From the Ivory Tower to Silicon Valley
The decision by Tel Aviv University to set up an economic company should not come as a surprise, in light of the departure of lecturers in the direction of get-rich start-up industry. However, beyond the need to keep lecturers in academe, it is a move which could make R&D more closely related to reality.
Levy Morav
Something good is happening at Israel’s universities. Lecturers, tutors and professors have always been blamed for sitting in ivory towers, failing to venture out and see the people suffering. This, however, was not always true.
Something very special occurred this week. The Tel Aviv University founded an economic company and appointed a general manager to the first economic company of any university in Israel. The company’s goal is to profit from exploitation of the knowledge accrued at the university. The setting up of the company was initiated by Tel Aviv University president Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, and Isaac Kohlberg, former general manager of Weizmann Institute YEDA Research & Development, specializing in the commercialization of the knowledge accrued at the Institute, was appointed general manager.
Rabinovich told Hebrew daily “Yediot Ahronot” that the company’s goal is to enable the university’s teaching staff to maintain their place of work, alongside entrepreneurial activity set up in cooperation with the university.
Rabinovich’s decision should not surprise us. Anyone following events, reports and announcements of professors from all fields, mainly mathematics, life and computer sciences, joining start-ups and high tech companies, knew that sooner or later the university would be obliged to find a way of keeping the lecturers from running off to El Dorado, awaiting them with millions of dollars in the new trend for Internet communications.
It was to be expected that if the twenty-something year old students receive options and become millionaires before they reach thirty, their tutors will not continue to sit on the side benches, and this is exactly what happened. Incidentally, the same thing is taking place in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in the same fields. Tel Aviv University therefore made the right decision by initiating the setting up of an economic company for putting the talents, initiatives and knowledge of its tutors to practical use.
No doubt some will frown on this initiative and ask penetrating and justified questions vis-a-vis academic research ethics and the lecturers’ mission in training new cadres of teachers for the future. They will also question mixing the desire to get rich with the conditions required for scientific research, teaching and publications.
These questions are relevant, but reality is more powerful and the only alternative is not between very good and good, but between good and the emptying of some faculties, particularly science and economics.
Many, often quite rightly, accused universities of being cut off from reality, saying that there is sometimes no relation between the nice theories and gray reality and that being occupied with theoretical and abstract material distanced the academic world from ordinary people. The economic company will be an opportunity for all disciplines to participate in a hands-on endeavor.
The lecturers will be able to contribute to society not only through academe and scientific publications, but in practical terms also, by economic, business and modern industrial creativity. They will also profit personally, but there is nothing wrong with it. Some may even thus re-examine long-standing and respected theories through the practical eyes of those engaged in life’s realities from all aspects: spiritual, cultural, social, economic, judicial and political.
We can hope that such mutual openness will lead to a better system of interaction between society and academic circles with mutual, fruitful feedback, to the benefit of all parties and the economic company.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 14 September, 2000