University Diaries » “[T]he desire to promote academic studies among the ultra-Orthodox cannot come at the expense of egalitarian principles on which Hebrew University and other institutions were founded. No “accessibility” and no “incorporation of the ultra-Orthodox” can legitimize gender separation and the segregation of women. The heads of the university should join the fight against this affliction instead of extending it to the higher education system.”

More on enforced gender segregation at Israel’s Hebrew University. Haaretz notes the Catch-22 – if you want to educate and make employable this enormous, growing, anti-democratic minority, you need to assimilate them into twenty-first century universities. But their regressive ways, especially their bigotry toward women, make them refuse norms of equality. The editorial in Haaretz concludes:

Hebrew University, like other academic institutions, is a public space in which students from different groups study and, while doing so, meet one another. This crucial interaction is one of the hallmarks of a liberal society in which women and men are to be treated equally. The university’s leaders would do well not to sponsor – academically or otherwise – an institution whose principles contravene these basic tenets.

So you keep the bigots out; but then you sustain a system of separate schools where the anti-democratic norms of the minority continue to thrive, and the minority continues to be what many Israeli commentators describe as a major existential threat to the nation of Israel.

The only possible solution I can see involves places like Hebrew University going ahead and assimilating these groups but making it clear the university will not budge on its democratic principles. No sex segregation. Probably a few haredim will attend despite the democratic nature of the institution; and perhaps eventually, as more and more of them find ways to tolerate the presence and equal status of women in university settings, the problem will be to a significant extent solved.

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