Technion: 77% of audited faculty signed the petition calling Israel's Gaza war a war crime, the highest rate of any audited university.
OLAM RESEARCH · WHO SIGNED SERIES
Technion is Israel's premier STEM university. 77% of its audited faculty signed the Black Flag letter calling the Gaza war a war crime, higher than Hebrew University, higher than Tel Aviv, higher than every other institution in the study.
This is the first university-specific deep-dive from our Who Signed? audit of 2,844 faculty at eight Israeli universities.
Technion at a Glance
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Faculty audited | 85 |
| Petition signers | 64 |
| Participation rate | 77% |
| Rank among 8 universities | #1 |
| Primary petition | Black Flag letter (war crime framing) |
| Multiple petition signers | 0 |
Why 77% Is Surprising
Technion is a technology university. Its faculties are engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, materials science. These are STEM disciplines, and across the full study, STEM faculties show 15-27% participation while humanities show 60-82%.
Yet Technion's overall rate (77%) exceeds Hebrew University (67%) and Tel Aviv University (58%), both of which have large humanities and social science faculties.
This is the single most counterintuitive finding in the study.
Named Faculty
Among the 64 Technion signers with identified titles and departments:
Prof. Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, Humanities and Arts. The most senior identified faculty member among Technion signers.
Dr. Edna Barromi Perlman, Humanities and Arts
Dr. Hadas Shintel, Humanities and Arts
Dr. Talia Fried, Humanities and Arts
Dr. Tamar Sovran, Humanities and Arts
Five of the six identified titled faculty are in Humanities and Arts, Technion's smallest faculty. This suggests Technion's high overall rate is driven partly by near-total participation in its Humanities faculty (38% rate in that department alone accounts for 5 of 13 faculty), combined with broader participation across engineering departments where individual names lack title data in our records.
Department Breakdown
| Department | Faculty | Signers | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Humanities and Arts | 13 | 5 | 38% |
| Other STEM departments | 72 | 59 | 82% |
Key finding: 59 of the 64 signers at Technion come from STEM departments where individual department assignments are not specified in our database. This means the STEM participation rate at Technion may be significantly higher than the 15-27% seen at other institutions.
The STEM Anomaly
At every other university in the study, STEM participation is dramatically lower than humanities. At Technion, a university that is almost entirely STEM, the overall rate is 77%.
Either Technion's STEM faculty genuinely sign at much higher rates than STEM faculty elsewhere, or Technion's institutional culture produces a different dynamic than peer institutions. We cannot determine which explanation is correct from this data alone.
Comparison to Other Institutions
| University | Rate | vs. Technion |
|---|---|---|
| Technion | 77% | base |
| Hebrew University | 67% | -10 pts |
| Weizmann Institute | 62% | -15 pts |
| Open University | 59% | -18 pts |
| Tel Aviv University | 58% | -19 pts |
| Ben-Gurion University | 54% | -23 pts |
| University of Haifa | 41% | -36 pts |
| Bar-Ilan University | 30% | -47 pts |
Technion leads by 10 percentage points over the next-highest institution.
In This Series
📖 Who Signed? (Flagship study)
📖 Israel vs. America Comparison
Ronn Torossian is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, author and philanthropist. He is the author of two best-selling editions of For Immediate Release.
