The General Assembly of the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya (IDC) has made the decision to change the higher learning institution's name to Reichman University, a decision made in order to better reflect the vision of the IDC President and founder Professor Uriel Reichman, who will be retiring from his position next year.
In addition to honoring Reichman and his founding vision, the renaming of the institution as a university was also done in order to accurately reflect its character as an academic research institution that confers doctoral degrees and operates in accordance with the highest academic standards.
“IDC Herzliya becoming a university is an important milestone in the development of the Israeli higher education system. Israel now joins a host of countries that, alongside state-funded institutions, boast excellent elite private universities," said Professor Amnon Rubinstein chairman of the board of directors and Israel Prize laureate for law.
"Since its inception, IDC has made a significant contribution to higher education in Israel, through its innovation, its uniqueness, and the way in which it has challenged and motivated the more established institutions," Rubinstein added.
Reichman founded the institute in 1994, with the vision to establish a private university modeled after the world's leading universities, in order to train the future leadership of the State of Israel and the Jewish People in the spirit of Zionism and the values of the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel.
IDC is Israel's first and only private university, and is a non-profit organization that does not receive any government funding and is among the top academic institutions in the country. The institution is also the most international academic institution in Israel according to data from the Council for Higher Education.