Faculty
of Philology
Belgrade
Case
Study
Received:
20.02.1999
THE
CASE OF THE FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY
From
Conceptual Crisis to Collapse
From
the outside, one may get the impression that the conflict at the Faculty
of Philology in Belgrade developed between the dean Radmilo Marojevic,
appointed by the government in July 1998 upon the proposal of the Serbian
Radical Party, on one side, and the majority of the Faculty’s employees
and a large number of active students, on the other. In this sense the
events at the Faculty necessarily resulted from the new University Act,
the Facultys Statute and the deans self-will. However, these events were
also the consequence of a rather lengthy internal development. Without
actually knowing about it, it would be very difficult to account for the
relatively slow and not entirely adequate collective response of the Facultys
staff to the challenge it had to face.
The
events which transpired in the period under consideration, that is from
June 1998 until the end of February 1999 should, presumably, also be viewed
within the context of developments at the University in general. Unfortunately,
we still do not have a critical review of the Universitys history over
the past few decades, or a comprehensive and factual chronicle of the Faculty
of Philology. Neither do we have an analysis of relevant indicators revealing
the structure of the teaching staff, recruitment of students, employment
of graduates, the manner of writing the election and reelection reports
and so on. This is due to the Universitys and Facultys traditional lack
of interests in itself as much as to an awareness that any historiography
would, of necessity, have to take an analytical as well as critical approach,
which is, at least at this point of time, hardly feasible for a number
of reasons which apply to any critical consideration of the present times
in general.
Since
I had neither the time nor possibilities for a systematic research, I have
based my analysis on personal observations formed over more than two decades
of work at the Faculty, with all the limitations imposed by an approach
of this kind.
Politics
and law as mechanisms of control
The
most important mechanism for controlling the work of a faculty is the political
will of the power. As for the ways of manifesting this control, they largely
depend on the political relevance of the science which is being studied
and thought at a specific faculty and its possible commercial importance.
Philology is a science which has a direct political bearing primarily in
the study of ones mother tongue and literature and relevant instructions
at all levels of education. This tradition originates from the second half
of the past century and the early years of this century when national philology,
together with national history, had an inevitable role in creating the
nation and national ideology. In our midst, regardless of the changes in
prevailing ideologies, particularly inflammable in ideological terms were
the issues of delimitation of the Serbo-Croatian language and literature
along national lines.
For
instance, the question of whether the literature of Dubrovnik was Croatian,
Serbian or both, forms the very core of the literary-historiographical
conflict between the Croatian and Serbian nationalists. The establishment,
interpretation and transfer of the national literary canon invariably provoke
overt or concealed polemics with every change of ranks among those who
decide on the selection of compulsory reading at all levels of the educational
system. As for the language itself, the main controversy is whether there
is one Serbo-Croatian standard language with variants, or two or more different
standard languages. The argument goes far beyond the Faculty of Philology
since it involves the general attitude towards the problems of establishing
norms for a standard language, attitudes towards dialects, the understanding
of the history of Serbo-Croatian language, teaching of the language at
foreign universities, the work of the Serbian Language Institute attached
to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, etc. In a wider context, the
problem extends to the writing of textbooks and manuals in mother tongue,
obligatory orthography, instructions in Serbian language and literature
at foreign universities and a series of other matters of culture and education.
During the past year all these issues were not only renewed but taken to
the extreme by a group of philologists and literates, as they chose to
call themselves, gathered around Radmilo Marojevic. This has caused the
sharpest conflicts so far, although not with the nationalists among the
Croatian linguists, but with the prevailing number of the Serbian philologists.
The
political importance of foreign philologies at the Faculty is much lower.
However, shifting the focus on or away from specific languages and literatures
has, as a rule, reflected the changes in political relations both within
the former Yugoslavia and with other countries. This may be illustrated
by a few examples. The Slovene and Macedonian languages and literature
were bracketed together with the studies of the Serbian language and Yugoslav
literature, according to the territorial principle of belonging to the
former Yugoslavia, as opposed to the Bulgarian language and literature,
despite the fact that all three belong to the South Slavic group of languages.
