Let us begin with a full disclosure in big letters: My wife Dr. Daniella (Dana) Margalit is a senior lecturer and very active member of the psychology department at the Ariel University Center in Samaria. She wants to continue to teach students, but no one asked me to write the following article. Another personal note: When I was just an almost-journalist boy, Professor Yuval Neeman invited me to meet an American Jew named George Weiss. They explained to me, using diagrams, (there was no PowerPoint back then, and certainly no laptops) why a university has to be founded in Tel Aviv. The entire academia ganged up on them, especially professors at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. They argued that there was no need for another academic institution in Tel Aviv, because the university in Jerusalem already answered all the country's academic needs. Why did they approach me? Because at the time, I was briefly reporting on urban development in Tel Aviv for Haaretz, and they wanted to take over the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv. I was reminded of this on Wednesday when the heads of the seven recognized universities urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to prevent the Ariel University Center in Samaria from being officially recognized as a university. They argued that Israel doesn't need another university it would only hinder the research being conducted at the existing universities. Since that meeting with Neeman and Weiss in the 1960s, I've noticed just how much spiritual, technological, economic and defense wealth would have never come about if Israel had heeded the choir of "we don't need another university" arguments. Famous IDF generals Yigal Allon and Yisrael Galili used the "we don't need" argument against the nuclear reactor in Dimona; former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and former President Ezer Weizman argued that "we don't need" Israel Aerospace Industries and the first made-in-Israel fighter jet (which never made it past the prototype phase). The advocates of the "we don't need" argument weren't always wrong we all remember the fiasco of draining the lake in the Hula Valley in the 1950s but usually in these cases it is best to question the "we don't need" school rather than heed them. Currently there are 13,000 Jews and Arabs from Israel and from the territories studying in Ariel and if their teachers are prevented from instilling knowledge in them and directing them toward doctoral degrees and professorship, the institution will gradually lose its prestige and more of its students will travel abroad to get a higher education. It will be like encouraging people to leave Israel. There are two arguments that can be legitimately used against recognizing Ariel as a university. The first is that it hasn't reached the academic level that would make it worthy of university status. A recognized Israeli university is an institution that carries a lot of prestige, a sort of Ivy League status in American terms. Ariel must be put to the test, and must meet the accepted criteria, without preferential treatment and without political backing based only on the merits of its research. When it meets the criteria (and it seems as though the criteria have already been met), the existing academic institutions can use the second argument and demand that the funding that the government would allocate to Ariel as an official university not detract from the funding that the existing schools are entitled to. In 2005, then-Finance Minister Ehud Olmert promised that the budget for Ariel would not come at the expense of the existing universities. Current Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz has echoed Olmert's vow. Under the current circumstances, this should be enough. Ultimately, each university that is founded in Israel only contributes to our strength.
