חבלי הלידה של אוניברסיטת חיפה

Abstract

The University of Haifa was founded in 1972 and was the first university in Israel to be established in a city that already had an academic institution, namely the Technion. The article discusses the principal questions and practical issues on the university’s journey from an affiliate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to an independent institution and analyzes the political struggles against both its parent institution and the Technion. The research period spans a decade: from the summer of 1962 with the initial contacts between the Haifa Municipality and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until the summer of 1972 when it became an independent university. The article clarifies the motives for the Haifa Municipality's decision to establish a separate academic institution in the city, examines the responses of the Technion and the Hebrew University, and addresses how and why the University of Haifa became an independent university rather than merging with the Technion. These questions are discussed while examining the different interests of the three institutions involved—the Hebrew University, the Haifa Municipality and the Technion—and the power relations between them, against the backdrop of the political processes in the local and national arenas. The article surveys the relationships between the institutions, their collaborations, and the difficulty in merging them. The Technion was a national-state institution, which is closely aligned with state institutions and enjoys a reputation as a national institution, while the University of Haifa developed as a local-municipal institution, established by the municipality to serve the residents of Haifa and the North and to promote the city's status in the country. With the emergence of these two different models of academic institutions—national-state and local-municipal—the broader dilemma in the development of higher education in Israel comes into focus: centralization versus decentralization and the budget distribution between the small number of existing institutions versus the establishment of new institutions with particular characteristics.