Monday, March 13, 2006

Center for Democratic Studies

University of Haifa

Founder and director:

Professor Raphael COhen-Almagor

The aim of The Haifa Center for Democratic Studies is to promote awareness and understanding of civic culture in democracy. Recognizing the growing need to secure the foundations of democracy and to facilitate conditions for pluralism, the Center would establish a national and international forum for deliberation and discussion. The main focus will be on the role of ethics and justice in all spheres of public life: politics; economy; culture; academy; business; law; media and medicine.

The Center’s purposes include the strengthening of democratic values such as active participation in public life, professional ethics, accountability for one’s actions, multiculturalism, diversity, and civic equality. The Center will also focus attention upon abuse of power and violation of basic human rights. It will encourage open debate on the vital importance of freedom of expression, in its broad sense, in democratic life. The term ‘free expression’ includes freedom of assembly, freedom to demonstrate and to picket, free media, artistic freedom, and academic freedom. At the same time the Center will aim to increase public awareness of the need to set boundaries to liberty and tolerance. We are living in an era of political violence and extremism, and we need to find ways to overcome the antidemocratic forces that seem to go from strength to strength. We must find ample ways for tackling antidemocratic phenomena that aim at the destruction of democracy. On this front the Center sees an urgent need for education on all levels: primary schools, high schools and universities.

To achieve these ends, the Center will do the following:

· Establish an M.A. program for ethics and democratic studies at the University of Haifa. This would be an interdisciplinary program in which excellent students could select courses in political science, philosophy, sociology, law, communication, history and education.

· Conduct biennial international conferences, each dedicated to a different topic, such as equality; media ethics; multiculturalism; medical ethics; business ethics; free speech; civic participation; professional ethics; feminism, etc.

· Publish, and help to publish, books in Hebrew and English whose subject matters lie within the frame of reference described supra.

· Establish The Journal of Ethics, Law and Society (full details in Appendix 1).

· Hold annual competitions on themes that deal with ethics and democratic studies in all three levels of education, primary schools, high schools and universities.

· Sponsoring of debating societies in high schools, aspiring to hold the finals on national television.

· Co-operate with the Ministry of Education to increase awareness and improve education of democratic studies at all levels of school education.

· Develop a broad curriculum of recent history and civics, empowering civic education.

· Co-operate with the existing foundations that are working at schools.

· Found Student Exchange Programs between the University of Haifa and selected universities all over the world. We would like to have students from universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Berkeley in Haifa and would like to give our finest students the opportunity to study in those institutions. In addition, excellent students of Latin-American universities who are interested in Middle East studies could visit the Center for a limited period of time (one or two semesters), while Israeli students interested in Latin-American studies might visit corresponding universities. The students will be selected on a competitive basis.

· Cooperate with similar centers that exist in other universities. In the first instance attempts will be made to establish channels of communication and cooperation with The Program on Ethics and the Professions, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; The Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University; The Hastings Center, New York; The Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, University of Chicago; The Center for Human Values, Princeton University; The Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, The University of Manchester, England; The Center for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Australia; The McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, Canada; The Centre for Applied Ethics, The University of British Columbia, and The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

· Establish an extensive website describing the activities of the centre, with links to the sites of the above centers.

BUDGET

The cost of setting up and operating the Center for Democratic Studies necessitates an endowment fund in the amount of $1,000,000. The donor of this sum will be entitled to name the Center with an appropriate name of her or his choosing.

In addition, donors may fund, and therefore have the right to name, individual Center projects:

· Publication of the International Journal of Ethics, Law and Society

($30,000 per annum)

· Scholarships ($10,000 per annum)

· Conferences ($40,000 each)

· Publications ($30,000 per annum)

· Room; two computers; a printer; phone; fax; E-mail; stationary ($14,000, and $2,000 per annum)

· Executive Director of the Center ($36,000 per annum)

· Executive Editor of The Journal of Ethics, Law and Society ($36,000 per annum)

· Academic Coordinator of the M.A. Program ($36,000 per annum)

· Academic Coordinator of the Students Exchange Program ($36,000 per annum)

· 2 secretaries ($40,000 per annum)

· Prizes for excellent papers of schools’ pupils ($5000 per annum)

· Exchange Program Fund ($100,000 per annum)