To this day, the establishment of a university in the Galilee, in Safed, has been a game of tears.
The Council for Higher Education has done everything in its power to harm and destroy the possibility of establishing a research university for more than one million residents in the Galilee.
Today, with the establishment of the Aharon Ciechanover Committee examining the establishment of a university in the Galilee, we are required to set the goal before us which is an excellent research university that will concentrate the fields of medicine and natural sciences in Safed.
It is worth recalling the words of Jenny Lee, the Minister of Arts who helped implement the plan of Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, who sought to establish an open university for the English working class and peripheral residents who had difficulty acquiring higher education due to opposition from the university cartel.
Lee argued that the establishment of the new university was intended to deal with the insults, rejection and repression of working-class students who sought to integrate into universities.
And when she laid the foundation stone for the Open University Library that bore her name she set a goal: "An independent and large university that will not offend any man or woman on the basis of their background or offer them a weakened education in relation to the best. Nothing but the best is good enough."
The MLAG has now set up the Prof. Aharon Ciechanover Committee to examine the establishment of a university in the Galilee and has four options to continue the academic tear game and erode and reduce the "best" for the Galilee.
First option, a recommendation to thwart the establishment of a university in the Galilee and leave the dispersal of colleges throughout the region intact. To do this, Ciechanover does not have to work hard, but only make a "glue copy" of the conclusions of the committee of Prof. Joshua Yurtner, the previous committee of the MLAG that examined the establishment of a university in the Galilee and destroyed its prospects for fifty years. That he is required to request from the State Archives this file: "The Council for Higher Education - Committee for the Establishment of a University in the Galilee, Gal-18813/38, Original File No., 282/6".
Option two, annexation of the colleges scattered in the Galilee to the University of Haifa.
This is a university that has never developed the field of natural sciences and today taking on the establishment of a research university is a mockery of Rash.
Moreover, the University of Haifa is in an administrative crisis, as the committee members know, and a recommendation to complicate the new university in the Galilee with a university that needs to strengthen itself is not a "best" prescription.
A third option was presented by Prof. Hagit Messer Yaron, a former deputy chairman of the MLAG, who believes that in the Galilee, his academic space deserves a "research college."
It is clearly an inferior and significantly weaker institution in relation to a research university in its budgets and the scientists it will coordinate.
Is "research college" the way the state is supposed to promote the Galilee?
On the face of it, this is a vision that narrows and downplays development possibilities and in fact, in my opinion, is the latest arm of Joshua Yurtner's academic frustration model.
The fourth option was presented by Prof. Nissim Ben-David, who claims that the preferred solution is the simultaneous establishment of three separate medium-sized universities that, in his opinion, will require a relatively small investment.
Ben-David's model is based on a gradual growth of NIS 15 million a year, so that in a decade alone it will reach NIS 240 million.
This is not the model that will shake and lead to an increase in the range of options for a broad academic education for the Galilee population, nor one that will attract new forces to the Galilee.
In my opinion, NIS 240 million should be the annual basic budget of the new University of Galilee.
The Ciechanover Committee is required to insist that innovative research laboratories for chemistry, physics and mathematics be established in Safed;
Recruiting the best Israeli academic staff from elite universities abroad; developing a comprehensive medical faculty that will provide students with an answer from the first year. All of these require investments that strive in one direction that the Galilee needs: "Nothing but the best is good enough."