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BGU Responds to Students’ Needs in Wartime

BGU Responds to Students’ Needs in Wartime

July 29, 2014

Social Sciences & Humanities

 This is an excerpt of an op-ed by Prof. David Newman, dean of the BGU’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

The Jerusalem Post — The emergency recruitment of over 50,000 reservists has disrupted the lives of many Israelis. Beyond the personal tragedies of the wounded and the dead, three groups in particular have been affected. The self-employed businessmen and shop owners who have nobody to fill their place while they are on reserve duty; the parents, especially mothers, of small children in the south of the country, whose summer camp and kindergarten activities have been stopped; and the tens of thousands of students who were in the middle of their end-of-year examinations as they were called up.

Once this bitter conflict in Gaza has ended and the reservists are free to return to civilian life, it will not be simple just to take up their lives at the point where they stopped a few weeks previously.

Prof. David Newman

Prof. David Newman

War has its own psychological and traumatic impacts, especially on those who have been involved in front-line combat, have seen their friends wounded and killed, and have witnessed the terrible civilian casualties which have been inflicted upon the other side.

Whether or not the army could, with more care, have avoided the civilian casualties in places such as schools and hospitals which were used by Hamas to hide weapons, no one involved can remain unaffected by the scenes of destruction.

The country’s universities are already planning for the day when the hostilities cease and life has to somehow get back to normal. Some students will find it difficult just to take up their studies and examinations at the point they stopped, as though the intervening weeks have not impacted their lives in a much more significant way.

While the universities will go out of their way to offer assistance, even providing personal therapy, there will be some who will be unable to cope in the long run and may drop out altogether, or may require a years’ break and breathing space.

We hope that this will be the minority but we cannot ignore the longer-term implications of what it means for someone to be suddenly pulled out of civilian life, placed into a combat situation, and then returned home just as suddenly and be expected to resume his life as normal.

Unlike the Israel’s other universities, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has experienced a much harder time. While other schools have continued with their normal research, teaching and examination activities during this period, Ben-Gurion University has been closed to students for the past month and will remain this way until it is clear that the missile threat has ceased.

BGU does not lack safe spaces, underground shelters and corridors in which to take refuge from the missiles. However, the administration could not take the chance that a single missile would penetrate the Iron Dome anti-missile system and explode in a classroom containing tens, maybe hundreds, of students.

The University correctly opted for a safety-first strategy, rather than endanger the students’ lives, despite the psychological importance of normal life carrying on as much as possible.

There is an eerie mid-summer silence about the campus.

Not that BGU campus is never very busy during the summer months; most of the students and staff leave the city of Beer-Sheva for the summer. The summer is always a period where those of us remaining on campus can engage in our research and writing in a quiet atmosphere, without too many external distractions.

But this time the silence is different. We work in the knowledge that, amid the silence, a sudden siren will herald the firing of another rocket in the direction of Beer-Sheva.

In those universities where everything has been functioning as normal, special rules governing the rights of those students who have been called up and have missed their examinations will have to be put into place. In the case of BGU, the entire university will have to be kick-started in a more comprehensive manner.

The faculty must be prepared to modify and change their own plans to help meet the student requirements. We are not always sufficiently sympathetic to student demands which disturb our own research plans and schedules, but in this case, there should not be even the slightest hesitation in helping our students return to normality. It is the least they can expect.

Click here to donate to Americans for Ben-Gurion University’s Wartime Assistance Fund for returning reservists.

Read more of the article by David Newman on The Jerusalem Post website >>