MK Amram Mitzna, the chairman of the Knesset Education Committee, pledged on Tuesday to address the need of finding a solution to reduce the number of subcontracted lecturers in the higher education system. Upon the request of MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) and Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On, Mitzna will appoint a subcommittee to examine the issue, which will be ready to formulate recommendations on the subject by the end of the academic year.

A demonstration of the Junior Academic Staff Union in the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Photo: Junior Academic Staff Union – Ben-Gurion University)

The decision was made during a committee meeting that came after a report by the Knesset Research and Information Center indicating that some 66 percent of public college lecturers are employed from outside of the higher education system. They are subcontracted workers without job security, title or future academic growth.

The research, which was initiated by MKs Khenin and Gal-On, also showed that about 37% of the lecturers in private colleges are external teachers and in universities, about 40% of the teaching positions are occupied by either junior faculty or foreign fellows. The figures showed that between 1973 and 2010, student population in research universities expanded by 157% and the number of students in the entire higher education system – including colleges – rose by 428%. Yet, the number of senior faculty rose by only 9% in research universities, while the overall number of senior academic faculty in all of the colleges and universities rose by only 40%. The size of the academic faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University has declined over the past three and a half decades, and the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology has also lost over a quarter of the faculty positions that it had nearly four decades earlier. Between 1977 and 2010, the number of students per senior faculty member has more than doubled. In 1986, the external teachers represented 13% of the senior research faculty. By 2010, this ratio had risen to 46%. Almost half of the university lecturers today are not on the research faculty.

MK Khenin said that “the problematic employment of teachers from outside, without standard conditions and without job security, has become the norm in the academic system and is responsible for the phenomenon of brain drain.” “There is a need here for rapid change,” he added. “Instead of the revolving door used to bring young researchers back to Israel, we have to adopt a policy of keeping them here and now.”