Israel Hayom
February 23, 2014
"Will Dropouts Save America?," asked Michael Ellsberg in
a 2011 piece published by The New York Times, a paper that reveres
universities and is considered the flagship publication of the American
liberal Left.
Ellsberg said most of the high-tech entrepreneurs and
the drivers of the Internet economy -- from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to
Mark Zuckerberg -- were college dropouts, having realized that they
were wasting their time in class.
"American academia is good at producing writers,
literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing
professionals with degrees," Ellsberg wrote. "But we don't have a
shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job
creators. And the people who create jobs aren't traditional
professionals, but startup entrepreneurs. ... No business in America --
and therefore no job creation -- happens without someone buying
something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they
are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are
evil."
Things are much worse in Israel. Universities help shape
a radical view where entrepreneurship is frowned upon. The ethos they
espouse is diametrically opposed to the Zionist vision that touted hard
work as the linchpin of a merit-based society. Liberal arts programs
focus on "redistributing wealth" rather than on pursuing a successful
career, as if wealth just descends from the heavens and simply needs to
be distributed "fairly" (whatever that means).
The Naftali Building, at Tel Aviv University. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons/David Shay)
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What's worse is that students are told that profit is a
product of exploitation and therefore any transaction is a zero-sum
game. But that is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Israelis students come out
of university determined not to be suckers; they make sure their
clients and business partners will forever be at a disadvantage. Human
capital is Israel's most important asset. But in academia, the social
sciences and humanities are dominated by a group of postmodern
neo-Marxist zealots who shun anyone who is not like them, anyone who
does not adhere to their radical economic and political principles or
subscribe to their anti-capitalist ideology. They have devoided higher
education of any critical thought that is grounded in reality. (Remember
that dissertation that accused Israeli soldiers of racism because they
wouldn't rape Palestinian women?)
Hundreds of thousands of young Israelis enter
universities because they want to get a better job, only to be
systematically brainwashed on dogmatic principles. They graduate from
universities without the proper skills, having been denied useful
information or analytical tools for what lies ahead. It is then that
they realize that their hard-earned diplomas have no real value on the
job market (the accumulated annual expenditure on tuition -- which is
state-subsidized in many cases -- amounts to millions of shekels). Their
peers might be impressed by their ability to quote Jacques Lacan,
Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Zizek, but that is no way to make a living.
The demonstrators who took part in the social justice protests in 2011
lamented that their degrees have led them along an uncertain career
path. Their concern is shared by others all over the world and it has
had an adverse economic impact on Europe and the U.S.
The lack of real pluralism in Israeli universities poses
an existential threat to our economy and society. Wouldn't the massive
subsidies that help students obtain useless degrees -- which have no
vocational value and create an inflation of hundreds of pseudo-academics
-- be better spent on vocational training and real know-how?
Daniel Doron is founder-director of The Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress (ICSEP), a public policy think tank, and a fellow of the Middle East Forum.
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