Birzeit University Physics Department

Bruce Hawkins

March 4-22, 1999

The Physics Department at Birzeit is largely a service department to the engineering departments, and enrolls a total of about a dozen Physics majors in all classes. The best of them go on to graduate school abroad (Birzeit offers no doctorates). The average student will become a High School physics teacher, for which there is great demand but low pay. Like many physics departments, they feel under constant pressure to justify the existence of the major.

Wa'el Qara'n, Department Chair (Left),
and Aziz Shawabkeh, my officemate

The department is reasonably well equipped, though their student computers are old. They have fairly modern oscilloscopes and other electronic equipment, not too different from many undergraduate colleges in the US. They have decided to limit the number of topics in their elementary course well beyond anything we dare in the US, teaching only Mechanics in the first semester and Electric Circuits in the second, which to my mind is probably a good idea. One of their technicians, Safi Safi, who has a masters degree in Science Education, is attempting to build up a set of hands-on corridor demonstrations and eventually a small science museum.

At least one of their faculty uses multimedia in teaching, with good projection equipment for his computer, which I used in one of the two talks I gave.

The faculty is expected to do research in order to be promoted and obtain tenure, but there is also recognition that this is very difficult when it is almost necessary to go abroad to accomplish any research. As a result, people stay on as Assistant Professors.

Retention of students is a considerable problem in a country where people are paid in the Jordanian economy in dinars and must purchase everything in the Israeli economy in sheckels. "We are paid on the poor side of the economy and must live on the rich side." A High School teacher makes $250 (1000 shekels) a month, yet food prices are comparable to US prices, and rents are perhaps half what they are in Northampton. Gasoline prices are comparable to European ones, about four times US prices.