with secret service agents, arrested Yusef and took the hard drive from his computer. While Yusef hoped to get his files back to be able to complete his university assignments he was found dead in his apartment a few days after the arrest. Yusef wasn’t the only Palestinian student at Israeli universities to be arrested and interrogated by the police and secret services (Gordon 2006: 194-5). Such cases and the limited freedom at Israeli universities have enhanced many Palestinian students with Israel citizenship to seek higher education abroad.

These stories show how the Zionist ideology of the Jewish State of Israel has created special socio-political conditions for defending “the mission of the Academy” in both Israeli and Palestinian universities. This ideology is a highly selected project enmeshed by power struggles over a unified race and ethnicity of the Jewish State of Israel and against any threats that might challenge this unity. Since 1948, “university closures [in the OPT] have been used by the Israelis to collectively punish the Palestinian community and hinder their chances of developing a strong independent Palestinian infrastructure which could become the foundation of a Palestinian state” (McGregor 1991: iii). This is evident in the story of Ahmad whose everyday life was embedded by fear of losing his education due to the discriminatory boundaries between Gaza and the West Bank, defined by the illegal occupation. The cases of Amal and Yusef also showed how their identities in Israeli Universities were conditioned not only by the acceptance of the Israeli narratives of Nakba but also by silencing the Palestinian counter narratives.

I therefore agree with Amal’s note that “Nakba is not a one-time event that occurred more than half a century ago. Nakba is an ongoing event of erasure, occupation and dispossession. To talk about Nakba is to engage in a complex act of translation that includes moving back and forth between narratives, memories, languages, times and geographies” (Eqeiq 2012). The Israeli educational system, as curriculum, institutions and legal documents, not only ignore the Palestinian narratives of Nakba but also reproduce the histories of the Holy Land so that they are anchored in the two themes of the Zionist narratives: Jewish return to the Holy Land after thousands of years in the Diaspora and the Jewish revival of a homogeneous national identity. As the ideology of Jewish national revival, modern political Zionism ultimately aims to establish a major Jewish revolt against all civilizations settled in the land claimed by the Jews to belong to their forefathers. Anchored in the specific circumstances of Jewish collective existence in “exile,” national revival was singled out by its emphasis upon “return” (the return to Zion) as the national restoration. The motif of quintessence return not only dominated the Zionist mythology and praxis but also entailed a rejection of “exile” as a Jewish option. The Zionist “return” included two racist projects, one for Jewish-Israel settlement and one for the eviction of the non-Jewish-Palestinians. Both aimed at establishing a coherent nation with a defined territorial base for nationhood, and the revival of Hebrew culture and identity (Sand 2010). As a result, those projects and their supporting narratives have resulted in the sustenance of the Palestinians’ Nakba.

Important actors here are the Israeli universities. They have promoted the Zionist myths about the Holy Land through the re/production of historical literatures. They also have chosen to fully support the Israeli security forces and policies for the illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territories, despite the serious suspicions of crimes and atrocities hovering over them. A report published by The Alternative Information Centre (Hever 2009) uncovers the consistent political choices made by more than 27 Israeli universities and Institutes to support the illegal activities of occupation. These choices have not only limited the freedom of expression in Israel’s universities but also challenged the ethical policies of their partners from the international academic community.

Participation in Military Activities

Production of military research is perhaps common worldwide. However, Israeli universities produce military research and offer the Israeli occupation forces with physical spaces to experiment these researches and carry out their military training. Technion University includes a “job fair” for weapon manufacturing companies, such as Elbit and RAFAEL, and offers training for engineers to specifically work for these companies. Since 2008, Elbit awards half a million dollars in grants to Technion research students. Officers from Elbit are part of the University’s Board of Directors (Hever 2009). Such relations with Technion have empowered Elbit in defining the strategic research of Technion. It has promoted the advance of unmanned vehicles, which aided the Israeli army attack on Gaza in 2008-2009, and resulted in the destruction of several Palestinian houses and physical infrastructures. Although European governments have financed some of these infrastructures the Technion University leads “Home Security” projects in collaboration with other European universities financed by the European Framework Program FP7. Maintaining international partnerships with Technion despite its support to the illegal Israel occupation made Technion supercilious. It has employed and honored military officers who are implicit in the illegal occupation. Haim Russo, a senior manager in Elbit Systems, joins the Technion’s quaternion. Technion has granted an honorary doctorate to the President of Elbit Systems and has provided special assistance to the students who served in Israel’s 2008 attack on the Gaza Strip.

Moreover, several Israeli Universities are built on the ruins of Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed in the wars of 1948 and 1967. Others are located in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Tel-Aviv University is located on the destroyed Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwanis, whose residents were displaced and exiled by the Zionist militants. This history has never been acknowledged by the university, although one might expect such a “neutral institution” to recognize the historic development of the different ethnicities of a society and their rights to associate themselves with their specific histories and geographies. The Ariel University Center of Samaria is located in the Ariel settlement, West Bank. Although the college and its staff have been boycotted both in Israel and overseas, the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Minister of Education Gideon Saar praised the decision of the Council for Higher Education in Judea and Samaria to grant the institution full university status.

Stifling of Political Dissent in the Israeli Universities

Since the 1960s, the growth of the international calls for social and political inclusions has encouraged universities worldwide to offer spaces for freedom of expression. In Israel, a series of repressive measures are sanctioned by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to intimidate domestic criticism, ranging from human rights groups to the media and judiciary (Cook 2012, 22). According to researches by Dirasat (a Nazareth-based organization monitoring education issues) Palestinian citizens of Israel (20% of Israel’s population) experience rampant discrimination. As applicants at Israeli Universities, they are three times more likely to be rejected than their Jewish counterparts.

