Technion goes English

August 24, 2008 - 7:58 AM by

The Technion in HaifaLet’s call a spade a spade. Despite Israeli intellectual stature and accomplishments, Israeli academia has been taking a beating lately internationally. Repeating student and professor union strikes, including the PR fiasco that was 2007′s especially harsh holdout, don’t help. Of course, relentless campaigns to marginalize our institutions on the shaky and inconsistent grounds that Israeli Universities are perpetrators of human rights violations against the Palestinians don’t either.

Despite it all, Israel remains a major draw for international thinkers in many fields, and every Israeli university has strong partnerships with sister organizations in North America. Some American schools even offer degrees through their Israeli counterparts.

Haifa’s Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, Israel’s only University to offer no undergraduate programs, has recently announced that its MBA program will now be offered exclusively in the English language. The announcement says a lot about the struggle for Israeli academia’s internationally respected status – the Technion is, after all, the first Jewish-led institution of higher learning in the Holy Land, thereby representing a landmark in the development of the contemporary Hebrew language:

Because German was then the dominant language of the scientific world, and all textbooks were written in German, the institute’s backers demanded that most subjects at both the institute and the affiliated high school be taught in German. This decision caused the outbreak of the “language war” – a dramatic fight that convulsed the pre-state Jewish community of that time. Students at Hebrew schools appealed to the Technion’s administration and the World Zionist Organization, declaring: “The language of the Technicom [the Technion's original name] can and should be the Hebrew language.”

It’s all about globalization, a concept not foreign to the Technion’s approach in recent years. The school’s leadership hopes that its globalization efforts won’t backfire by merely enabling Israel’s elite thinkers to skedaddle. In fact, they’re hoping that other local institutions will follow suit, making Israel a major destination for the world’s non-Zionist developing minds, a relatively untapped market so far. As Prof. Boaz Golany, dean of the Technion’s faculty of industrial engineering and management, told Haaretz,

“We reached the conclusion that if we continued to train our students by teaching in Hebrew, we would be placing them in an inferior starting position, given the conditions of the global competition.”

In other words, in order to maximize matriculation figures amongst overseas students here, and in order to minimize the impact of Israel’s brain drain, sometimes a little identity mediation is in order.

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Comments

3 Comments on Technion goes English

  1. David-Joe on Sun, Aug 24th 2008 1:57 PM

    2. In my view that Hebrew is the primary languagae of Israel and not English is the main reason why aliyah from English speaking countries will never occur in any significant way.

  2. Maskil on Wed, Aug 27th 2008 4:45 PM

    3. This doesn’t have to take on the character of a Kulturkampf. I believe it would be easy draft a set of principles that would both protect Hebrew (as the national language of the Jews in their homeland) and still allow graduates of these programs (and the programs themselves) to become or remain competitive in the global arena.

    Apart from programs at those institutions specifically established to cater for a global Jewish audience (such as the IDC), under-graduate and Honours studies should be offered in Hebrew. The language of instruction for post-graduate studies at the Masters and Doctoral levels should depend on how the institution, course and prospective market for the course are positioned. For an MBA, English makes the most sense.

    Nations that are secure in their cultural and language-based identity are not concerned at having to adopt English in order to integrate with the global economy, and neither should we.

  3. omer on Sat, Oct 8th 2011 8:23 AM

    4. I like the intelligence of Hebrew people I like both universities in America and Israel but their is some thing I got afraid from Hebrew people which is dajal al cawr or dajal al masiix will be their son in the future OH MY GOD . there is some thing else I want to say does a Muslim person can learn this universities in Israel with no hatness for him .

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