Gad Yair - "The Diversity of Diversity"

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Oct 21, 2014
by Gad Yair
Gad Yair - "The Diversity of Diversity"

Fellow of "Students at the Margins" writes about affirmative action policies

Gad Yair speaks during the "Students at the Margins" session


This feature originally appeared in University World News: <font color="#0066cc"><a href="http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20141015204534839" target="_blank">www.universityworldnews.com/article.php</a></font>


Accessibility and representation of minorities and disadvantaged students in higher education entails two partly dependent processes. The first is to get students to enrol – after having prepared them in high schools and pre-academic programmes, motivating them to access higher education, and preparing them to pass entrance examinations.

Oftentimes, this stage predates the mandates of elite institutions – which are mostly responsible for the second process, namely accepting and retaining students who hail from socially marginalised communities. 

This article focuses on retention programmes that target two at-risk populations in the Israeli context – namely ultra-orthodox and Israeli-Palestinian Arab students. Over the past two decades, Israeli higher education more than doubled student enrolments, mostly by extending accessibility through the creation of new academic colleges. 

The Israeli Higher Education Council thereby created a division of labour between colleges and universities, with the veteran universities focusing on elite research and scientific upbringing, while the new colleges were mostly assigned to provide first degrees in high-demand areas like law, business and the social sciences. 

This division of labour also created ipso facto an institutional hierarchy in terms of student body composition. Indeed, research has shown that the seven veteran universities cater to middle and upper class students while the colleges – as mandated – cater to minority students and those living on the periphery. 

Intellectual levels – as measured by the common entrance exam – are also correlated with academic sector. Nevertheless, given that entrance to higher education is decided by common entrance exams, and since Israeli universities do take their social mission seriously, students from the periphery do make it to the doors of Israeli elite institutions.

Ultra-orthodox and Israeli-Palestinian Arab students

Ever since statehood in 1948, Israel struggled to expand accessibility to higher education. Over the past decade female representation surpassed that of males – leaving four main targets for social inclusion: students whose parents emigrated from Arab and Muslim countries; recent immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union, and more recently students who hail from ultra-orthodox communities and from Palestinian-Israeli Arab communities. 

While the former groups seek integration and embrace Israeli higher education institutions, the latter ‘involuntary minorities’ express greater ambivalence and even reject what they deem to be Zionist, colonial institutions.

Because of high dependency ratios (large families), elective unemployment, community segregation and overall social closure, Israel loses something close to 40% of its human potential, with secular, middle-class citizens carrying ever greater burdens in terms of military service and tax contribution for the public good. 

Consequently, and fearing even greater disparities, the current government targets integrating the latter two groups to the labour market through funding schemes that create incentives for HE institutes to accept and retain formerly underrepresented groups. 

Specifically, the Israeli Higher Education Council – which is responsible for funding Israeli public universities and colleges (there are only a few private colleges) – provides special funding for university programmes which target ultra-orthodox and Israeli-Palestinian students who make it to their doors. 

Though elite universities continue working on all four target populations, the latter two have become a recent focal point. And rightly so. The challenges that the latter two groups raise are unique and unprecedented. Israeli ultra-orthodoxy rejects higher education institutions as Trojan horses of modernity and secularism.

Ultra-orthodox communities teach their young to denigrate scientific knowledge and despise secular values – seeing in advanced studies in Israeli colleges and universities the greatest risk for communal closure and religious integrity. 

Many rabbis go as far as to decree higher education as blasphemy and a cause for excommunication and even divorce. Nevertheless, growing poverty and exposure to the internet and other media has brought some innovators to create bridging programmes that invite ultra-orthodox students to enrol into higher education. 

One such programme exists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the leading Israeli university. The programme – a pilot implemented after long debates inside the university – accepts annual cohorts of 25 ultra-orthodox students, mostly men aged 30+ with leadership positions in their communities. 