Inside the universities, Jewish students and faculty members police the academic environments and act as the watchdog of the courses of “dissident” professors. To avoid public vilification, job loss, imprisonment, or even death, staff members delimit the information that might disrupt external political groups or the authorities. Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, was condemned by the Knesset Education Committee after he criticized a Jewish student who arrived in his film studies class at Sapir College in the Negev wearing his uniform (Cook 2008). This wasn’t the case when a Jewish lecturer at the same college asked a female Bedouin student not to come to class wearing a veil. When Eyal Rosenberg, a Master student at the Technion University didn’t participate in singing the national anthem (Hatikva) in a graduation official ceremony he was warned not to attend the next ceremony.

Professor Ilan Pappe who supports academic boycott of Israel was himself boycotted at Haifa University. After he had received several death threats and had been condemned by the Knesset, he moved his work to the University of Exeter in 2008. Professor Ariella Azoulay of Bar-Ilan University was denied tenure because of her political associations. The Zionist extra-parliamentary group Im Tirtzu published a report propagating the need to dismiss Professor Neve Gordon at Ben-Gurion University after he announced his support for the boycott of Israeli in 2009. This report called upon the University of Ben Gurion to “put an end to its anti-Zionist tilt” (Haaretz 2012). In response, the education minister, Gideon Sa’ar, has criticized the department at Ben Gurion for their “post-Zionist” bias. In an interview reported in Haaretz, Professor Gilad Haran who initiated the aforementioned petition stated that, “academic freedom in Israel’s higher education system is in severe danger”.

The examples above indicate that closing down the Department of Government and Politics at BGU is not without its own political interests. It aims to support the aforementioned Zionist ideology and to reduce threats this department generates against the Jewish unity of the State of Israel. As stated by the president of BGU, Professor Rivka Carmi, in her letter to the Presidents of Israel’s research universities: “I request your support against this dangerous development which is taking place before our eyes… there are many internal and external threats against Israeli academic institutions… This is not Ben Gurion University’s private battle, but a struggle of all Israeli academic institutions… Ratification of the current decision by the CHE is like hoisting a black flag over the independence of Israeli academics.” Professor Tanya Reinhart of Tel Aviv University, says that, “Never in its history did the Board of any Israeli university pass a resolution protesting the frequent closure of Palestinian universities…. [I]n extreme situations of violations of human rights and moral principles, the academia refuses to criticize and take a side, it collaborates with the oppressing system’ (Reinhart, 2003). The same is true of Israel’s supporters abroad; not one of the 450 presidents of American colleges, who denounced the boycott call, protested against the destruction of the Islamic University in Gaza.

In response to the silencing and policing practices of Israel academia, especially after the Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-2009, concerned academics worldwide have demanded their universities to break their relations with Israel universities that have not dissociated themselves from Israel’s apartheid policy. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP: www.bricup.org.uk/) was formed in response to the Palestinian Call for Academic Boycott. It supports the Palestinian universities, and opposes the continued illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands with its concomitant breaches of international conventions of human rights, its refusal to accept UN resolutions or rulings of the International Court, and its persistent suppression of Palestinian academic freedom (BRICUP website).

In Sweden, a group of students and faculty members of the Royal Institute of Technology formed the “Action Group at KTH for the Boycott of Israel” (PSABI: www.psabi.net ). The president of KTH banned the use of KTH premises for the activities of the group. In a press release, PSABI demanded that KTH implement its ethical policy against the Israeli universities that are implicated in the illegal occupation. In December 2011, PSABI escalated this call to the national level. 218 academics endorsed this call which was sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and all Swedish universities. In Norway, 100 prominent persons signed an appeal to the same end. Other examples include the university staff association of McGill University in Montreal, students and academics at the Uppsala University, Sweden, and the student union of the University of California – Berkeley. The University of Johannesburg has already broken its cooperation with Ben Gurion University.

At the European level, more than 260 academics from 20 different countries have written to the European Commission urging it to take action to prevent Israeli arms producers and other companies involved in abusing Palestinian human rights from participating in EU funded research consortia such as the aforementioned FP7. The letter argues that EU funded research programs supporting Israeli companies that help Israel violate international law “undermines both the reputation of these programs and the stated goals of the European Union and its member states.” In September 2012, Márie Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, sent a carefully worded reply that avoids taking a position.

The boycott campaign is often seen as standing in conflict with free dialogues and cooperation, and the achievement of academic freedom. For its proponents, the past 70 years of various types of dialogue with the Israeli authorities have neither promoted the peace process nor obliged Israel to comply with the different UN resolutions. Examples from South Africa during the apartheid regime show that calls for academic freedoms from within and outside the official boundaries of universities can be effective. Such calls might uncover the apartheid policy of the Israeli government; challenge the police system that control freedom of speech in universities; and thereby rescue Israeli universities from their current ethical crisis.

References

Benari E (2012) Nationalists Welcome Decision on Ariel University, Arutz Sheva article published on 7/18/2012,. Accessed on 2012-11-08 from http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/157960#.UKAko4chjpY

Cook J (2012) The full story behind the war against free speech in Israel’s universities. The Electronic Intifada. Accessed on 2012-10-27 from http://electronicintifada.net/content/full-story-behind-war-against-free-speech-israels-universities/11783

Cook, J. (2008) Academic Freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel. Counter Punch. Accessed on 2012-11-08 from http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/02/29/academic-freedom-not-for-arabs-in-israel/

Eqeiq, A (2012) “Epilogue.” Omrim Yeshna Eretz – Hekayat Balad (Once upon a Land) / A Tour Guide. Sedek. Zochrot: Tel-Aviv, 2012. 500-509.

