La trahison des clercs
… or I should say "la trahison des elus," the betrayal of the leadership: The Presidents of the Universities ( with the notable exception of Pres. Galil of TAU), the Chair and Vice-Chair of MALAG, the Chair of VATAT, but first and foremost the Presidents of the Universities who caricatured themselves into "hanhalot", "management", instead of rising to the challenge of manhigut. Some of us have been there before and may even know what we are talking about.
[….] The Presidents seem to have forgotten who they are, where they come from, where they shall return, who their constituency is and to whom they shall render an account; but they forgot even more than that: they forgot what a university was. And in the process they have lost their mandate.
They forgot what a university is. Historically, in the West, higher education and its locus, the university, has evolved over hundreds of years, shaping and following, in a reciprocal way, the social and intellectual currents of the culture, until it has become the distilled expression and the very embodiment of the civilization , molding, representing, and transmitting it. From Athens of antiquity, through the monasteries to Bologna and the Sorbonne, to Oxford, to Harvard, to Jerusalem. In the course of the centuries and through changing emphases from theology to philosophy to science, reflecting dominant social and intellectual currents, a dual role has evolved for the universities. A dual role that is as powerful today as it was when the faculty of the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, broke free of episcopal control, almost eight hundred years ago, in 1215 CE.
המשך קריאת הפוסט "על מנהיגות האוניברסיטאות הכושלת / פרופ' אמריטוס אלכסנדר-זאב גיורא, אונ' חיפה"