As soon as I retired from TRW, my wife and I decided we would like to accelerate our travel ventures. It would take a few years to get into the mind frame of spending our own money for travel, after a lifetime of company-paid trips. I applied for a Lady Davis Visiting Professor fellowship at the TECHNION ( Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa for the Fall Semester of 1989. I offered to teach my course in "Spacecraft Systems Design". One of their Aerospace Engineering faculty knew of me, offered to be my mentor, and championed my appointment. We contacted my distant Cousin - on my Mother’s side-Susan, whose husband was also a Professor of Industrial Engineering there, and they eased our first entry into the old country. Haifa, the site of the school, is a beautiful beach city, as well as the major port of the country. And, best of all, it has a small boat marina for sail boats.

When I met my first class in spacecraft design, over 50 students sat in on the first lecture. A week later, only half that number showed up. I was puzzled and asked an obvious English-as-his-first-language student, "what was going on". As his story unraveled, I began to see in what a highly competitive academic environment I was now operating.

The TECHNION is to Israel what MIT and Cal Tech are to the United States. It is the premier technical school in the country and was founded shortly after the war of independence, and, with Hebrew University in Jerusalem, shares the title of being the oldest state-supported higher learning institution. Almost to a person, the industrial tycoons and leading engineers in Israel wear the old school tie. It is like a closed corporation.

The school was first located in the Hadar, or middle section, altitude-wise, of Haifa, but now is located on a large, lovely campus in the upper Carmel section of the city. At first, they were going to teach in German, as a tribute to the strong pre-war technical position that German scientists and engineers held throughout the world. But, national pride- of which there is a great abundance, and a beautiful thing to experience – won out. So, the official language of the school is Hebrew. Nowadays, however, what with the large faculty influx from the Soviet Union, the recurring joke is that Hebrew is now the second language - in favor of Russian. The students are allowed to take one course per semester in a foreign language, which is usually in English.

Their course load, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, is barbaric by US standards, and the student competition is fierce. There are only a limited number of educational and industry/ government slots available. The best students will get the best, highest paying jobs. It’s as simple as that! It is my feeling that there is a considerably higher percentage of women students than in the States. There is also the peculiarity of students being called up for two or more weeks of military service right in the middle of a semester. Although such service appears essential to the security of the State, one wonders if this is the best way to run a railroad ? All students speak English, which is their normal second language. However, some are reluctant to do so, which is natural.

The Faculty are mostly ingrown, but most have received at least one higher degree in the United States or, to a lesser extent, in Europe. Most take frequent sabbaticals, again mostly in the US or England. If you listen to them, they are miserably paid, and this is true of their base salary. In fact, the second time I was a visiting professor there, I arrived to teach the Spring semester in the middle of a teacher’s strike. They merely wanted their base pay to equal that of the garbage collectors!

But, in truth, the salary situation for most professors, at least for those who conduct active research programs for the Israeli government or NASA, for example, is quite good. They supplement their base salary by drawing directly from the contract work. In the US, most of such contract funds are generally used to support graduate students or buy equipment. The top faculty also supplement their salary by consulting, which is encouraged. The TECHNION gets much support directly from the government. Another nice (?) feature is that the faculty can ‘borrow" heavily on their anticipated retirement funds, with no great pressure to pay back.

The Aerospace Engineering faculty, headed by a Dean, who rotates out of the job on approximately 3 year centers, almost universally consists of what I call " Battleship Admirals" – persons who do not recognize that there is a viable regime above the earth’s sensible atmosphere. Of course this situation is reflected in aerospace departments throughout the world. Only retirement of the ‘old timers’ will permit a more benign attitude towards astronautics. The aeronautical buffs hang on even though the airplane business is on the decline. In fact, the Technion’s Aero Department was one of the last in the modern world to convert its name from "Aeronautical Engineering" to "Aerospace Engineering" in recognition that the Space Age was probably here to stay. The catch is that the Faculty did not change and,

in many cases, remains blissfully unaware that such subjects as flow around an airfoil are of absolutely no interest to a space aficionado.

Dr. Tancum Weller, who was Dean of the Aerospace Faculty in 1999, was interested in space when I first arrived. He is a structures expert and was leading a group of his students in an international design competition. It was sponsored by the NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab of Pasadena. The idea was investigate the possibility of erecting a huge solar sail which, utilizing the reflection and/or absorption of the high energy particles which are emitted from the Sun to provide very low thrust propulsion, would facilitate travel to nearby planets. The problem was how to erect the sail. One obvious solution was to use inflatable tubes to give shape to the very lightweight sail material. The fear of deflation due to particle puncture was a real one in this approach.

Years before, when I was working with the Atomic Energy Commission’s lab at Iowa State University, the alloy of Nickel-Titanium was brought to my attention. In wire form, NiTi ( pronounced nye-tye) has some unusual properties. If it is heated to a certain temperature and formed into a particular shape, like a circle, say, and then allowed to cool, it will return to that shape when heated again. This is true no matter what is done to it while cool, like packing it into a small space, say. I suggested to the group that they propose NiTi to erect the sail, using electrical energy to heat the wire. They liked the suggestion and proposed it. They were one of the winners.

Throughout the TECHNION, there is a strong belief that it is the fundamentals that must be taught, and that it is industry’s role to teach their graduates the applications. This is a highly elitist attitude, which MIT, for example, long ago abandoned. It is sustained by the fact that the faculty has had very little industrial experience and their school philosophy is that every student should go for the PhD. They have a fear of becoming a ‘trade’ school. But, methinks their pendulum has swung too far. Since I teach only applications-type course, I was like a fish out of water. Some years ago, because of my trade school attitude, a friend said, "Brodsky, you have no clue of what constitutes an education". Sure, the fundamentals are great, but to see them in action is greater! Maybe I’m wrong, but I did win two national ‘outstanding teacher’ awards.

Anyway, it was this purist attitude that made the Faculty look down their noses on my courses. Unbeknownst to me, they had reduced the credit for my three-hour-a-week course in Spacecraft Design from the normal 3 credits to 2½ , without telling me. That was why so many dropped out after I told them about the homework and exams they should expect. They figured they would have to put out an non-proportional amount of effort for the credit they would receive. Nevertheless, many students stuck by me, and one later became my protégé at USC, where she earned her PhD.

I reprised as Visiting Professor for the Spring 1994 semester, this time teaching my "Principals and Techniques of Remote Sensing" course. The second time around, the ‘admirals’ did me in even worse, again without letting me know before it was too late. This time around, I taught my Remote Sensing class; a course which has no natural departmental home. It can be taught by Electrical Engineering, Physics, or Aerospace - each having a legitimate claim. The Aero Faculty at the TECHNION didn’t know what to make of it, so they decided to give it 2 credits. I screamed like a wounded eagle and wrote an angry appeal, which was eventually denied. I felt sorry for the 20–odd students who decided not to take the course that they really wanted. I gave no homework assignments to the 7 students who stayed, going over the answers in class instead. For the final exam, I gave only one question: "Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?" I gave everyone an "A" even though all could not come up with the right answer.