Gordon, N (2006) Letting Being Be: Cross-Cultural Encounters in a University Setting. Accessed on 2012-11-07 from http://israelsoccupation.info/sites/default/files/Letting%20being%20be.pdf

Gordon N, Halper J (2008) Where’s the academic outrage over the bombing of a university in Gaza? Counterpunch [online] Dec 312009.

Hever, S. (2009) The Economy of the Occupation – A Socioeconomic Bulletin. Jerusalem: The Alternative Information Center. Accessed on 2010-02-5 from http://usacbi.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/economy_of_the_occupation_23-24.pdf

McGregor, P. (1991) Palestinian Education in the Occupied Territories. A Master Thesis, University of Canterbury.

Rose H, Rose S (2008) Israel, Europe and the academic boycott. Race Cl 50: 1–20.

Rose S (2009) Academic freedom in Israel and Palestine. Accessed on 2012-11-08 from http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v10/n11/full/embor2009229.html

Sand, S (2010) The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso.

Sheizaf, N (2012) Nakba Law in action: Students must pay expenses for ceremony. Accessed on 2012-11-21 from http://972mag.com/nakba-law-in-action-students-forced-to-pay-expenses-of-commemoration-ceremony/45555/

UN (2005) Cost of Conflict: Nablus after 5 Years of Conflict. UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

To read the full report, please visit here.

On August 6, with the new academic year approaching, the government-backed Mehr News Agency in Iran posted a bulletin that 36 universities in the country had excluded women from 77 fields of study. The reported restrictions aroused something of an international uproar. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer and Nobel laureate exiled in Britain, wrote a letter to Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, and Navi Pillay, the UN high commissioner for human rights, condemning the measure as “part of the recent policy of the Islamic Republic, which tries to return women to the private domain inside the home as it cannot tolerate their passionate presence in the public arena.” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland read a statement on August 21 calling upon “Iranian authorities to protect women’s rights and to uphold Iran’s own laws and international obligations, which guarantee non-discrimination in all areas of life, including access to education.”

In Iran, higher education officials went on the defensive, denying the existence of gender discrimination and blaming “clerical error” for what they claimed were misrepresentations in the media. The Education Evaluation Organization, which administers the nationwide entrance exam called the Concours, released a statement saying that a mere 0.3 percent of study programs would be affected by the new policy, which would apply to admission of entering classes. Kamran Daneshjoo, the cabinet minister who is the public face of the restrictions, suggested that the story had been blown out of proportion by the Persian-language services of the BBC and Voice of America. “If they are unhappy,” he said, “it means we are doing the right thing.” [1]

With the fall semester well underway in Iran, it is clear that the spin from both the Islamic Republic and the West was somewhat misleading. The new restrictions affect both men and women, and are part of a long-standing scheme of gender segregation that is not an invention of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline conservative government. Such schemes date back to the early years of the Islamic Republic and have been tried by different governments in the service of different goals. In the 1980s, the state sought physically to separate men and women on campus, in keeping with the idea that mingling of the sexes outside the home was “un-Islamic” and dangerous for public morality. Today, the hardliners want to “Islamize” the campus anew, but also to redress the unintended consequences of the feminization of higher education in Iran. The new gender segregation measures are primarily aimed at protecting the life chances of men, in education, marriage and the job market, and at shielding the state from political pressure amidst high unemployment and overall economic malaise.

Devil in the Details
In its late summer defense of the new restrictions, the Education Evaluation Organization marshaled figures that presented the changes as minimal: Of 1.6 million applicants to the nation’s universities, some 631,0000 would be admitted, of whom roughly 570,000 (or 90 percent) would enter programs open to both men and women. Only 31,000 applicants (5.3 percent) would commence study in men-only programs, and 30,000 (4.7 percent) in women-only programs. Nevertheless, the overall gender segregation regime is far larger than these numbers imply. It is a patchwork of different practices that are applied, albeit unevenly, at universities across the country.

Many universities have simply expanded the rigid gender quotas that have been in effect since the Islamic Republic’s first decade, by which a specific number of places are allotted to men and women in each field of study. For example, Tehran University, generally considered the flagship institution of Iranian higher education, allocates half the classroom seats to men and half to women in almost every discipline. If the number of available seats is odd, the extra one, as a rule, goes to a man. In 2012, the philosophy department at Tehran University has admitted 25 students — 13 men and 12 women. There are exceptions to the 50-50 quota system: Shahid Beheshti University, also in the capital, has accepted 110 law students — 60 women and 50 men.

Other schools are separating male and female students into two cohorts, which, at least in theory, will follow two tracks in their studies. The men are admitted in the fall semester and the women in the spring. In practice, however, and in the absence of monitoring of the separation all the way through, the cohorts eventually mix and men and women often end up sitting in the same elective courses. Such is the case, for example, at Arak University in central Iran, which has admitted single-gender cohorts in its Persian literature and Arabic literature programs. Lorestan University in the mountainous west has followed a similar system in its psychology, education, economics and business management programs. It is mostly provincial universities that have carried out such policies. The Islamic Republic has often used the provinces as testing grounds for its more controversial initiatives. The pilot plan is usually implemented in lightly populated provinces to gauge the severity of the reaction in (sometimes radically) different constituencies. If successful, the plan is then extended to larger provinces and the capital city.
Still other universities have reserved certain fields of study exclusively for men, usually fields that for economic or cultural reasons are traditionally regarded as “masculine.” The Oil Industry University, for instance, has barred women from studying accounting, business management and industrial management. According to university officials, women rarely show interest in oil industry careers, and the state is wasting its investment by making free higher education in these fields available to them. But the officials wish as well to secure these highly paid and sought-after jobs for men. Shahid Chamran University, a historically important institution in the southern province of Khuzestan, has likewise excluded women from law, economics, social sciences and geography — and thus from futures in those professions. Tehran’s Allameh Tabatabaei University has designated hotel management, among other fields, as men-only. The hotels in the capital are those where most foreigners would stay and therefore provide hotel employees with more lucrative job opportunities. (Women can still enroll in law, hotel management or economics programs at other universities.)

The men-only programs have garnered the most media coverage, but several institutions have also reserved certain fields of study — often “feminine” ones — exclusively for women. In 2012, Shahid Chamran University admitted no men to study history, Persian literature, psychology or education. Allameh Tabatabaei University has similarly excluded men from education, political science and library science programs. Golestan University in Gorgan near the Caspian Sea has admitted women only into Persian literature and geography courses.

There does not, however, seem to be a countrywide pattern to the new types of single-gender admissions. Various universities seem to have adopted the measures arbitrarily and drawn the line between “masculine” and “feminine” fields of study haphazardly. No one in government, in fact, has taken responsibility for the implementation of the new measures. The Education Evaluation Organization claims that they were proposed by individual deans.

Gender segregation, however, is not solely an administrative practice of admissions officers. Under Kamran Daneshjoo, the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology is also pushing for two types of physical separation of men and women. This ministry oversees all state-run institutions of higher education, which are the most prestigious and resource-rich such institutions in Iran.

In the early 1980s, extremist factions within the fledgling Islamic Republic asked that classrooms be gender-segregated and, in some cases, dividers were actually erected between rows of men and rows of women. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini reportedly instructed Ali Khamenei, then the Republic’s president and now Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, to speak against this practice in his Friday sermon. The dividers were taken down, but gender segregation endured. Signs went up in hallways, classrooms, libraries and cafeterias directing “sisters” and “brothers” to walk in separate lanes or sit in separate places. These restrictions eventually faded away as it was difficult and costly to monitor students’ every movement. Science Minister Daneshjoo wants these measures back, however, because “Islamization has two dimensions, one of which is content of academic disciplines — especially social sciences — and the other of which is appearances and symbols.” [2] He announced: “Beginning this academic year, male and female students will have to sit in separate rows and university deans are responsible for overseeing this process.” [3] Sharif University, the most reputable technical university in Tehran, was one of the first to follow these instructions. The dean stated that “taking into account the availability of university space and the number of boys and girls,” the school would attempt to hold different classes for men and women. [4]

Daneshjoo is also rallying support among the clergy and in the Majles, the Iranian parliament, for single-gender universities. Single-gender universities have existed in Iran before. Tehran’s Imam Sadiq University, for example, was established in 1982 as an all-male institution. Alzahra university, Tehran’s women-only university, was founded in 1964 as a private school named the Higher Educational Institute for Girls. Ali Motahhari, an MP, pointed out this fact in a letter to President Ahmadinejad. “Even the Shah noted the importance of such initiatives,” he wrote, complaining that in the 32 years since the foundation of the Islamic Republic not a single major all-women university has come into being. “This is while even in the US, the worth of all-women universities has been recognized,” he added. [5]

Gholam Ali Naderi, a Science Ministry official, announced on August 21 that permits had been issued for the establishment of 18 new non-profit universities, in Qom, Karaj, Tabriz and Mashhad, all of which will be single-gender (all-men or all-women). [6] Two hundred and three MPs have signed a statement demanding that all universities allocate money for establishing women-only branches. The Ministry says its goal is to build a women-only university in each province of the country. [7] It remains to be seen whether the state will try to channel women to these women-only spaces or whether they will simply provide women with more choice in higher education. Past experience, however, shows that women have used such spaces as a way of extending their access to and presence in the public sphere.

Cotton and Fire, Meat and Cats
Why is the Islamic Republic pressing for this gender segregation initiative now? The question is particularly interesting in light of reported divisions inside the cabinet when the measures were only proposals. Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, once an advocate of gender segregation at hospitals, complained of the impracticality of such schemes at medical schools. Her comments were evidence that the plans for universities had not been cleared by President Ahmadinejad or his council of ministers. [8] The president himself wrote a letter to the Science Ministry calling for a halt to the “superficial and unscientific” proposals. [9]

Only Daneshjoo defended the plans robustly. They were rooted, he reminded his critics, in a measure passed by the High Council of Cultural Revolution in 1988. “Opponents ask: ‘Why now?’ Well, aren’t you ashamed of asking such questions? Why don’t you ask the previous authorities why they did not enforce the law?” He stressed that 14 senior religious scholars supported the ideas. These remarks have led many observers to read the gender segregation measures as a political maneuver in advance of the 2013 presidential election. Ahmadinejad and his cabinet have had poor relations with the conservative clerical establishment — tensions that deepened after spats about women’s attendance at soccer matches and the appointment of female ministers like Dastjerdi. [10] Ahmadinejad’s two terms in office will shortly expire, and it may be that the hardline camp he represents is hoping for a fresh start with the clerics.

