It turns out David Ben-Gurion’s notion to make the desert bloom didn’t apply solely to foliage.
After several decades as a second-tier school, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has blossomed into Israel’s most popular university. More undergraduates applied to the Beersheva school than to any other Israeli institution this year, and the university’s enrollment has tripled in the last decade to roughly 16,500.
“It’s the university of the future,” said Woodside philanthropist Helen Diller, who recently awarded the university $5 million toward a new humanities building.
“It’s the university you hardly hear about. But the president [Avishay Braverman] is a most brilliant and dynamic man. Here’s a man who took nothing and made a magnificent university.”
In the last 18 months, Diller awarded the university $50,000 in scholarship money and endowed a $500,000 chair in chemical physics before a meeting with Braverman and Professor Zamik Rosenwaks — whose chair she endowed — convinced her to go even further. Her grant will help construct the Helen Diller Family Building for the Humanities. It will house, among other departments, the Hebrew literature and Jewish thought programs and the Center for Bedouin Studies, the only such department in Israel.
“It’s more than just a new building, it’s a whole intellectual and spiritual heart for the humanities at Ben-Gurion University,” said Daphna Noily, the regional director of the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University, the university’s fund-raising arm.
“We’ll be able to have conferences, archives, classrooms, all kinds of things enabling an exchange of new ideas. When you’re driving in from Tel Aviv to Beersheva, it’ll be one of the first buildings you see. Now it’s a huge parking lot.”
The new building would also help to obscure one of the university’s original structures, a “kind of hideous” building housing the history and social science departments, said Seth Moskowitz, the New York-based executive vice president of American Associates of Ben-Gurion Univesity.
Moskowitz believes a sleek new building would help to symbolize the transformation of the university from a sparsely populated desert school to one bustling with students and boasting a Hebrew literature department with such world-renowned authors as Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz.
In order to begin construction on the $11 million structure, the school must petition Israel’s Planning and Building Commission to match Diller’s grant, and then make up the extra $1 million by selling the naming rights to laboratories, lecture halls and classrooms within the building.
Moskowitz said the university has always received approval from the commision on dozens of requests, which take between six months and a year to process “in normal times.”
These are not normal times, he concedes, but he said Braverman would take his case all the way to the prime minister if necessary. If matching funds are approved, hiring an architect, designing the building and constructing it will take some time. The school hopes to complete the project within three years.
“People from all over the world will come together in the Helen Diller Family Building for the Humanities,” said Braverman.
“They will share ideas and exchange knowledge, thereby creating an intellectual and spiritual meeting place for all Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world. It will be a focal point for research and meetings and will be the spiritual and intellectual heart of our university because it will host all the unique centers in the humanities faculty.”