The Open University

Zagorka Golubovic, Trivo Indjic, Mihailo Markovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Svetozar Stojanovic, Nebojsa Popov, Ljubomir Tadic and Miladin Zivotic - these eight professors thrown out of Belgrade University in 1975 were excluded from public life to such an extent that one of them once said: our death notice would not even have appeared in the newspapers if we had died. Then came the idea to meet regularly in private apartments and to include a wider circles of intellectuals - as large as their modest housing conditions would allow - of different professions and spiritual orientations in order to debate about their research, society and the state, about what they are reading and writing. This is how the Open University began at the beginning of the 1980's. One of the encouragements for this type of gathering was the experience of the similar Polish movement, long active in the Polish political underground and with developed publishing and education activities.

According to Nebojsa Popov, the person who was to begin the discussion and the theme to be discussed were usually confirmed in advance. "One of the first personalities that we discussed was Pico de la Mirandola. On the agenda were ideas of the renaissance, individualism, human rights, freedom. The first to speak were Ljuba Tadic (philosopher) and Dragoljub Micunovic (recent leader of the Democratic Party), in Tadic's apartment. Sometimes there were more than thirty of us, but the university was limited by space - there was not a single apartment with more than three rooms. It is understood that there were no true salons, so the new housing 'living rooms' were promoted to a type of salon. Conditions were even more cramped with younger colleagues, but the conversations were much more dynamic." This was not the only attempt by critical intellectuals to gather against the will of the authorities. Regular gatherings were held on the Dalmatian island of Korcula (the well-known Korcula summer school) from 1963 to 1974 until this was ended by repression. While the authorities tolerated the gathering of oppositionists, hundreds of people from Yugoslavia and abroad would come to Korcula, including Herbert Marcuse, Jurgen Habermas, Ernest Bloch...

Dr. Popov continues: "Essentially, when the Korcula summer school and the 'Praxis' journal (published from 1964 to 1974) were no longer possible, when people were thrown out of the Universities in Belgrade, Ljubljana and Sarajevo, the gatherings began to more resemble salons of critical intellectuals. The groups were smaller and more dynamic and younger colleagues, such as Pero Ladjevic and Lino Veljak from Zagreb, were able to speak. We could speak freely outside of Belgrade, while we could not do so in Belgrade. We met with colleagues from other parts of the country on the islands, with Danko Grgic, Predrag Matvejevic...."
What exactly was the "group of professors"? In Contra fatum, Nebojsa Popov writes: "As far as we know, in scientific, sociological and psychological classifications there is no place for such a social group as we are talking about...The empty space for such a group is not something strange since it is a common fact that life is richer than any scientific classification. What is particularly strange here is that the 'group of professors' was formed independent of the needs and will of the individuals who found themselves in it... The 'group of professors' was formed at one meeting of Josip Broz, president of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ) and the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), with political functionaries of the Socialist Republic of Serbia during October 1972, as the result of his many years of insisting upon finding a 'culprit' for the 'June events" (the student demonstrations in June 1968). The 'group of professors' was therefore formed as a result of the particular need to find a scapegoat for a specific event, outside of and against the needs and will of the individuals who found themselves in it."

In conditions where democracy is absent, salons are groups that represent the aspiration for the public articulation of ideas that are discussed and debated in private groups. These can be the initial forms of new institutions and were the general road to the creation of new journals in more recent history. After Tito's death, the future of society and the state were brought into question and the initiative to found a new journal - Nova Revija in Ljubljana - appeared. After certain disputes and conflicts, the journal saw the light of day and more than one hundred issues were published. Nebojsa Popov remembers that a similar initiative in Belgrade met with repression which made the appearance of Javnosti impossible in 1980. A group of intellectuals of various professions, orientations and generations stood behind the idea of Javnosti - from Dobrica Cosic, Ljuba Tadic, Zoran Gavrilovic, Lazar Trifunovic and Svetozar Stojanovic to Zoran Djindjic, Dusan Boskovic and Vojislav Stojanovic. In opposition were Stane Dolanc (former Yugoslav police minister), the Belgrade Socialist Alliance and then the Yugoslav Socialist Alliance, even the municipalities (Savski Venac, where the offices of Javnosti were to be), which were "surprised that the founders weren't satisfied that they were allowed to freely breath and stroll about".

Nebojsa Popov believes that "it seems that neither the government's power nor the power of massification can completely eliminate people's need for diversity and communication, so that you now have smaller groups of people who express their views in some forms of intellectual salons and publicly despite their surroundings. Only those who are totally desperate or are extremely unscrupulous manipulators do not notice such groups and their opinions and journals - or cynically put off thinking about them 'until the moment that they eventually come to power'. I am talking about the Belgrade Circle, the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia, Republika biweekly - the first opposition paper which has been coming out for six years, the group of workers from IMT who held a hunger strike, after which began contacts between the union and their enterprise... All of this is new, it is never the same as it was, because where gatherings are spontaneous they are unrepeatable."