BUDGET CUTS threaten the study of ancient history in Israel:

The shaky future of higher education (Ha'aretz)
By Dvorit Peles
The threat of closure hovers over various university departments - especially the humanities.

This year the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will not be offering courses for a B.A. in Italian, Yiddish and demography. At this point it is still possible to begin a course in Ancient Near Eastern Studies - Egyptology and Assyrian Studies - but those departments are also threatened with closure, though to a slightly lesser degree than the departments of African Studies, French, German and Russian.

The threatened closure of these departments is not unique to Hebrew University, and is actually affecting all the universities in recent years, some more and some less, due to the shifting demands for courses of study, and especially because of Finance Ministry cuts in the budgets of institutions of higher education over the last four years.

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The dean of the faculty of humanities at Hebrew University, Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, says that crisis periods are often actually periods of innovation, because of the need to cut back and select.

"The danger of certain areas of knowledge disappearing does exist, but sometimes instead of the disciplines that have disappeared, new disciplines emerge," he says. "It's impossible to preserve everything, even if they give me another $20 million."

Motzkin is referring to the threatened future of every discipline that has less than four positions for lecturers.

"All of the European language departments, for example, are at risk because they are small," he says. In this context, the threat to the Egyptology and Assyrian Studies departments, which each have two teaching positions and between five and 10 students each year, is the same as that facing the French department, where there are 60-80 students annually, but which also has only two teaching positions.

Another problem exists when it comes to advanced degrees. For example, in the Ancient History Department, where according to Motzkin there is an excellent teaching staff, there are no doctoral students, a fact that may place in question the continuation of the program to teach ancient Greek and Roman history.

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