It is an honor and pleasure to have been asked to speak to this conference, organized by Neal Sherman and the Israel-American Fulbright committee. I have had long and close ties with Israel, and I am delighted to have a chance to talk with you about your institutions of higher education in this way. It is not quite the same as being there, without the informal conversations over coffee or a meal that carry the real flavor of a meeting. But I will have to put off that pleasure for another occasion.
I will be speaking of Israeli higher education from an American perspective. I need scarcely warn you that in what I say I will not be suggesting that your system and institutions are just like ours, or should be. There are many differences between our societies and their colleges and universities, and not only those that arise from the enormous difference in size of our two countries. We differ in some ways, and are similar in others. For example, we are both societies of immigrants; that gives a special significance to our colleges and universities. I want to explore some of those differences and similarities as the context for a discussion of the relevance of our arrangements to yours.
Nevertheless, the fundamental challenge to all of us who think about higher education is to think of our colleges and universities not as specialized institutions for creating and transmitting knowledge, i.e. for research and teaching, but rather as the institutions that lie at the heart of every modern society, with a broad range of functions for those societies.
* Professor Martin Trow is a member of the Samuel Neaman Institute Working Group on “Rethinking the Research University of the 21st Century and the Israeli Higher Education System”. The paper was read through interactive video connection to a conference on Israeli Higher Education, in Tel Aviv, organized by the United States-Israel Educational Foundation, April 8, 2003, and reproduced with the author permission.