The students are integrated in regular disciplinary undergraduate programmes – from psychology and social work up to computer science and even medical sciences. Lacking academic upbringing and scientific preparation, the students – being alone amongst mostly secular students – encounter existential questions as well as technical difficulties. 

To answer those questions and allow them to make a bridge between their ultra-orthodox environment and the secular nature of the university, the programme provides participants with moral and intellectual supports. The students meet as a group for discussions about their values and the questions they encounter, and are provided with a socially supportive network. 

A recent assessment project which accompanied the programme for two years, produced very interesting results. While initially fearing the university as a Trojan horse and expressing resentment, over time participants adopted academic thinking skills and orientations – which were formerly alien to them – whilst maintaining their belief in God and their wish to support their communities. 

The participants, although encountering many existential challenges (eg studying without anyone in their community being in the know) progressed in their academic programmes while creating functional social relations with their secular peers. 

While both sides feared each other, the results suggest that this most diverse population (often describing itself as ‘a state within a state’) becomes integrated whilst maintaining its cultural distinction.

Israeli-Palestinian students

A similar challenge faces Israeli-Palestinian students. While being fully fledged citizens of Israel, they grow up knowing that they and their people in the Palestinian territories are victims of military defeat and occupation. 

Many of them learn to reject Zionism and Israeli culture, yet many also understand that they have to ‘march through Israeli institutions of HE’ in order to succeed in life. A growing number of Israeli-Palestinian students apply to Israeli universities and a growing number of them are being accepted. 

However, the encounter with Israeli HE institutes is challenging. First, there is the language barrier – Hebrew often being their third or fourth language. Then there is the Zionist barrier – a worldview that they encounter in studies of law, the social sciences and the humanities. 

Feeling that the Israeli curriculum hides colonial premises, they sometimes reject topics, skip classes and feel alienated from their peers. Studies have found that while their dropout rates are not significantly higher than those of Jews, Israeli-Palestinian students do take longer to complete their studies, attain lower grades, and find it hard to pass on to graduate programmes.

To counter those hardships, the Hebrew University takes several steps. A significant one is a pre-studies orientation programme where students are provided with dorms a month before school starts, while participating in an intensive English preparation course that decreases their learning load during the first year of study (which is often the hardest in the transition). 

The students meet veteran peers and are taken to libraries and computer areas and are generally accustomed to campus life before the stress of the new academic year. Another programme - a bottoms-up initiative led by a young law professor – is carried out through a ‘big brother’ tutoring programme. 

Second and third year students tutor at-risk students in the incoming cohort by explaining academic life, terminology and regulations and generally providing the social capital that is necessary for maintaining motivation and success. During the first years of the programme, dropout rates dropped to nil – making it a pilot that was later adopted on a mass scale in the social sciences as well.

Overall, university programmes for the diverse populations that reach its doorstep are premised on the model of ‘social capital’. Vincent Tinto, one of the major experts on student dropout, suggested that social relations are a key to retaining and motivating students. 

Indeed, our surveys support this theoretical conjecture – finding that student networks are the main buffer against frustration and dropping out. Our programmes therefore seek to provide minority and at-risk students with the social supports to utilise their potential and maximise their opportunities. 

Nevertheless, data suggest that while our undergraduate programmes attain success in raising retention rates and expediting degree completion, advanced (MA) and graduate studies (PhD) are still a challenge. 

Representation of minority and at-risk students at those levels requires further efforts – which I believe requires provision of excellent and motivating professors who act as role models and provide the support necessary for success. 

Being a ‘father-doctor’ of two Arab professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I know this is possible.


Gad Yair is the director of the National Council of Jewish Women Research Institute for Innovation in Education. He teaches at the department of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This essay was written as part of the Salzburg Global Seminar (SGS) – Students at the Margins and the Institutions that Serve Them – held from 11 to 16 October 2014. #Salzburg MSI. The SGS is sponsored by the Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, Educational Testing Service, and The Kresge Foundation.