Technion to Launch Five-year Program to Double Its Student Body

Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, will launch a five-year program to double its student body by 1970 to “meet the challenge of a new era in which nuclear energy will be applied to every phase of the new state’s industry, agriculture and other programs.”

This was made public today by Alexander Goldberg, the new president of the Technion, addressing the eighth annual Conference on Science and Technology in Israel and the Middle East. More than 700 delegates attended the two-day gathering, held at the New York Hilton Hotel under the auspices of the American Technion Society.

“The current enrollment of 3,640 undergraduates and nearly 1,200 graduate students must double in size by 1970, if the Technion is to fully meet its responsibilities to the development of Israel,” Mr. Goldberg told the assembled guests. He said plans now being completed after many months of preparation call for the enlargement of existing classrooms and laboratories, the addition of new buildings, including dormitories and the acquisition of an additional 300 acres of campus land.

Mr. Goldberg, a chemist trained in England, who headed Israel’s largest single industrial enterprise, Chemicals and Phosphates, Ltd., before assuming the presidency of the Technion in June of this year, emphasized that the Israel Government has agreed to donate one-fourth of the “many millions of dollars that will be required” to enlarge the Institute’s facilities. The balance, he said, will be sought among the “legion of friends and benefactors of the Technion throughout the world, particularly in the United States.”

Dr. John Wolberg, a member of the Technion’s nuclear engineering faculty, told the gathering that nuclear energy in Israel can be applied not only to desalination and electricity production programs, but also to many phases of industry and agriculture. Other speakers at the conference included Mrs. Zena Harman, the wife of the Israel Ambassador to the United States, and chairman of the Executive Board of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, and Maurice M. Rosen, of Philadelphia, president of the American Technion Society.