A legend stands behind the establishment of the Department of General Studies, later called the Department of Humanities and Arts. The story goes that in 1962 the vice president of the Technion, Professor Haim Hanani, who was a mathematician, was very disturbed by the state of Technion students’ education. The reason for his concern was not the technical level of the students, but their lack of understanding of the broad philosophical and cultural contexts of their work.
To convince the Senate of the necessity for a department that would be dedicated to broad humanistic studies, he conducted an experiment in which he presented his students with the challenge of designing a pipeline to carry blood between Nahariya and Eilat. The dedicated students immediately began planning, but none of them questioned the nature of the strange request or asked about the source of such a quantity of blood or why it should be streamed to the south of the country. Hanani presented the findings of his experiment to the shocked members of the Senate, who immediately approved the establishment of the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion.
Did this experiment actually take place? The answer probably lies between reality and imagination. In any case, the department was indeed established and in 1959 the cornerstone for a dedicated building was laid. To this day, the department’s goal is to complete the students’ technological training through a wide variety of courses in the humanities, languages, physical education, social sciences, and the arts, and to deal with ethical questions that will guide scientific research. The department hosts the ” Sonia Marschak Artist in Residence Program,” in the framework of which meetings are held between researchers, students, and faculty members in the Technion community and international artists and musicians.