Meanwhile, Daneshjoo also claimed that gender segregation policies were “in line with the Supreme Leader’s demands.” “Criticizing the plan,” he concluded, “is playing on the enemy’s and the opposition’s field.” [11] Indeed, despite his opposition to barriers in classrooms in the early 1980s, Ayatollah Khamenei appears to have embraced the concept of gender segregation by the late 1990s, during the reformist administration of Mohammad Khatami. In one lecture, the Leader berated the science minister of the time, Mohammad Moin, for his carelessness: “Co-ed school trips and retreats? I am baffled! Co-ed retreats?… There are places in the world where the relationship between boys and girls, men and women, is absolutely normal. There are no concerns, meaning that a man and a woman mingle in the same way as two men would or two women would. But in our country, in an Islamic environment, this is not the case.” [12] Hojjat-ol-Islam Nabiallah Fazlali, Khamenei’s representative at Tehran’s Khajeh Nasir Tusi University, lent insight into the Leader’s thinking in 2009 when he spoke of his “bitter memories” of “inappropriate friendships” on campus. “Women and men are like cotton and fire,” Fazlali continued. “If you don’t keep them apart, the cotton catches fire.” What attracts boys and girls to one another is “instinct and lust” — and nothing else. “When you throw a cat raw meat, it will eat the meat. How could it not?” [13] Young men, in both metaphors, are poised literally to devour young women, yet it is clear that the object of the clerics’ concern is the men.

MP Motahhari criticized Ahmadinejad for his initial opposition to gender segregation measures, saying it was of a piece with the president’s overly liberal tendencies in the cultural sphere. “If men and women are to mingle,” Motahhari declared, “then sexual relations should also be permitted, as in the Western world. Otherwise, the suppression of sexual desire leads to various mental and psychological problems.” [14] If the sexes mingle freely, in the deputy’s mind, young men will need to suppress their desire. Earlier in 2012, in a religious TV program aimed at youth, Hojjat-ol-Islam Naser Naghavian, Khamenei’s cultural represenative at Shahid Beheshti University, recalled the extreme frustration of a young male student who asked him if it was religiously permissible to feel sexual urges when sitting behind a woman in the classroom. The moral of the story would seem to be that if the cat cannot eat the meat, the meat must be taken away.

Hojjat-ol-Islam Mohsen Qaraati offers a different solution. He suggests that, until the state manages to implement gender segregation fully, women should refrain from wearing makeup and bright-colored dresses, so as to avoid “distracting” or “provoking” men. Sexually frustrated young men, meanwhile, should enter temporary marriages (mut‘a) with widows until they are ready to settle down permanently. “This,” he suggests, “would eliminate millions of sins.” [15] Hossein Malekafzali, from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences, explains what the “sins” are, claiming that “10 percent of our university students are engaged in various levels of [illegitimate] sexual relations.” [16]

“Lost in the Shadow of Modern Women”
But the regulation of sexuality is not the only motive behind the gender segregation moves, and worries over the position of women in Iranian universities are not new under Ahmadinejad. In 1998, for the first time in Iranian history, women outnumbered men in the ranks of newly admitted university students. Women’s share of places at university has been on the rise ever since, reaching a peak in 2008 when women made up 66 percent of the first-year class. Subsequently, this number has fallen to around 60 percent. But the overall trend of feminization is clear, and it is not restricted to undergraduate education. According to Fereshteh Roohafza of the Women’s Cultural and Social Council, a subdivision of the High Council of Cultural Revolution, in the past decade there has been a 269 percent increase in the number of women in doctoral programs, while the number of women pursuing a master’s degree has jumped by a factor of 26. [17]

Government officials and state-sanctioned news agencies constantly cite these figures, along with others indicating the explosion of female literacy (especially in rural areas), to present the Islamic Republic to the world as a promoter of women’s rights. Inside the corridors of power, however, the statistics are a source of anxiety. Iranian authorities express concern over the growth in the rate of divorce (up by 135 percent over the past decade) and the lagging number of new marriages. Tayebeh Safaei, a university professor and a member of Parliament’s education and research commission, worries about the remarkable gains of women in education: “Instead of talking about gender equality, we need to talk about gender justice. Because these imbalances can lead to social crises.” [18] What is the “social crisis”? All over the conservative press and online, commentators fret that men are losing out in education and the work force. (In reality, men continue to outnumber and out-earn women in the job market, but the perception is otherwise.) One such article reads like a requiem for male glory. “Modern men,” the author implies, are lost “in the shadow of modern women”: “It is obvious that men are becoming junior partners. The man of the house is just a bank account who has no say in anything…. ‘Whipped’ is the best adjective for describing modern men…. Effeminacy is at the heart of modernity: Men are no longer the men they used to be. They have almost been transformed into a third gender, floating between manhood and womanhood…. Women are the center, like the sun, and men are relegated to the margins, useless and submissive, like the moon [whose light is a reflection of the sun’s]…. It’s fair to call them ‘dopey fathers.’” [19]

Risible rhetoric aside, the social landscape in Iran has indeed changed, and with it the status of traditional gender norms and values. The university campus is one place where the state can try to modulate the pace of change.

