Numerus Clausus
By Aviad Kleinberg
Haaretz, December 16, 2003
Racism has a tendency to infect even those who are not racists. Racist expressions, categories and thought patterns are taken for granted. A fair number of discussions motivated by the best of intentions are often decided in advance due to the very choice of tendentious terminology.
Take, for example, the discussion being held on the conditions surrounding admissions to universities. Until last year, candidates were accepted based on their matriculation grades weighted with their psychometric examination scores. Last year a change was introduced into the universities' screening policy. Candidates could now choose between the old system and a new, alternative method: Instead of the score on their psychometric exam, they could present a combined grade made up of the average of their marks in the mathematics, English and Hebrew matriculation tests, without their class mark. So far so good.
The universities finally realized that the psychometric screening test screens out the poor, and decided - very cautiously, I might add - to take a different approach. The new system was in place for only one year. Already at the end of the first year, it was decided to return to the old system.
The reason given for the panicky retreat was that it did not significantly increase the number of university students from development towns. This is the official statement of the committee of university heads of November 26: "The admissions policy conducted in accordance with the presentation of combined grades does not increase the accessibility to higher education for those from the periphery. On the contrary, of those that presented combined grades, 46 percent of the candidates for admission coming from the weaker population sectors had higher combined grades than their psychometric scores, compared to 71 percent of the other population. [...] Seeing as the number of places in the university has not grown, the admission of one population comes at the expense of the other."
Please note the euphemistic fashion in which the statement refers to the Arab population. First, it refrains from mentioning them by name. However, in figures presented the Knesset Education Committee, the same 71 percent were given the more explicit name of "minority communities." Second, it is hinted that the places of the weaker population (the "development towns") is not being taken by the rich kids from Tel Aviv's northern suburbs (they are in the universities in any case) but rather by the members of the "other population."
Often, as stated, racism may appear inadvertently, in the terms and language we use in all innocence. The concepts of "periphery," "weak populations" and "development towns" are all euphemisms for Jews. After all, if the relevant criteria were geographic and socio-economic rather than national, it would be impossible to ignore the glaringly obvious fact that the Arab settlements in Israel are weak towns located in the periphery that are poorer and more neglected than the Jewish towns in the periphery and in desperate need of development. Consequently, if the goal is to foster weak populations, the Arab population is an especially weak population in particular need of any help it can get. It is not in competition with the weaker Jewish population. Both are competing with the strong Jewish population. If we want to create a more balanced system, we need to dramatically increase the representation of the weaker populations, Jewish and Arab, in the universities, at the expense of the only population that benefits from over-representation - the satiated population in the center.
From the press, one might get the impression that the universities are being inundated with Arab students. In fact, as a result of the new criteria, the number of Arab students rose by only 1 percent. The proportion of Arab students in the universities is about 9 percent of the student body and the percentage of lecturers is a little more than 1 percent of the senior academic faculty. These proportions are very far from representing the actual percentage of Arabs in the population. If there is any problem in the number of Arab students admitted to the universities in the past year, it is that it is too low.
The problem, say concerned individuals in the universities, is that the new applicants are not evenly distributed throughout the university. They prefer the faculty of medicine. Don't we have the right to prevent over representation in the faculty of medicine? Perhaps. Perhaps we need to learn from the treatment accorded another minority group that was over represented in the universities throughout the world, and especially in the faculties of medicine. That minority group tended to register for medical studies in percentages far greater than its proportion in the population. That phenomenon greatly concerned certain regimes that feared that "admitting one population would come at the expense of another."
Perhaps a maximum number should be set for the faculty of medicine. It is known as a Numerus Clausus.
