While visiting a Bedouin village in the Israeli desert earlier this year, more than 55 professors, deans and department heads from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev toured a school that doesn’t have electricity in the winter.

The academics learned that on rainy days, the students can’t attend class due to the unpaved roads and lack of public transportation. Also, the school doesn’t teach physics, and one student shared that she has to travel to a school in Beersheva on Fridays to attend a class on that subject.

The tour of Bedouin schools was organized by Sarab Abu-Rabia Queder, who will visit the Bay Area next month to discuss challenges in diversity and inclusion in Israeli higher education. She’ll attend two Bay Area events on Sept. 6.

Abu-Rabia Queder will arrive with exceptional credentials. She is Ben-Gurion University’s first vice president for diversity and inclusion, having been appointed two years ago after already becoming the first Arab woman from the Negev promoted to professor at BGU. She is also the first Bedouin woman in Israel to earn a doctorate.

Her field of research has been diversity and inequality in academia. That’s why she organized the tour, because she wanted her peers to witness the Bedouin educational system firsthand. She especially wanted to make them aware of obstacles like those they heard about at the combined middle and high school in Umm Batin, an unrecognized village.

The university campus is the first place where Arabs and Jews actually meet in a daily, equal way.

Bedouin villages that aren’t officially recognized by the Israeli government suffer from a lack of basic services such as running water, sewers and trash collection. Without understanding the impediments students from disadvantaged educational systems face, it’s easy for academic leaders to assume they are being lazy or aren’t making enough effort, Abu-Rabia Queder said over Zoom from her home in Beersheva.

“These are blind spots,” she said. “When these decision-makers see the structural gaps, it becomes easier to persuade them to work on diversity issues.”

Diversity in higher education, Abu-Rabia Queder stressed, is about more than attracting gifted students from a range of backgrounds. It’s about creating opportunities for those who haven’t been given equal educational access. “Higher education,” she said, “is the means that enables them social mobility, economic mobility and stability in life.”

In her Bay Area talks, Abu-Rabia Queder will focus largely on Israel’s Bedouin population, which faces disproportionally high unemployment and low levels of education. Data from the Knesset Research and Information Center reveals that 17% of Bedouins don’t reach 12th grade, compared with only 3% of Israeli Jews.

But the Bedouin community is just one area of concentration for Abu-Rabia Queder. The 46-year-old professor is charged with advancing university policies that increase faculty and student body representation from a range of underrepresented groups: Druze and other Arabs, women, those with disabilities, Ethiopian immigrants, ultra-Orthodox Jews and the LGBTQ+ community.

It’s complex work, “and the topics are very loaded,” Abu-Rabia Queder said. But she’s passionate about her mission.

“I am a minority myself and my field of work is about minorities in higher education,” she noted. “I know where to put my finger and I know where to offer the solution.”

Often, she pointed out, “the university campus is the first place where Arabs and Jews actually meet in a daily, equal way.”

Arab and Jewish student union leaders at BGU work together; in May, Jewish and Arab students teamed up for a hackathon that tasked participants with devising creative ways to promote coexistence on campus.

One lesson that’s emerged? “If you bring students to speak only about the conflict, it might create more conflict and people will not want to gather together,” Abu-Rabia Queder said. “We try to find other social, educational ways to make Arab and Jewish people meet.”

In a country where political tensions abound, Ben-Gurion University faculty members have received a Hebrew University toolkit for handling Arab-Jewish diversity in class, specifically when it comes to differentiating between legitimate freedom of speech and speech that crosses into racist territory. The model has proven useful beyond the classroom, Abu-Rabia Queder said, including in discussions between Jews on campus who hold vastly different views of the judicial overhaul that has led to months of civil strife.

“We called for students and professors to meet and talk about this, and a lot of people came,” Abu-Rabia Queder said. “It doesn’t matter what you think. It’s important that you can express it in a safe space, but also in a way that will not threaten others.”

“Diversity and Inclusion in Israel: Empowering the Bedouin Community”

Sarab Abu-Rabia Queder, 8:30-10 a.m. Sept. 6 at Addison-Penzak JCC, 14855 Oka Road, Los Gatos; 12-1:30 p.m. Sept. 6 at Jewish Community Federation, 121 Steuart St., S.F. Free, with advance registration.