In 2000, during the Khatami presidency, higher education officials pressed for stricter gender quotas, aiming to reserve half of the seats in each entering class for men and half for women. This initiative would have cut the number of women in some fields, but also increased it in technical fields where women were underrepresented at the time. Critics accused the state of taking a step toward curbing women’s access to higher education and phasing out female-dominated disciplines. Officials denied it, and the initiative was tabled. In 2002, Hossein Rahimi, director of the Education Evaluation Organization, again broached the subject of a 50 percent gender quota, arguing that this measure would improve the quality of education. That same year, the High Council of Medical Education Planning, a branch of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, demanded that up to 50 percent of the seats in medicine and dentistry be allocated to women. And while on the face of it, this step seemed to benefit women, many believed it was intended to put a cap on the ever growing proportion of women in medical practice. Numerous women’s rights activists opposed the proposal, along with 156 members of the reformist-led Sixth Majles, who requested that it be suspended. When the demand was presented to the cabinet, Khatami asked for more research into its likely consequences.

The feminization of higher education has been inexorable, however, for the simple reason that girls are achieving higher scores on admissions exams than boys. In 2012, too, more than 60 percent of new admits to university are women. Women ranked first in natural sciences, social sciences, foreign languages and literatures, and art — every field of the Concours, in fact, except mathematics. The gender disparity in achievement persists at the university level. Even in the “masculine” field of mining engineering, reportedly, four of the top six graduates in Tehran University’s class of 2012 were women. Iranian women of all levels of education are increasingly finding their way into “masculine” domains of the job market.

As sociology professor Shahla Ezazi points out, “In recent years, women’s share of university education and especially technical education has been growing. Thus their chances of getting a prestigious job with a high salary are growing as well.” [20] In Iran, however, male employment is still considered primary; the husband is supposed to be the main breadwinner. This confluence of factors likely explains why universities are trying to reestablish the distinction between “masculine” and “feminine” fields of study. The Oil Industry University, for instance, has justified its new restrictions on the grounds that certain fields do not suit “women’s nature” because of “difficult working conditions.”

Conservatives portray these attempts to enforce a gendered division of labor as natural and desirable. Pouran Valuyun, a conservative female judge and adviser to the judiciary, asks, “Why is it that when we excluded men from certain medical fields [such as gynecology] four years ago, there was not a peep? Now suddenly everyone is concerned!” [21] Another conservative commentator objects to the “overpopulation of government organizations with women and spinsters who have, amidst the unemployment crisis, restricted men’s access to the job market.” For him, women’s mass entry into the workplace explains the lowering rate of marriage: “At first glance, women’s employment might work in their interest, but under the current circumstances in our society men should be given priority in the job market…because an unemployed man equals a husband-less woman. No one will marry off their daughter to an unemployed man, but an unemployed woman has no problem getting married.” [22]

Protecting Men and the State
The September 15, 2012 issue of Hamshahri Javan, a state-run magazine intended for youth, dedicates an entire section to women’s successes, but depicts them as dangerous. The main cover title reads: “Hands Up! Women Ambushing Social Spheres: First Universities, Then Sports and Now Key Jobs. What’s the Next Target?”

A girl in pigtails armed with an assault rifle faces down a tall, top-hatted man with spindly legs, whose shadow is seen against the wall. The illustration evokes My Daddy Long Legs, a 1990 Japanese anime television series (based on the 1912 American novel Daddy-Long-Legs written by Jean Webster), which was dubbed in Persian and shown on state-run TV in the 1990s. The series tells the tale of a girl, Judy Abbott, who is attending college thanks to a wealthy man whom she has seen only in silhouette. The message of the Hamshahri Javan cover would seem to be that Iran’s Judy Abbotts have not only outgrown their need for male benefactors, but also become hostile toward them. One article inside, titled “Dear Boys, Don’t You Worry,” refers to the “ambushing” of university seats as “the first step” in the encroachment of women into all areas of social life.

The feminization of Iranian higher education is a phenomenon deeply rooted in social change, rather than in political divides inside and outside the Islamic Republic. Opposition to the new gender segregation regime is coming not only from students and professors but also from conservative women’s groups such as the Islamic Coalition of Women and the Islamic Population of Women Followers of Hazrat Zahra. The criticisms have been fierce enough that some universities, like Shahid Chamran, have rescinded the initial restrictions on what and where young men and women may study.

Meanwhile, the evidence from the Iranian press and the statements of public officials suggests that the fresh turn toward gender segregation policies, while its costs are paid mainly by women, is more about an escalating concern with a crisis of masculinity, embodied in sexually frustrated, under-educated men who are confronting a bleak future. The state wants to give an impotent masculinity the kiss of life rather than kiss a potent femininity goodbye. And it is not about men’s feelings. Iran is in economic crisis, squeezed by sanctions, reeling from devaluation of the rial and worn down by a high unemployment rate. The hardliners in control of the Iranian state are employing all measures possible to stave off social unrest led by jobless men, whom their assumptions lead them to fear the most.

The co-author can be reached via email at nazanin[at]berkeley.edu.

Originally published in: Middle East Report Online (MERO), 18 October 2012: http://www.merip.org/mero/mero101812

Image: Hamshahri Javan cover.

