Shabbat Shalom from BGU President July 2026
Dear Friends,
Yesterday, while scrolling through LinkedIn between meetings, I came across a post by one of our alumni, Dror Berman, that made me stop and smile.
Dror wrote about meeting Nadav Grossinger on his very first day as a student at Ben-Gurion University.
Like so many first encounters on a university campus, neither of them could possibly have imagined where that introduction would eventually lead. Years later, both found themselves in Silicon Valley, building companies together and helping shape Israel's, and indeed the world's, technology ecosystem.
Reading Dror's reflection, I found myself thinking less about entrepreneurship than about universities.
Many of you will remember that at our Board of Governors meeting last year, I spoke about one of the central pillars of our strategy for Ben-Gurion University: AI resilience. Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on what AI will replace. It therefore raises an uncomfortable question: if knowledge becomes universally accessible and expertise increasingly augmented by AI, what remains uniquely valuable about the university?
This question has occupied me for many months and became the focus of a recent article I published (see link below).
The more I reflected on it, the more convinced I became that universities have never been simply places for creating and transmitting knowledge. They are places where people become. They are places where young people encounter ideas unlike their own, where they meet mentors who change the trajectory of their lives, and perhaps most importantly, where they meet and learn from one another.
That is why Dror's story resonated with me so deeply.
On the surface, it is a story about two successful entrepreneurs. I see something different. I see two young students whose lives intersected because they arrived on the same campus at the same moment. Their friendship endured. Their professional paths converged. Eventually they built together, along with several other of their classmates.
No university could have planned that outcome. But universities can create the conditions in which remarkable people meet, challenge one another, and discover shared ambitions. It strikes me that creating those conditions may be among the most important things we do.
Dror's post came on the heels of another piece of news that, to me, reinforced the very same idea. Ben-Gurion University was ranked first in Israel and third in the world for the proportion of alumni who become founders of highly successful venture-backed companies.
Naturally, I was delighted by the recognition. But the ranking itself was not what excited me most.
Instead, I found myself thinking that perhaps the ranking is measuring something deeper than entrepreneurial success. Perhaps it is capturing, however imperfectly, the strength of a community in which talented people find one another, challenge one another, inspire one another, and continue creating together long after they have left our campus.
That, to me, is what AI cannot replace.
Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly transform universities, just as previous technological revolutions transformed those that came before us. We should embrace those changes, and indeed we are investing heavily to ensure that Ben-Gurion University is among the institutions leading that transformation.
But as AI becomes increasingly capable of delivering information, the uniquely human dimensions of university life become even more valuable: curiosity, mentorship, serendipity, collaboration, friendship, and community. In many ways, this is precisely what we mean when we speak about building an AI-resilient university. It is not about resisting technology. It is about strengthening the aspects of higher education that technology cannot replicate.
David Ben-Gurion envisioned this university as a place where the future of the Negev, and indeed the future of Israel, would be shaped by bringing exceptional people together to solve difficult problems. More than sixty years later, I believe that vision is even more relevant than he could have imagined.
The university of the AI era will not be defined primarily by the information it possesses, but by the people it brings together and the relationships they build.
Dror probably intended his LinkedIn post simply as a reflection on an old friendship. I read it differently. I saw a reminder of why universities continue to matter, perhaps even more in the age of AI than they did before. If AI changes how we learn, it does not change why we gather. And it is in that gathering that universities continue to do what they have always done at their best: help remarkable people find one another.
As we enter Shabbat, I wish you and your families a peaceful weekend.
Shabbat Shalom,
Danny
P.S. If you are interested in reading more about these ideas, my recent article can be found here
