Tel Aviv University President Seeks to Raise Funds in United States

Dr. George Wise, president of Tel Aviv University said here today that the present development plans for the new university call for expenditures of $16,000,000 and about $7,000,000 of that sum had been given or pledged for that goal. He is visiting the United States to raise additional funds and to recruit more Israeli teachers, now on university faculties in this country, for the Tel Aviv school.

Among the reasons cited by Dr. Wise at a press conference for the urgent need for additional higher education facilities in Israel was the fact that Israel had one of the lowest percentage of its population in the college student level of any advanced nation. Another, he said, was the fact that while the Oriental-originating Israeli Jews had been integrated politically and economically, they were not integrated culturally.

He reported that while the Arab university student population on Arab countries had advanced from 25,000 to 180,000 in the past ten years, in Israel the college student population had risen from 12,000 to only 18,000. He said Israel’s needs for university-educated experts required an increase in the university student total to 40,000 by 1970. He noted that the increase to 18,000 students in Israel included the 4,000 attending Tel Aviv University and said he hoped that in the next three or four years, the University would have 10,000 students.

He said one of the goals of his current trip to the United States was to continue to find Israeli teachers who came to this country because of lack of teaching and research openings in Israel. He reported that 30 such Israelis had been persuaded to return to Israel to join the Tel Aviv University faculty and that he hoped that another 60 would follow their example.