Endnotes
[1] Khabar Online, August 12, 2012.
[2] Fararu, July 7, 2011.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Mehr News Agency, June 27, 2011.
[5] Parsine, July 6, 2011.
[6] Farda News, August 21, 2012.
[7] Khabar Online, October 1, 2011.
[8] Fars News Agency, September 8, 2012.
[9] Khabar Online, October 1, 2011.
[10] See Nazanin Shahrokni, “All the President’s Women,” Middle East Report 253 (Winter 2009).
[11] Fars News Agency, July 5, 2011.
[12] Student News Agency (Iran), October 24, 2011.
[13] Radio Farda, November 20, 2009.
[14] Parsine, July 6, 2011.
[15] Etemad, October 3, 2012.
[16] Jamejam, June 21, 2012.
[17] Fars News Agency, February 10, 2012.
[18] Tebyan, July 10, 2012.
[19] Rasekhoon, April 30, 2012.
[20] Daneshjoo News, August 10, 2012.
[21] Iran Zanan, August 16, 2012.
[22] Alef, August 10, 2012.

The Subcommittee for Quality Assessment of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE) has submitted a proposal to bar Ben Gurion University’s Department of Politics and Government from admitting students this year. This proposal follows a short report submitted by two international scholars, Professor Thomas Risse and Professor Ellen Immergut, about the university’s handling of another critical report prepared by an international committee CHE had appointed to audit departments of political science in Israeli universities. Appointed by the Israeli Minister of Education, CHE is a public body that is meant to preside over the management of Israeli universities and colleges, ensure their responsible budgetary management, and guarantee their academic autonomy. Recently, however, the Minister of Education, a radical right-wing figure, has appointed several right-leaning public representatives and academics as new CHE members and initiated several moves that were clearly political. The subcommittee’s proposal is a conclusive step toward closing the Department of Politics and Government, a department known in Israel for the political activism of some of its professors, some of whom are vocal and sharp critics of the Israeli regime.

The actions CHE has taken against the Department of Politics and Government are clearly politically motivated. The department has been an important target for Im Tirzu, a nationalist movement. Using McCarthyist methods, Im Tirzu persecutes non-Zionist academics systematically, encourages students to report “leftist” professors, and keeps track of syllabi in social science and humanities departments and evaluates them according to the movement’s own “Zionist” and “national” standards. Both the Minister of Education as well as a member of the auditing committee who has been particularly active in aggravating the report’s tone, Professor Avraham Diskin, are close to “Im Tirtzu” or at least, identify politically with the movement. Professor Moshe Maor, who serves as the chair of the CHE subcommittee, is a member of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, and identifies himself as a supporter of right-wing politics. Indeed, some of the reasoning that appeared in a public announcement made by CHE’s spokesperson, as well as in clarifying letters sent later, was whitewashed political arguments.

The context in which the attack against the department is waged, which made the threat to close it concrete, is quintessentially political too. The Israeli regime along with the right-wing circles linked to it are promoting initiatives in all areas and institutional branches, to push those who identify with the political left out of positions of power. This is the case in the justice system, in the state attorney’s office, in the professional ranks of the Ministry of Education, on public radio and television, and in newspapers. This is the case in CHE itself, where representatives from universities were reduced in number, while “public representatives” and representatives from colleges, many of whom, as mentioned earlier, are right-wing figures, have increased.

Equally significant as the political context, is the academic context in which CHE’s proposal was made. Ben Gurion University’s Department of Politics and Government was originally founded as an alternative to what was considered mainstream political science in Israel. A quantitative and positivist research orientation dominated and continues to dominate the other four Israeli political science departments. The precondition that Ben Gurion University’s department follow a distinctive approach and pursue distinctive research topics was in fact originally established by CHE itself, more than a decade ago, when the department was first created. CHE followed a correctly pluralist approach then. Pluralism, in this case, like in many other cases, is a matter of focus. The other political science departments are not pluralistic: they include only a small minority of researchers that adopt interpretive, historical, and critical approaches, and these researchers tend to be marginal in their departments. The Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University is not pluralistic because it does not give sufficient representation to quantitative and positivist research. But thanks to CHE’s decision, which was instrumental in establishing the department, political research in Israel became more pluralistic.

And indeed, the Department of Politics and Government gathered a group of outstanding scholars (the auditing committee report does not doubt this point), most of whom employ a variety of approaches that belong to the wide field of interpretive-historical research in social sciences. One of the most important characteristics of the interpretive approach, especially in its critical branches, is the fact that unlike most political science research, the state—the nation state in its current historical form—does not determine the coordinates within which research takes place, but is itself made an object of research. This is why the department is not called “the Department of Political Science,” but rather “the Department of Politics and Government.” The premise is that the state is a changing form of politics and government or governance, and these—not the state itself—are the elementary forms from which investigation should begin. Therefore, the problematization of the nation state is not necessarily an outcome of post-Zionist thinking, but of a critical historical approach to the state, its logic (raison d’être), and its apparatuses. One may very well adopt such an approach and be Zionist—indeed, there are such Zionist scholars in the Department of Politics and Government—but, in such cases, Zionist ideology would take on characteristics that would distinguish it from a right-wing Zionist ideology.

CHE appointed an auditing committee, in which none of the members could be counted as representing the critical historical approach to the study of state and politics. In no academic journal in this field, central or marginal, would the editors consider sending one of the committee members an article written by researchers in the department for review. No decent institution would ask them to review a file of a department scholar being evaluated for appointment, tenure, or promotion. Yet all of these people were convened to decide on the verdict of an entire academic department, whose research is in fact not in their field. The conclusive critical reasoning of the original report cited lack of scholarly pluralism in the department. They accused the department of insisting on studying a field that is its raison d’être. They accused the department of not balancing different academic approaches, as if balance in science is a matter similar to a T.V talk show.

