Israel and Germany have agreed to establish two new international research institutes for neurobiology and archaeology. The new institutes, which will each have a budget of €5-million (about $6.8-million), will be the first established in Israel through the Max Planck Society. The neurobiology institute will be at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the archaeology institute at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, which will provide an additional $2-million dollars for laboratories. Each institute will comprise senior faculty members, doctoral students, research students, and technicians.
In a joint declaration, the education ministers of Israel and Germany stressed the importance of broadening academic cooperation between the two countries and announced a joint Israeli-German scientific conference to be held in 2012.
The Max Planck Society has been financing research in several scientific fields at Israeli universities for some time. The decision to establish the two research institutes is part of a new worldwide effort by the society, which is financed by the German government. The society has 80 institutes, of which four institutes and one research facility are outside Germany.
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26 Responses to Max Planck Society to Set Up New Research Centers in Israel
jbarman - June 10, 2011 at 2:31 pm
At an institution where I worked twenty years ago, a deserving individual was promoted to the VP level; however, no agreement could be reached regarding his new title.
After a week of negotiations regarding the title, someone finally taped a sign to his new office: “Vice President in Charge of Sitting by the Door”.
Jonathan Cohen - June 10, 2011 at 2:31 pm
I always liked Harvard’s Walter M. Cabot Chair of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, formerly held by Stanley Cavell.
rwbuck - June 10, 2011 at 2:37 pm
Gary Spiecker, Director of Faculty Opinion Promotion, University of Southern California, formerly Deputy Opinion Editor, Los Angeles Times….would you like to add a comment?
11289932 - June 10, 2011 at 3:35 pm
One of my bosses with a real sense of humor about her own august title–Vice President for Academic Affairs– commented, “A job that begins with vice and ends with affairs can’t be all bad.”
mnprof - June 10, 2011 at 3:45 pm
At first I thought you meant the title was “Walter M. Cabot Chair of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, formerly held by Stanley Cavell.”
Now, *that* would be a good title.
blue_state_academic - June 10, 2011 at 3:48 pm
A few years ago there was a position advertised in The Chronicle titled “Coordinator of Sexual Assault”
suzannewayne - June 10, 2011 at 4:09 pm
We have an associate dean of research, outreach, and technology, which by itself sounds like a victim of downsizing. It was even better when the person in the position (who happens to have a great sense of humor) referred to himself as the associate dean of ROT.
dennisgaudet - June 10, 2011 at 4:09 pm
I once saw a position advertised as “Director of Student Happiness”
mikealfano - June 10, 2011 at 4:13 pm
My favorite was a federal title: “Assistant to the Assistant Administrator for Administrative Assistance.”
mnprof - June 10, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Federal bureacrat titles? That’s unfair. It’s like allowing Professionals to compete in the Olympics.
drj50 - June 10, 2011 at 4:19 pm
In at least one institution in which the provost’s direct reports were all deans, in addition to the deans of the various colleges there was one referred to (informally) as the “Dean for Everything Else.”
polstergeist - June 10, 2011 at 4:44 pm
At my university, the Education Department has an Institute for Evidence-Based Education. I teach in the English Department (more technically, the subsidiary Department of First-Year Writing, which has gone from Composition to Rhetoric to FYW, and now Written English in the course of a decade or so).
One of my colleagues suggested that our next department name should be the Department of Conjecture- and Innuendo-Based Education. I’m in favor of that.
prillva - June 10, 2011 at 6:08 pm
If you want to throw around informal or unofficial titles, one of my dean colleagues was regularly referred to as “Dean of Miscellany.” Because the college I headed up had lots of problems with flooding, my own informal title was Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Water.”
We also had a university committee to study committee workload differences. The official title was “Committee on Committees.”
wisensale - June 10, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Committee on Committees – and I served on it twice!
gavin_moodie - June 10, 2011 at 8:26 pm
In the 1970s my then university’s faculty of arts added to its struggle to schedule classes to minimise clashes a fast expansion in size which made it difficult to find enough teaching rooms and so of course it formed a committee, which it called the time and space committee.
cwinton - June 11, 2011 at 1:38 am
Dean of Freshman Orientation is the one that has always topped my list.
greensubmarine - June 12, 2011 at 5:37 pm
J. Robert Oppenheimer’s title in his capacity of scientific head of Los Alamos is my personal favorite: Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.
schwerdt - June 13, 2011 at 8:39 am
I chaired a Committee on Committees. Seems to be a popular committee…….
copesan - June 13, 2011 at 9:06 am
Any relation to the “evidence-based reality” cited by a Bush official a few years back?
copesan - June 13, 2011 at 9:08 am
My own title, which I am NOT going to post here, drifts close to the titular shoals discussed here, but titles count in the academy. When I got it, people started answering my emails and being polite to me as opposed to before, with a shorter, more succinct and even more accurate title, even though there had been no change in my job description…
22185161 - June 13, 2011 at 10:58 am
At a former large, multi-facility academic medical center where I previously worked, we had a Wayfinding Committee. I always pictured committee members as having bulging pockets full of bread crumbs which they dropped behind them.
7738373863 - June 13, 2011 at 11:31 am
I am particularly fond of the ubiquitous “dean of summer school.” “Director” would be closer to the truth and need not impact pay grade. But if one really wants to explore the messy inner recesses of muddled administrative thinking in academe, s/he should take a good look at the titles sported by associate/assistant provosts and deans. At my institution, one interesting and revealing phenomenon is what happens when one searches for these light-sensitive creatures in the online directory. They are almost never listed, nor are they found on the units’ web pages. How about, within a college (at another university), a doctorally prepared but non-faculty “associate dean for student academic life”? And s/he is only one among eleven associate deans in that college: too much.
esgphd - June 13, 2011 at 11:50 am
I used to be a dean for faculty affairs. I had to keep explaining to people that the Offfice of Faculty Affairs was, despite the name, not really a dating service.
Brian Abel Ragen - June 13, 2011 at 1:04 pm
I would love to see a university where the titles reflected the real nature of the job. There would be no provost: instead, their would be a “president’s minder,” “president’s hatchetman,” “pesident’s flatterer,” or “president-in-waiting,” as the case required. And the faculty would give up all professorial pretentions and because simply “fireable teachers” and “malcontents.”
missoularedhead - June 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm
We often referred to the vice-chancellor and provost simply as ‘the money guy’.
11223435 - June 13, 2011 at 5:20 pm
I wouldn’t want anyone to jump to the conclusion that any of us might know anything about the porn industry–but how about “the president’s fluffer”?