Today (Sunday) a huge plan for the return of scientists and the upgrading of the universities will be brought to a government decision

According to Minister Gideon Sa'ar and the head of the OT Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg, as part of the program, about 30 centers of excellence will be established at an average cost of NIS 45 million per center (a third of this amount from the government budget and the rest from donations). The universities will compete for the establishment of the centers in the fields in which they are the best * Another element of the plan: the establishment of graduate schools in English, which will attract researchers and foreign students

Today (Sunday), Minister of Education Gideon Sa'ar, who also serves as chairman of the Higher Education Council, will present a plan formulated in cooperation with the Treasury and the National Economic Council in the Prime Minister's Office to establish university centers of excellence, one of whose functions will be to bring minds back to Israel.

At a press conference convened on Thursday at the Ministry of Education in Tel Aviv, Minister Sa'ar explained: "At a government meeting held in October, the government will tempt my power and the power of the head of Tel Aviv to formulate a plan for centers of excellence with an emphasis on bringing in minds from abroad. The plan was presented two weeks ago to the Prime Minister and the whole move was made with his support and backing. The program is designed to achieve two goals at the same time - raising the level of excellence in institutions of higher education and bringing outstanding Israeli and Jewish research, science and technology personnel. This talk has consequences in the form of increasing growth potential." The head of the Tel Aviv University, Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg, who also participated in the press conference, said that there will be success in the return of 300 scientists to Israel.

According to Minister Sa'ar, the government will invest about NIS 450 million in the program and the rest of the budget will be raised by the universities from their internal sources and donations. The fields of research will be chosen by and under the supervision of Israel's economic and scientific needs. The program will be spread over five years. And within the framework of this five-year plan already in the next academic year, XNUMX, five centers will be established, although the topics that the first centers will deal with will be determined by the Council for Higher Education in a short time, and only from next year will a competition for that also begin.

Minister Sa'ar explains: "The measures of success of the program are the recovery of brains and the strengthening of scientific research in Israel. Another result of the move will be an improvement and upgrade of the research infrastructure in our system and the encouragement of academic innovation including the integration of several fields of thought. During the period we will also examine the progress towards the goals according to indicators of the research outputs and according to the number of returning researchers who will be admitted. There will also be a periodic report to the government on the progress."

The chairman of the OT Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg: "The higher education system and scientific research in Israel in recent years have found themselves in a broken trough after years of decline as a result of a combination of several processes: one is a large expansion of the higher education system in terms of accessibility, and the establishment of new institutions which is a phenomenon Welcome, but the quantitative expansion comes at the expense of quality and excellence due to limited resources. The second process: from 2001, the budgets allocated to higher education were cut. These two processes - quantitative growth on the one hand and budget cuts on the other, and again the result was damage to research excellence."

"A third process that affects the level of higher education in Israel is the accelerated globalization of higher education in the world, which has resulted in competition for human resources all over the world. We are connected to the academic world, this is a huge advantage but also a disadvantage because our young people can easily integrate into the best centers in the world, which is why we have seen the brain drain that has greatly intensified in the last decade."

"Therefore, we decided in cooperation with all the parties and with the encouragement of the Prime Minister to take action. No more actions on the margins, not trying to plug this or that hole, but to do an action that has the potential to make a serious difference. Both in raising the fund of research in Israel and in bringing back Israeli researchers from abroad not individually but in groups. We only wanted to stop the decline, but to start with a program that has the potential to initiate a process of qualitative progress forward for the scientists who remained in Israel and to bring back scientists from abroad. "

"Another important element of the program is refining the relative advantages of each research institution. Not every institution has an advantage in every field. Each institution should define what it wants to excel in so as to enhance natural relative advantages it has."

According to Prof. Trachtenberg, the process will be open to all Israeli researchers in Israel and abroad. The university that will win is the one that already has a strong research core in the field and that can show that it has the ability to bring in a group of Israeli researchers from abroad - through letters of intent from specified researchers. Another important element on the way to an institution becoming a center of excellence is the ability to mobilize additional resources. The degree of cooperation with other institutions in Israel, including researchers from colleges, will also be examined.

Another important element of the program is the ability to establish in the course of time International Graduate Schools around each of the centers of excellence. Prof. Trachtenberg explains: "In Israel we rely on the American model in academia, but we do not continue it in the context of advanced studies. In Israel you study an MA and then, if you decide to do a doctorate, you choose a supervisor and write a thesis, there are no structured studies for a doctorate. Since we are not in sync with the American system, this does not allow us to compete for staff. The studies will be done in English and the degrees will be international, with cooperation between the universities to bring to Israel the best minds in the world who will raise the level of Israeli academia." Prof. Trachtenberg concluded.

In response to the question of the science site, what is the lesson learned from the establishment of nanotechnology centers in most universities, Prof. Trachtenberg said: "The move of establishing nanotechnology centers, which was a very successful move, was made through a furrow - national infrastructures for research, which is a completely different organization. The big difference is that the move we are making is a competitive move. It's not that I put a cookie on the table and everyone is entitled to the same cookie, but that the institutions will compete. There will be one winner and therefore it will be required of them to refine their relative advantage, and to concentrate their efforts instead of decentralizing them.

Minister Sa'ar added to this answer: "The whole point is to establish research infrastructure, the current move should strengthen areas where the institutions are strong. The concept is that in the age of globalization we need to strengthen the existing anchors of quality."