After the disintegration of former Yugoslavia, the Slovene and Macedonian
languages and literatures were detached from the studies of the Serbian
language and literature. Croatian literature has a fairly undefined position
and comments are often heard that the status of its studies in Belgrade
should match the one accorded to the studies of Serbian language and literature
in Croatia. As for the Albanian language and literature the issue of whether
they should be studied in Belgrade as mother or non-mother tongue and literature
has never been clearly settled. Attitudes towards the teaching of foreign
languages and literatures, especially those of neighboring or geographically
close countries changed depending on the political relations with the state
concerned, so that the introduction of studies of the modern Greek language
and literature was not explained on grounds of professional standards,
which would have required this to be done much earlier, but rather by the
ties with the brotherly Orthodox Greek nation. The relation between certain
world languages and their representation in elementary and secondary schools,
especially the position of the Russian language compared with that of English,
German and French, and thereby also the emphasis on their teaching at the
faculty, depended on foreign political relations. It was even conceivable
that the attitude towards certain peers of literature or science of a language
and its letters be determined by political standards.
All
this formed a picture of highly entangled internal relations and reactions
at the Faculty. Political control over the Faculty was carried out in two
ways. Direct interventions from without or from above, first through the
Party branch and then also via the Faculty Council, were fairly few. By
contrast, indirect control from within was rather tangible and revealed
in the activity of certain teachers and associates, as well as the established
Rules of Conduct with Foreigners (fortunately, not rigorously applied),
and the direct insight of the Security Service through its men at the Faculty.
However,
the atmosphere at the Faculty of Philology was fairly calm. In the second
half of the 1970s and the early 1980s the requirement for moral and political
suitability was more of a ritual than anything else. I can recall only
one case when an assistant lecturer of the French language failed to be
reelected, formally because he lacked the moral and political suitability,
although the actual background was entirely different and he was subsequently
reassigned to an administrative staff duty. Essentially, the use of politics
was, in a few cases, merely a cover for actions which had nothing to do
with it. Internal censorship sufficed to prevent major strayings from the
correct course. Sheer political rule appeared on the scene only after Radmilo
Marojevic had been appointed the dean.
Until
the adoption of the most recent University Act, the law as the other basic
control mechanism did not have a significant influence on the operation
of the Faculty of Philology. Over the past 20 years, there were practiclly
no external interferences or references to the law which might be interpreted
as straightforward legal limitations of academic freedoms. Only in a few
specific cases did the law impose certain limitations. For instance, both
the current and previous Acts require that reports for the masters degree
as well as doctoral theses must be written in the Serbian language, which
is of importance for the development of the Serbian scientific idiom, but
is an inferior solution for foreign philologists, and partly also for the
Serbo-Croatian studies; the domestic scientific public is more than limited
and the joining in of foreign opponents is practically inconceivable. In
the absence of political will to ask for a different solutionfor
instance the freedom of the candidate to agree with the commission on the
language to be used for writing the paper and for its defensethis
provision of the Act elicited no reaction.
Real
limitations of academic freedoms, therefore, are not the outcome of political
pressures and legal provisions so much as of the fear inherited from the
initial post-war years, opportunistic behaviour of certain teachers and
overall conservativeness in matters of teaching and science. More precisely,
due to the highly traditional culture of the institution and traditional
scientific paradigms at certain departments, as well as clannish and individual
interests, overly provocative issues were avoided as were also those which
might have disrupted the Facultys balance.
The
emerging of the crisis
In
the post-war period, especially from the mid-sixties onwards, the Faculty
of Philology experienced a powerful development with an enormous increase
in the number of students and introduction of a series of new study groups.
In addition to a highly ramified structure which made the Faculty one of
the largest in terms of numbers of its teaching staff (close to 215 before
the most recent events) and students (about 800,000 active and 12,000 registered),
this development completely changed the internal relations. In addition,
language studies have also been introduced in a number of other university
centres and the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade was no longer the only
place one could go to study languages.
