After all the threats, blackmail and punitive measures, the University is still resisting the government's intention to crush it. And it wasn't easy: they cut their salaries, sent educational inspectors, checked their operations, introduced bribes to detect violations of regulations related to teaching, holding teaching and scientific councils and the presence of professors, sent misdemeanor reports, demanded that the deans call the police against the students, and finally interrogated the rector at the Criminal Police Department. However, the professors are still not giving up their support for the students. They have recently told the deans to start online classes by May 20th at the latest or to resign. And if that demand is not met either, they are announcing a "new network of universities". This means - either the state faculties will submit or they will be destroyed.
When they heard that some future list for the elections was being created by students with the support of the academic community, they decided to move on to even more radical measures. Aleksandar Vučić angrily said from Niš: "I will not fulfill any of the students' demands, professors will not receive a single dinar until they return to teaching, and there will be elections in the next year and a half." Vučić knows well how the autonomy of higher education institutions is trampled on and abolished. He was once in the red-black coalition that did it thoroughly. He has a vivid memory and a pattern.
Ironically, Slobodan Milošević also tried to bribe the rebellious students by establishing the Foundation for Solving the Housing Needs of Young Scientists, headed by Professor Mira Marković. And when that failed, at the end of May 1998, the Assembly, under emergency procedure, at the proposal of Dobrivoje Budimirović Bidža, a professor at the Agricultural High School in Svilajnac, adopted the Law on Higher Education, which was written in secret by unknown authors.
Freedom is always subversive for authoritarian regimes. Under the pretext of "depoliticization", the government became the university's manager. It elected rectors and deans and appointed members of the Board of Directors. Professors and assistant professors were elected by the dean, while the Minister of Education was responsible for full professors. The dean was not obliged to announce a competition for re-election or promotion if a professor did not suit him. Everyone had to sign new employment contracts as a pledge of loyalty. The epilogue: two hundred teachers were dismissed from their jobs, a number of them left the faculties themselves because they did not accept professional humiliation, and 1.400 teachers and associates were admitted to the faculties according to the new criteria.
And here we are 27 years later with the same topic, the same political actors, on the same task. The government is looking for new ways to further punish and discipline the faculties. Vučić seems to have remembered the pattern from 1998 when he was the Minister of Information and threatened: "We will break the monopoly of state faculties, they will never be able to blackmail again." In April of this year, the government suddenly, without a public debate, tried to push through the draft law on higher education. But the resistance from the scientific community was so great that they had to withdraw it.
Now comes a new attempt. The Ministry of Education, headed by Dejan Vuk Stanković, a professor whose academic conduct has been the subject of two scandals, has been tasked with preparing a draft of a new Law on Higher Education within three months. They are in such a hurry that they have not even informed the rector Vladan Đokić that he has been appointed to the Working Group.
It is obvious that a repeat of the government's fierce revenge on the rebellious university is coming. After several months of exhaustion, they are switching to a strategy of total destruction in a year in which the outlines of the resolution of the greatest crisis this government has ever found itself in are emerging. Unless the academic community stands up to them. And unless the citizens stand up to them. Because, without a free university, there is no free state.
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