A few days from now, when students of the Faculty of Humanities enter their lecture halls at the Hebrew University, they will discover that some of their teachers have disappeared from their familiar surroundings. When they ask where they are, they will be told that the university was forced to cut more than a hundred faculty positions for teachers and lecturers due to budgetary constraints.

For years now, the academic world in Israel has been following in the footsteps of market forces, sometimes to adapt to them, often to mold the future of society. Today, high tech is the Israeli economy’s mark of distinction. Its unusual flowering sprouted from special military intelligence units that recruited the best and the brightest young men and women. On their way to achieving military superiority over enemy forces, these young people launched daring, state-of-the-art technological developments. After completing their military service, they pursued studies to advance them along the path on which they had begun in the army. 

The trend became clear. Any young person who wanted to get somewhere should seek a future in the prestigious faculties whose graduates are considered prized commodities in the economic market. Thus, a clear division of labor was created in academia: sciences with economic value versus social sciences and humanities. Those who could sign up for subjects that promised economic prosperity did so; those who could not or who sought a measure of inspiration signed up for ancient Greek literature or philosophy of the biblical period.

The more the academic world came to be regarded as the road to prosperity and well-being, the more the number of students in the so-called spiritual studies diminished. Dozens and then hundreds of courses reported a shortage of students. A Hebrew University lecturer told me that he was forced to cancel his class on the separationist trends of the Jacobeans during the French Revolution because fewer than five students had signed up for it. The universities claim in their defense that the reduction in humanities courses is the result of a lack of interest on the part of students, while academics regard this trend as a dangerous reflection of market forces.