There
are at least seven basic categories of study groups at the Faculty of Philology:
mother tongue and literature (the so-called national departments), foreign
languages taught in schools (English, French, German, Russian), languages
considered significant in terms of the number of their speakers, number
of states where they are spoken or their economic importance (e.g. Chinese,
Spanish, Arab, Japanese, Italian), languages of neighbouring states which
are as a rule minority languages in Serbia (for instance Romanian, Hungarian,
Albanian) and other languages of diverse characteristics, as well as heterogeneous
translingual departments such as general linguistics, world literature
or librarianship. This results in different importance and positions of
specific departments, different number of teachers and different conditions
for engaging in teaching and scientific activities, as well as a highly
diverse social background of their respective students and vastly different
employment prospects for their graduates. The following are but a few examples
to illustrate this point.
There
is a difference between scientific involvement in a language spoken by
a few dozen thousand of people and that spoken by a few hundred million,
languages and literatures of neighboring countries and geographically distant
ones, or working in a group with 20-30 teachers and with merely one, as
there is also a difference between teaching in a department with fifteen
students, or in one enrolling two thousand. This gave rise to different
relations among specific departments and essentially resulted in an almost
negligible inter-departmental communication.
Where
students are concerned, Serbian language and literature are no doubt the
most important subjects taught in schools, but they have for years attracted
students primarily from the lower strata, poor environments and rural areas,
and quite often graduates of teachers schools. On the average, the results
of admission exams failed to indicate a particularly high quality of students,
and this picture has started to change for the better only in recent years.
Russian was studied by students from those parts of the country where the
Russian language was taught in secondary schools to a greater extent, primarily
the Serbian south-east, and they even more often came from the lower strata
and had rather poor grades. English, Spanish and Italian departments attracted
students from the upper strata and urban environments, with high average
results at entrance exams, followed by Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Scandinavian
languages. These departments always had more candidates than they could
possibly enroll.
Over
time, this internal complexity created a kind of a permanent crisis. The
Faculty of Philology turned from a teachers faculty into one which devoted
only a minor part of its activity to the production of teachers and there
was a lot of commotion when the law was invoked initially to set up and
then abolish the programs which, for the first time, laid bare the discrepancy
between what the Faculty was anticipated to do and what it actually did.
The huge differences in the quality of newly enrolled students by departments
were also reflected in vastly different possibilities to renew the teaching
staff, especially ever since other universities started establishing departments
for linguistic studies. Furthermore, a Faculty which had a small number
of students turned into a mass educational institution. Finally, the breakup
of former Yugoslavia set off a politically determined reordering of subjects,
teachers, importance and understanding of specific languages and literatures.
The Faculty of Philology faced this challenge unprepared in both personnel
and conceptual terms and entered a crisis it could not solve and moreover
did not even try to resolve, as revealed by the following examples.
During
the past decade the phonetic laboratory of the Faculty became practically
inoperational due to poor management and faulty personnel policy, but this
failed to provoke any reaction. The Literary-Scientific Section, envisaged
as a panel for professional discussion has never actually opened in earnest,
since the eyes of those who should have formed its backbone, were turned
towards the Academy of Sciences and Arts, the publishing houses, magazinesthus
places where external promotion and gains were expected. The Linguistic
Section stopped working after a few years, having been taken over by one
of those who were later to join Marojevic’s group and remained benumbed
for reasons we could only guess at. However, it is characteristic that
no one considered it necessary to at least try and revive their work. In
the like manner, the Society for Foreign Languages and Literature and the
Society for Applied Linguistics was rendered inactive. The Faculty was
thus left practically without any internal or external professional life
while its Scientific and Educational Council decreasingly functioned as
a professional body.
In
addition, in the late 1980s and the early 1990s the standards for election
to specific teaching positions were somewhat eased so that, along with
good teachers and associates a number of the less appropriate was admitted
or promoted. Then, the younger cadre started to dissipate and it became
increasingly difficult to find a good assistant. At the same time, the
view that whoever was missing was dispensable was adopted. One could say
that in the first half of the 1990s the Faculty of Philology basically
grew indifferent to the personnel policy outside the narrow clannish interests.
