The Old School

When the break began, Serbian Minister of Education Jovo Todorovic stated, “The application of the law goes according to plan and program at the desired pace,,” which means that all documents and normal functions of the faculty should be in harmony with the new university law by August 5, in essence professors must sign agreements with the faculties by that deadline.

A week before, the deans of the faculty in Belgrade, Bor, Nis, Novi Sad, Leskovac, Vranje, Kraljevo, Subotica, Kragujevac, Cacak, Sombor, Uzice, and later Pristina were appointed. The new dean of the Philological Faculty, Radmilo Marojevic, provoked a cultural scandal anticipating firings and rescinding professorships. Even the dean of the Political Science Faculty, who was asked to organize an internal election at which confidence in the administrative organs of the faculty would be proclaimed, was present in the resistance. The beginning of Vlade Teodosic’s mandate as dean of the Electro-technical Faculty is tied to “freeing one professor of his obligation,” and beginning of the mistreatment of Professor Srbjanka Turajlic (i.e. prohibiting entry to the computer center after working hours). Sixty five professors at the Philological Faculty came out against Article 165 of the new university law by letter, and announced that they would not sign any kind of work agreement, and that in harmony with valid, legal regulations they will further consider employed teachers and associates having full rights and that they will seek their rights in court.

“The 16 of us who committed ourselves to not signing the new contract because it is unconstitutional will stick to that because we don’t want to violate the constitution,” said Law Faculty professor Vojin Dimitrijevic in Glas.

This pre-registration of the employed really looks like a penal act in some one time dismissed party organization. Everyone returns books, but the commission decides who to return to.

This detail uncovers which spirit began this campaign - the spirit of party inquisitors. The regime has until now demonstrated the intention to subsequently forbid that which happens to it. But in 1991, 1992, and 1996-1997 a citizen and intellectual uprising occurred at the university.  For every generation of students in Serbia it’s like they have to have their 1968, their own generations cause, and their own defeat in order to electrify and socialize new generations.

 In this government there are two anti-intellectual and anti-liberal parties hungry for booty, who are hatefully disposed toward an intellectual elite in rebellion, which is deeply rooted in Serbian cultural history.  Even Dr. Vojislav Seselj and Dr. Mirjana Markovic haven’t selected the words to express a negative attitude toward rebellious, academic citizens.  Both see in the freedom of the university conspiracy, except he wraps his attitude in arrogant cynicism while she in paranoid fear. JUL and the Radicals consider the university as a source of bourgeois liberalism and the corrupt influence of the West just as the Partisans (except they were enthusiastic victors tied to their doctrines, they convinced those they couldn’t beat as is evident in our historical documents, but they are just a caricature of their worst edition), and just members of the ruling nomenclature of the ‘70s thought when they removed Praxisers, contributers to the famous philoshopical bulletin, from the faculty.

The irony of history dictates that the new university law become a basis for the new forerunning purge, as described by Republican President Milan Milutinovic who as a party aparatchik carried out the removal of elite professors from instruction  in the ‘70s.   Then they passed a special law--for the necessity of isolating the reluctant they attached research institutes at the university.  Now, it looks as though they are separating the research institutes from the university with the same intent.  Political parties have sharply reacted to this “siege of the university” as Mile Isakov says.  DS Vice-President Slobodan Vuksanovic said that the republican government, rather than solving huge problems, is involved in the placing of old, loyal, communist personnel in leadership positions at the university, which attests to  Slobodan Milosevic and his Socialist-radical government’s desire to take revenge against students and professors for demonstrating and frightening them at the same time. The Serbian Reform Movement (SPO) also released a statement of protest aimed above all at Seselj’s Radicals, but all in all, the opposition didn’t succeed in seriously frustrating this operation of the Radical-Left government.
Because the conquest of the university is tied with insulting and threatening the dignity of intellectuals, it isn’t out of the question that certain number of professors might be in that way removed from the university, and that a new wave of experts leave the country, which was probably the regime’s intention who judging by the way in which they run  the country, don’t need intellectuals.

That is how galloping incompetents will occupy the new space, but the government undisturbed by criticisms of the competent will run to lead this country running into an abyss.

There is no rational explanation as to why the government pulled out this move. Some kind of explanation can be heard from the newly appointed dean of Novi Sad Univsersity Svetolik Avramov, who stated in an interview with the newspaper Borba that he considers it his obligation to say he is a member of the Yugoslav Left (JUL) “which supported by appointment as dean.” The old pretension of the most powerful woman in Serbia was to control the University. The university Communist Committee was one of the institutions in which the conspiratorial core that launched Slobodan Milosevic as a new leader in Serbia originated.  That’s a tardy attempt to repeat ’45 after 50 years , but JUL and Dr. Mirjana Markovic, after all, didn’t say anything the Serbian Radicals or liberal circles when they mentioned the “rightists” from which they have a complex.

But the Radicals? They are by anti-intellectualism and xenophobic rhetoric closer to this late Zdanovisim. They simply stir up the hate of the mediocre toward the elite.  That rightist, authoritarian, and egalitarian party (the economist Mladjan Dinkic was obviously joking when he mentioned that they are liberal according to their program) has constructed as part of their influence attacking rebellious students and intellectuals.  After all, the Radicals were the loudest in promoting this new law. Republican Vice-President Tomislav Nikolic “well acquainted with all members of the government,” declared that “no one will get tired, surrender, or change their minds about the new law.”
They, therefore, once again will not surrender.