Israel’s Technion Institute will teach its prestigious business courses in English only.
The decision by the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, hailed internationally as Israel’s version of MIT, to ditch the Hebrew-language classes begining next year for its business students pursuing an MBA degree was defended as an effort to keep them competitive in an English-dominated world.
“We reached the conclusion that if we continued to train our students by teaching in Hebrew, we would be placing them in an inferior starting position, given the conditions of the global competition,” Prof. Boaz Golany, dean of industrial engineering and management, told Ha’aretz on Monday.
But the move was denounced by Prof. Moshe Bar Asher, head of the Hebrew Language Academy, as dealing a fresh blow to the Jewish lingua franca. “The language war has won,” he said.
Several Israeli universities offer programs partly or exclusively in English.
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