That happened precisely at a moment when it became clear that the deep
political divisions, primarily concerning the so-called national policy,
would have a large influence on the overall development of the Faculty.
On top of all that, extremely unfavourable material situationlow
salaries, practically discontinued acquisition of professional literature,
slowed down technical development, drastically worn out equipment, lack
of heating and so onsubstantially
disheartened the teachers and associates to engage in instructions and
science and made quite a few of them look for gainful work outside the
Faculty.
On
the whole, the personnel resistance of the Faculty at the time Marojevic
was appointed its dean, was remarkably reduced.
The
disrupted balance
It
is an academic tradition that the dean is considered the first among equal,
and the Faculty of Philology has observed it, more or less, at all times.
In matters related to teaching and scientific issues the dean, as a rule,
relied on the Educational and Scientific Council which, at the Faculty
of Philology, consisted of the complete teaching staff, while in all other
matters the dean referred to appropriate professional services and the
Faculty Council, and more or less regularly informed the teaching staff
about the overall operation of the Faculty. This formed a management quadrangle
consisting of formal bodies, such as the dean, Scientific and Educational
Council and occasionally Faculty Council (now called the Managing Board),
along with the informal influence of the administration, or rather the
secretariat of the Faculty and the heads of services for general affairs,
financial and material operations and students affairs. This created an
intricate balance of varying knowledge and competences, highly unstable
since the times of self-management, and easily disruptible in the struggle
for power and influence.
The
key in this quadrangle is the personality of the dean. The Faculty of Philology
had deans of highly diverse ambitions and abilities, but the actual situation
at the Faculty was formed during the terms of office of the previous two
deans, Nikaa Stipcevic, professor of Italian literature and Slobodan Grubacic,
professor of German literature. During their terms of office, repeatedly
renewed for the first time in the history of the Faculty, the previous
balance was upset and the centre of management shifted towards the dean
and, in time, towards an increasingly stronger role of heads of certain
services. Thereby the balance was changed and business management introduced,
while the teaching staff was practically left uninformed about anything
but the issues which were, according to the law, within the competence
of the Scientific and Educational Council. Everything else was generally
subject to guesswork. In all truth, the long-drawn-out financial crisis
finally shrunk the interest of the teaching staff to the payment of salaries,
food and holiday allowances. The lack of interest, disinclination towards
any engagement, the absence of awareness of actual relations between the
government as the employer and teachers, associates, administrative and
technical staff as employees all resulted in the fact that the Faculty
of Philology trade union branch was not formed before mid-1998.
Since
due to economizing with paper the documents for Educational and Scientific
Councils sessions were reproduced in a small number of copies, and since
moreover, the interest in the sessions was not particularly large, the
work of the Council was, over the past years, largely reduced to a ritual
vote on certain decisions with an occasional voice of dissent in the case
of candidates proposed for lower teaching positions or when the topics
for masters or doctoral theses were clearly below the admissible level.
Less than ever before the Faculty operated as an organic whole and appeared
mostly as a conglomerate of loosely linked departments and seminars. However,
the internal disagreements and misunderstandings notwithstanding, the abolishment
of the Scientific and Educational Council consisting of all teachers and
associates was experienced by many as the abolishment of the single body
wherein we felt as part of a collective.
This
kind of development created a soil equally fertile for a true renewal of
interest in the Faculty and for the appearance of a dean such as Radmilo
Marojevic. The latter came true because the Serbian Radical Party had only
one member among the professors at the Faculty of Philology, and Marojevic
was also instrumental as a link with the extreme nationalist opposition
in Russia. It was precisely this party, a coalition partner of the Socialist
Party of Serbia in the republic government, that appropriated the right
to appoint the new dean for itself.
The
ongoing conflict
Using
the brutal force of political authority and extremely rigid interpretation
of the University Act, the new dean, from early July until November 1998
managed to lead the Faculty deep into a crisis and then, until he was de
facto replaced by the government in mid-February, took a series of decisions
which brought the Faculty practically to a collapse. Thereby he provoked
the sharpest possible conflict the consequences of which may prove more
detrimental for the Faculty of Philology and philology in Serbia than any
of the previous events ever could
Radmilo
Marojevi graduated with honours from he Department of the Russian Language
and Literature and the Faculty of Political Sciences. As atn activist of
the League of Communists he was the first student elected vice-dean and
is generally remembered by the teachers and students in negative terms.
As a Montenegrin and party cadre he transferred from the Faculty of Political
Sciences, where he worked as Russian language instructor, to the Faculty
of Philology. He was extremely diligent and published a large number of
papers advancing fast towards the title of a full professor. His papers
range from very good to very poor. The gravest deficiency of his works
are his manifest theoretic manner and remarkable reliance primarily on
Russian literature, probably due to the lack of knowledge of other languages.
During the past few years he published a very large number of works dealing
with socio-linguistic problems of the Serbo-Croatian language in a highly
unprofessional manner, clearly subordinating professional arguments to
political beliefs and programs. His attitude to other colleagues was generally
bad and highly selfish. He is extremely persistent, inflexible, inconsiderate
and has developed a messianic understanding of his own personality.
In
the first stage of his political development he was an ardent Montenegrin,
a communist, internationalist and atheist but with the aggravation of the
political crisis and an enormous increase in his ambitions and after a
clean split with those who previously offered him support, particularly
from the circles of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he turned
into a Serb in the extreme, a radical, a zealot of pan-Slavism and Orthodoxy.
He gathered around himself a smallish group of like-minded people, mostly
from Montenegro and Republika Srpska, coming from marginal universities
and with extremely nationalistic views. Marojevic obviously looked upon
the office of the dean as a means to submit to himself the key part of
philology in Serbia and win a position wherefrom he could channel its further
development. These efforts of his reveal two mutually connected, internal
and external, lines. The sequence of internal events from June 1998 until
the end of February this year may be basically outlined as follows.
The
response to the new University Act came already in June taking the form
of one-week stoppage of exams on the basis of a decision of the former
Scientific and Educational Council. Then everything came to a halt in expectation
of the appointment of the new dean. The teaching staff generally engaged
in discussions whether the employment contracts should or should not be
signed, speculating who the new dean might be and, for the most part, perished
the thought that he could turn out to be a person so controvertible as
Radmilo Marojevic. The first move of the new dean was to prohibit the employees
to leave Belgrade until August 5. Meanwhile, with the help of a legal expert
of the Serbian Radical Party he developed a draft of the new statute. Coming
to his first meeting with the teaching staff which should have considered
the proposal, the dean brought with him only the rules of procedure for
that particular meeting which rendered any discussion meaningless since
the document entitled him to give someone the floor or cut them off at
will and enter in the records of the meeting only what he saw fit. An overwhelming
majority of participants walked out, while about 30 remained with Marojevic
to support him out of conviction or convenience. About 150 teachers and
associates, of the total number of approximately 215 at the time, held
their meeting in Hall 11. However, some dissipation was immediately noted
since only about 130 signed the statement opposing the deans intentions.
On the last day for signing the employment contracts, August 5, about 30
teachers and associates refused to sign, although later on during that
year a number of them gave in to pressure and threats.
After
about a month of calm during August and when September exams were over,
the dean ordered the retirement of all who met the legally prescribed conditions
to be pensioned off, including even those whose employment contracts were
extended by the previous dean as necessary for instructions. Thus a professor
of the English language and literature and general linguistics Ranko Bugarski
was forced into retirement, while professor of medieval literature Djordje
Trifunovic was sacked only a few months before he was due to retire. At
the same time a number of employees decided to take early retirement, including
e.g. professor of German language Zoran Ziletic, professor of Russian literature
Miodrag Sibinovic, professor of Serbian language Darinka Gortan-Premk and
a few others, although most of them could stay on beyond the retirement
age limit in view of teaching requirements. During the next few weeks a
number of teachers and associates resigned on their own, for instance assistant
professor of Italian literature Zeljko Djuric and a few assistants at Spanish
and English language departments.
After
the October exam term was over the new Dean first suspended all teachers
and associates who had failed to sign employment contractsabout
30 in allincluding practically the
entire Department of World Literature and Theory of Literature and individual
teachers and associates of a few other departments and then dismissed a
number of the suspended: professor Vladeta Jankovic and assistant professors
Aleksandar Ilic and Zoran Milutinovic of the Department of World literature,
Predrag Stanojevic assistant at the Department of Serbian Literature; professor
Slobodan Vukobrat and Srdjan Vujica, assistant at the Department of English
Language; and Branka Nikolic, an assistant in Hebrew and the only connoisseur
of the language here.
This
virtually ended the Department for General Literature and Theory of Literature.
The Department of Italian Language was down to one associate professor,
one assistant professor and one teaching instructor, so the instructions
were practically discontinued, as was also the teaching of Hebrew, while
the Department of English Literature was left without an assistant in literature
and so on.
After
that, the dean reassigned a number of teachers to other subjects taking
their own away and finally persuaded the Managing Board to accept his proposal
of the statute which created a completely chaotic and arbitrary organization
of the faculty he believed would give him full control over it and, at
the same time, assigned himself a few dozens of authorities. The students
responded by boycotting the instructions and the teachers organized one-hour
strike of warning. They also drew up a request to replace the dean, reestablish
the previous organization of the Faculty and the Educational and Scientific
Council, restore to instructions all the suspended or dismissed teachers
and annual all irregularly announced job openings.
The
dean banned entry to faculty buildings to all who had been dismissed or
retired and gave them a two-hour deadline to move out of their offices.
In order to secure physical control over the faculty buildings he ordered
all entries but one closed and brought unidentified guards who harassed
the employees and students for three weeks during November causing a series
of incidents. At the same time, the rectors office gave instructions to
hold additional exams in October, November and January hoping to secure
the support of students which nevertheless went missing.
However,
divisions and realignment among the teachers were already under way. A
number of teachers still conducted instructions and some of them provided
loud support to the new dean for political or opportunistic reasons. In
order to ensure the holding of instructions and reinforce his influence,
the dean started taking over politically like-minded teachers and associates
from other faculties and then, violating even the statute he himself had
made, invited competitions for non-existent subjects, for instance general
and German literature, to compensate for the gaps he had created by suspensions,
dismissals and retirement. The teachers brought this way would not have
measured up in the regular electoral procedure at the Faculty of Philology.
Incapable and still more reluctant to resolve the problems, the dean started
to resort to closing the building completely with increasing frequency,
thereby alone cutting the instructions down for a few weeks, while the
volume of his threats and pressures on individual teachers and associates
kept swelling. At the same time, almost all other activities at the Faculty
came to a standstill because he was simply incapable of managing the work
independently and was, moreover, absent from the Faculty a few days a week
since, as it is known, he also lectures in other towns, least-wise Kragujevac,
Niksic and Banja Luka.
However,
in only a few days, 104 signatures were collected on a request to the government
and the competent minister to replace the dean and normalize the instructions
by restoring the previous Faculty organization and the Educational and
Scientific Council consisting of all teachers and associates, but no response
was forthcoming from either the government or the minister at that time
or even later. After that, the majority of teachers and associates voted
for the postponement of exams in January and February terms and the start
up of instructions in the summer semester. From the very beginning Marojevic’s
relations with the Managing Board were rather tense, since he considered
it his executive body, but on December 11, when his self-will started to
exceed the limits acceptable even to the government-appointed Managing
Board, it proposed a few decisions to at least calm the situation somewhat,
but the government once again failed to react. During the vacations and
while the faculty was closed down on the deans orders, the protest, out
of fatigue, started to dissipate. But, February 4 marked a turning point.
On that day, a group of clubbers arriving at the Faculty at 6.45 p.m.,
with the knowledge of the dean (although it is not certain whether they
acted on his instructions or an order from higher up), beat and threw out
of the building a large group of students and teachers who wanted to protest
by remaining at the Faculty around-the-clock.