Because of the political pressure and the palpable threat CHE posed, Ben Gurion University gave in, appointed new researchers that would satisfy the report’s demands, and made several changes in the curriculum. The last letter written by two international scholars, who had been appointed to keep track of the department’s implementation of the report, praises the University for successfully recruiting new researchers and calls on it to provide these researchers with resources and the time not only to conduct research, but also to develop a more diverse curriculum. This was the letter that the CHE subcommittee invoked to support its recommendation to stop enrollment in the department. That is, in the CHE subcommittee proposal, the allegation that the department lacks research diversity—fundamentally inaccurate in the first place, and which was addressed by the reforms Ben Gurion University adopted when it gave in to political pressure—remained the only guise for the political motivation behind the persecution of the department. In other words, the only rationale the subcommittee does rely on is flawed and contradicted by the content of the letter written by the very same international scholars that it cites.

In its blatant intervention in Ben Gurion University’s academic affairs, CHE does not only overstep the limits of its authority as defined by Israeli law, but it also violates the very principle of academic freedom. No academic department is obliged to give representation, let alone equal representation, to all scholarly approaches. Just as researchers should not be forced to adopt certain approaches, no one should impose a particular approach on departments. Departments should foster one or many academic approaches and prefer them to others based on their understanding of the state of knowledge. Departments should distinguish themselves from each other in their approaches to research and in the different emphases they put on history and theory, measurement, and comparison. CHE is not supposed to intervene in these matters. If there is an authority to correct an imbalance between different research approaches, that responsibility lies with the faculty and the university. Moreover, a perceived imbalance should be rectified by appointing new faculty members or opening new departments, not by closing existing departments filled with outstanding researchers. CHE’s decision has wide-reaching implications. It is not just a no-confidence vote in the Department of Politics and Government, but also a blatant intervention in the way Ben Gurion University navigates its academic affairs. Alas, the university has studied the auditing committee’s report, provided resources for new appointments in the department, decided in discussion with the department’s faculty what scholarly approaches should be added and from which specialties new researches should be recruited, followed the recruitment process closely, using international experts, and even required the department to adopt several changes in its curricula—and the university backs the department completely.

This is where we should consider the political conditions again.

We have good reason to believe that the decision to start the review process at CHE was driven from the beginning, to a large extent, by the desire to get rid of those “post-Zionists,” revisionist historians and critical sociologists that have been deconstructing mainstream Zionist meta-narrative and ideology since the early nineties. The simplistic reasoning behind this move goes something like this: critical theory = postmodernism + Marxism = post-Zionism. Who was selected to the auditing committees was certainly shaped by the effort to delegitimize anything that smells of critical theory. Last week CHE released another report, the general report of the evaluating committee for sociology and anthropology departments (in Israel the two are combined). Once again, their main target was critical theory; and indeed, this report should be studied in critical theory classes. The committee declares that “critical studies are controversial as areas within sociology” and should therefore “remain modest in size in any one department.” In a recent letter, Professor Maor, chair of the committee that recommended the sanction againt the Department of Politics and Government at BGU, uses precisely the same language to explain his recommendation. He could have quoted the report on the departments of sociology and anthropology in full, for this report goes on to explain that “critical studies are not part of the disciplinary core of the profession (i.e. sociology), contribute little to the prestige of a department in international arenas, and its representation in a sociology program should therefore be modest. This is best accomplished by limiting the number of sociology faculty in a department who are disposed to this theoretical approach and research style.” To this recommendation the committee then adds an interesting reservation: it should not apply to anthropologists. Why? Because critical theory “appears to be common in elite anthropology departments in the US and Western Europe… [and] the anthropological profession appears to have absorbed this conceptual orientation.”

Ever since the audit committee was created, the Department of Politics and Government has made little use of arguments about the legitimacy of its critical approaches, the scientific nature of political science, or the bias of the committee in this respect. The university administration, which has supported the department (more so today than in the past), was very reluctant to use this kind of argument because it mostly shares the spirit of positivism, along with the neoliberal ethos of quantification and of measurements of efficiency and excellence. Today, even though the threat to academic freedom is so blatant, the administration chooses to address CHE’s misconduct and the discrepancy between the “professional” report and the way CHE uses it.

One should keep in mind that Ben Gurion University is a peripheral academic institution; it depends on CHE much more than more established institutions like the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University. It is the victim of a serious flaw in CHE’s conduct, a flaw that has led to the right-wing’s takeover of this body and the legitimacy that many of its members gave to the systematic persecution of leftist figures in Israeli academia in a political context where such persecutions are the norm. If the decision is made to bar Ben Gurion University from registering students in the Department of Politics and Government, it will create an opening for politicians and academics loyal to them, to dictate academic curricula in Israeli universities. This is nothing new, historically. But it may happen in Israel too.

That is why this is a critical moment for the future of Israeli higher education. Faculty in all universities must gather together to stop the closure of the Department of Politics and Government. We should demand from the heads of our universities not to leave Ben Gurion University alone in this battle against the subcommittee’s foolish proposal. We should make it clear that a Council for Higher Education that adopts this proposal will lose its academic legitimacy both in Israel and the rest of the world, and in a way that will have serious consequences for Israeli academia. We should make it clear that this is a violation of the accepted relationship between the regime and academia. We should make it clear that this violation necessitates a response, which can range from stopping all cooperation with CHE to calling a strike in the entire higher education system.

To support the Department of Politics and Government, visit the international petition here.

Read more about the entire affair (and look at relevant documents), in English, here.

Read CHE’s letter of clarification published in Haaretz on September 30, 2012, here.