Rebellion against Government Draft Law on University

The Left and the Right Abolish Autonomy of University

AIM Belgrade, 24 May, 1998

"Come on, let's all go to the West!" This is how a resigned student greeted her colleagues at one of the protest gatherings which are organised daily in the past few days by scholars together with their professors - in protest against government draft law on university which is experienced as introduction of commissar control into the academic sphere. All the bitterness accumulated since the rebellion with which Belgrade won admiration of the world was poured into this changed, once cult slogan - "Come on, let's all join the attack!" - the mataphor of positive energy and citizens' freedom which a civil society is unthinkable without. The response of the regime to demands of the "rebellious university" arrived twelve months later, in the first ten days of May in the form of the document which fully abolishes the autonomy, as free-thinking academic world claims, and turns one of the pillars of every nations into an ordinary enterprise.

If the text of the draft which will be in front of the deputies of the Assembly of Serbia on Tuesday, the university will be fully "centralised", and all the rights will in that case go into the hands of the government and the minister in charge. This means that they will nominate rectors and deans, and through them have direct influence on personnel policy and promotion into academic ranks. This practically means that the university will be organised according to two-party criteria of the left in power and their absolute domination in all aspects of academic life.

"It is quite clear that every government will do its best to nominate ideologically apt and politically obedient persons for management and supervisory committees. In conditions of expressed political instability with frequent changes of governments, every change in this case will cause profound clashes at the university, because the entire management will be changing. That is how the university will turn into a battlefield and it will be concerned more about who will win the elections and form the government than about problems of science and education. Instead of depolitization - this draft law introduces the most crushing politization of the university", warns Dr Ilija Vujacic, professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade.

The document which was written in top secrecy and with no knowledge of the university, even the Belgrade rector, prescribes stricter regime of studies, reduces the number of exams that can be transferred into the next year of studies and introduces more rigid rules for maintenance of the status of a regular student. However, conviction prevails among the public that this time the authorities will make a concession to the students and leave introduction of order into the teaching process for some other opportunity.

The law-makers defend themselves by accusing all critics that they are pursuing politics and that their reactions are in fact a lament for self-management which permitted them "to elect each other again and again". In the assault against professors "because of their lament over self-management principles", the loudest are the former most zealous apologists of the "workers' constitution" who used to glorify it and made their glorious careers on its basis.

Vice prime ministers, Dr Ratko Markovic, Dr Milovan Bojic and Dr Vojislav Seselj, presented the government draft to the public. In the explanation they claimed that an excellent and modern law was drafted, and said that the founder of the university, that is the state (and they themselves are the state) has all the rights on the basis of ownership.

Dr Dragoljub Popovic, professor of Belgrade Law School, says that it is the result of completely monstrous ideas: "They say that the state finances state universities, therefore, it can determine how they will be managed. Budgetary means do not belong to ministers in the manner in which means of Brothers Karuic University belong to the family which has founded that university. The truth is that our ministers got mixed up and that they should be reminded of this confusion", Dr Popovic warns.

In the history of the university in Belgrade, the oldest and the most prestigious academic institution in Serbia, there has never before been a document which stifled all management rights and freedoms. Belgrade University has survived many attacks and continued to exist - it survived eight changes of the name of the state, numberless governments, a series of wars, two world wars inclusive.

"This was possible, because the university was neither private, nor state, but an accomplishment of the people who are living in this space. There is no doubt that in the period remembered by our generation, this draft law is the most severe attack on the university. It is the task of the students and the professors, as temporary guardians of this national treasure, to try to defend it and pass it on intact", says Dr Srbijanka Turajlic, Professor of the Faculty of Electric Engineering in Belgrade, and member of the University committee for defence of democracy.

The government draft law on university certainly got the blood of the academic public up. Assembly of Belgrade universities adopted a declaration demanding withdrawal of the document from the parliament procedure and that a new draft law be made in cooperation with the university and with its approval. Both the students and the professors backed this demand, and at the latest session of the teaching and scientific council of the Belgrade University, the same conclusions were adopted. They insist that prime minister Mirko Marjanovic urgently receives them and the rector, Dr Dragan Kuburovic, has announced that he would submit his resignation if on 26 May deputies pass the drafted document which has already been backed by the government and which has already been approved by the assembly committee for education.

In case the parliament adopts the questioned paragraphs, students demand general strike and in revolutionary appeals they ask the professors to insist on paralysing work at the university and they will then whole-heartedly back them. "Do not agree to subjection. This regime understands only the language of force, they take no argument seriously", was the message of Boris Karaicic, member of Students' Parliament and a brilliant student of two faculties.

The opposition parties also denounced the government draft law, which did not exactly cause enthusiasm in the academic world, because the collapse of the Together coalition is still remembered and the way it betrayed everything for the sake of which the winter '96/'97 protest walks were organized. Serb P.E.N. centre also raised its voice against this document, and unofficially it is possible to hear that Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts is also getting ready to demand withdrawal of the text which reduces the university to the status of a cooperative farm. A group of professors thrown out from Belgrade University because of participation in the events in June '68 addressed on 20 May an appeal for creation of a movement for democratic transformation of Serbia. In their letter addressed to the public signed by Ljubomir Tadic, member of the Academy, Prof. Dr. Svetozar Stojanovic, Prof. Dr Zagorka Golubovic, Prof. Dr Dragoljub Micunovic, Dr Nebojsa Popov, scientic advisor, and Trivun Indjic, M.Sc., scientific researcher, among other, they say:

"Imitating his ideal - the great dictator Tito who in the end of the sixties and in the seventies, was reinforcing totalitarianism in the state and the society, small dictator Slobodan Milosevic, by using shock troops of the Yugoslav United Left and the Serb Radical Party, with the attack against the University in Belgrade, is trying to introduce receivership at the faculties under the veil of a secretly and cowardly prepared law. He is at the same time trying to liquidate disobedient mass media. To make Milosevic's destruction of the nation and the state even greater, on the eve of Montenegrin elections he is organizing the anti-Constitutional attack on independence of that Republic of ours. Hopefully even the last citizen is by now aware that he is capable of destroying even the little of the federal state left just in order to remain the untouchable ruler of at least on one of its parts"...

The demand to withdraw the government draft law on university was signed by about 12 thousand students, professors, research workers and citizens in all the university centres except the one in Pristina. At the same time about 16 thousand signatures were collected in favour of putting into the procedure the document prepared by the expert team of the Association for Defence of Democracy. This draft law on university was, contrary to the government one, presented to the public.

This is not the first time that the authorities in Serbia are trying to get even with the Belgrade university. After the students' protest in 1992, which was whole-heartedly supported by Belgrade University, during the summer vacation they passed in an express procedure a document which was not at all concerned about the interest of the university. Although that law which is still in force was assessed as a project which limitted the autonomy of the university, the current critics of the government draft law believe that it is "generous" in comparison with the offered one. And the paragraphs passed in 1992 were evaluated as follows by Professor Momcilo Grubac: "Nowadays, not even Nikola Tesla could become the rector if he were not a member of JUL or the SPS".

Drafters of the law insist on the fact that the offered document was made on model of the "French type" of organization of university life. Cynical commentators finish the sentenceby saying: "This may be true, but the ideas in it will be applied in the Soviet manner of the twenties".

Olga Nikolic

(AIM)