The Not-So-Nobels

Steve Plaut sent this out:

All week Tel Aviv University officials were flooding the media with reports that one of its professors was about to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. As it turns out, TAU was counting its chickens before the Nobel egg was laid. He did not get the prize. TAU, which is arguably Israel.s most politicized universities, has never produced a Nobel Prize winner.

On the other hand, Israel.s least politicized institutions, first the Technion and today the Weizmann Institute, HAVE researchers who have won Nobel Prizes. A woman chemist at Weizmann shares today.s Nobel in chemistry.

It is not a coincidence that the most politicized institutions in Israel are least likely to get a Nobel Prize. (Hebrew University, which is politicized but less so than TAU, has one Nobel winner - it is conservative and religious [and I'd add nationalist] economist Robert Aumann . but he is the exception to this rule.) The Israeli institutions where leftist politicized anti-Israel faculty are as rare as four leaf clovers are the ones producing the champions of science.