Published in Haaretz: July 22, 2013
THE BRAIN DRAIN AND THE HUMANITIES
Gabriel Motzkin
People often complain about the flight of Israeli academics to other
countries. They claim that there are not enough jobs. So the answer has to
be: Open more universities and research institutes.
Even if we opened a hundred more institutes, there would still be a
brain drain. Why? We live in an international world, and academics are
among the most mobile of populations. We should be proud rather than
ashamed that so many Israelis do well abroad.
On the other hand, we should be readier to accept foreign
academics here. If one great scholar or innovator came here for everyone
who left, our academic economy would be in balance.
But why should people come here? The pay is not that great, and the
place itself looks like an ethno-nationalist backwater with odd religious
populations. In other words, to counter the brain drain, we need to make
Israel an attractive place to live; we need to make Israel more
cosmopolitan.
How can you do that? Good hotels and tasty restaurants are part of
the story, but academics generally seek a congenial intellectual or scientific
environment. Paris and New York are so attractive not least because of
their intellectual ferment. Such intellectual ferment is produced mainly by
the humanities. The natural sciences tell us about the world, but they seek
to answer questions. The humanities seek to formulate questions that can
be debated, questions to which there is no one answer, but where there
are many answers. People argue about the humanities.
If we want to make Israel an attractive place to live, we need to
invest in the humanities. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, we have just
such an initiative, a five-year program for postdoctoral fellows in the
humanities and social sciences generously funded by Dr. Leonard Polonsky.
The more people like that we have in Israel, the more we will be able to
reverse the brain drain. Since we are both an international academic power
and a small, isolated country, it is imperative for us that we make space in
Israel both for Israelis who want to live in this country and for all those who
would like to join us.
Prof. Gabriel Motzkin, Director, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute