Chronicle of Higher Education - web daily - October 10, 2000
Yugoslav Students March to Demand Repeal of Repressive Higher-Education Law By THERESA AGOVINO
Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Emboldened by the election of a new president, about a thousand students protested on Monday in downtown Belgrade, demanding the repeal of a repressive Yugoslav law covering higher education and the dismissal of the minister of higher education and the rector and 16 deans at the University of Belgrade.
Meanwhile, the university's faculty senate, which was disbanded when the law was passed in May 1998, reconvened and effectively dismissed the current rector by electing a new interim chief executive. The dean of the economics department also resigned under pressure, and economics professors voted to disband their department's supervisory board.
"There is such good news you can't digest it all," says Goran Milicevic, an economics professor who hasn't been able to teach for two years because he was suspended for his refusal to sign a loyalty oath required by the 1998 law. "I'm happy to go back to teach but I'm so tired, so overloaded by good news."
The 1998 law squelched intellectual discourse by politicizing the university, giving the minister of education the power to select the rector and deans. The law prompted some students to found Otpor, Serbian for "resistance," which swelled into a movement that was a crucial factor in persuading people to vote in the September 24 elections that eventually led to the ouster of the nationalist dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Students say they expect all the university leadership to be replaced but they still want the law repealed, even if it is moot.
"No country in the world has a law like this," says Jelena Sljivar, a 20-year-old English major. "It has to go. It is embarrassing. "We want to be rid of anything that had to do with Milosevic."