Until
that time the teachers actions were mainly guided by the Strikers Committee,
but from that moment on the key role was taken over by the Department of
Serbian Language and Literature which was the main target of the deans
attacks. At the same time, negotiations were conducted with the Managing
Board and the rectors collegium. Pressured by the protest and the fact
that the deans utterly unproductive conduct had already became a burden
for the Serbian Radical Party itself, the Managing Board issued a release
whereby, along with enormous praise of the dean, it asked the government
to relieve him of his duties as he himself requested so he could go to
Moscow for a three-year assignment on a Serbian-Russian language project,
which was no more than a fiction. Meanwhile, the initiated court proceedings
were still under way except in the case of Ranko Bugarski who was temporarily
restored to his job by the court, although Radmilo Marojevic refused to
comply with the ruling. At the same time, until the very last moment, he
tried to inflict additional damage on the Faculty and thus, e.g. withdrew
the signature he had been forced to give, from the request to the public
prosecutor to secure extrajudicial settlement with the dismissed and to
restore them to their jobs and, in addition, took a few more decisions
affecting the protesters.
Two
weeks later, after a lot of guessing as to who the new dean would be, the
office was filled by Rade Bozovic, professor of Arab language and literature,
columnist of the daily Borba and member of the Managing Board. On March
1, the new dean brought all the dismissed teachers and associates back
and after almost four months of protests the situation at the Faculty started
to calm down. However, a lot of problems are still outstanding, from the
complete reestablishment of the dismissed, to the solution for the status
of those Marojevic had brought there in order to renew the departments
most seriously affected by protracted destructive work.
That
was the internal course of the conflict. In it Marojevic primarily aimed
at the national departments and the department for Slavic languages due
to external developments. All other departments had a secondary role, which
naturally did not diminish the damage he inflicted upon them. On the other
hand, Marojevic’s design was much bigger: to place the Serbian philology
under his control. It hinged on a completely or almost completely scientifically
unfounded understanding of the Serbian language and literature with extreme
nationalistic foundations, the main ideas of which he and the group around
him presented in the first two editions of the new magazine called Srbistika
(Serbian language and literature) in the summer of 1998 after he had been
appointed the dean in a paper called Slovo o srpskom jeziku (An Address
on the Serbian Language). In an interview he gave, Marojevic stated that
these considerations would in future present the bases for teaching the
Serbian language and literature at the Faculty of Philology. It is a program
the counterpart for which can only be found in the curricula of the Nazi
Germany or the imposition of Marc’s linguistics and Lysenko’s biological
understandings in the former Soviet Union. In order to do precisely that,
immediately after taking over as dean, Marojevic assumed control of the
International Slavic Centre and sent a letter attempting to take control
of the Slavic Society of Serbia and the Union of Slavic Societies of Yugoslavia
and, at the same time, started to mount attacks on the Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts and Matica srpska (Serbian Mainstream Society) on
a wide front, accusing them of being treacherous institutions. People who
were close to him say his ambitions went further than that.
His
politics at the Faculty was a true reflection of the Serbian Radical Partys
policy. The history of the Faculty has no previous record of so much damage
inflicted on the institution, science and relations among the people concerned
in so short a time, even during the German occupation during World War
Two. The Faculty has been disastrously set back in every respect and it
will take years to recover under condition that Marojevic’s line does not
prevail through those who share his views at the Faculty, including both
the old-timers and the new staff he brought during his terms of office
or installed there by legal pressure. Divisions in various departments
are sharp and there is a lot of bargaining behind the scenes, many internal
departmental disagreements have been brought to the boiling point by Marojevic’s
systematic fanning of the conflicts. On the other hand, Marojevic has managed
not only to unify a large number of teachers and associates who previously
barely knew each other, or displayed largely different views, but he also
succeeded in turning against himself the bulk of the administrative and
technical personnel who could not go about their duties normally. In addition,
the employees have started to understand that they need a strong trade
union organization in order to be able to keep going. Thus, there was a
positive element to the events, after all.
SOCIOLOGIJA,
Vol. XL (1998), No 4, p.12.
Ljubisa
Rajic