Belgrade student demo

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>[the beauty of the U.S. system is that the loyalty oaths are all 
>implicit, not explicit...]
>
>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."

I'm happy to see Professor Milicevic teaching again, but I'm afraid 
that he will be teaching neoclassical economics.

*****   Goran Milicevic, a professor of Urban Economy at the School 
of Economics, University of Belgrade, and a member of the Initiative 
Board for the Defense of Democracy of the University, wrote his 
analyses of the events in the December 30, 1996 issue of the Belgrade 
weekly "Vreme".

1) The Roots: Professional disorder makes me search for the causes of 
the existing few-years-long crisis of the uncompleted transition from 
a traditional society to a modern one. More precisely, I see the 
causes in the fact that the traditional, agrarian, patriarchal, rural 
system of values still stubbornly resists the modern, urban system of 
values. Even a hasty look at some developmental features supports 
this thesis. The participation of the literate became greater over 
the participation of the illiterate in 1931 for the first time. The 
participation of the non-agrarian inhabitants became greater than the 
rural only at the beginning of the 60s.

The participation of the employed with elementary school education 
was over 50% only in the middle of the 80s, and, finally, the 
participation of the urban inhabitants, due to the tempestuous 
migrations from the rural areas to the urban areas, became greater 
than the participation of the rural only at the end of the 80s. Thus, 
it could be said that the basic preconditions for democratic 
development and ascendancy of the modern system of values were 
satisfied only at the end of 80s, and only after a few decades of 
accelerated industrialization and urbanization.

Regretfully, the quality of these two processes (measured by the 
achieved income per capita) is fairly modest. And not only due to the 
short time in which the changes, which in the developed countries 
took centuries to model, happened, but also due to the ideological 
obstacles to the normal development of the processes. Which is why 
here we could say that we had quasi-industrialization and 
quasi-urbanization. And that means that the majority of the workers 
has low education and training, that a considerable portion lives in 
the village and works in the city, so their fear of a transition from 
such a system into a market economy based on competency is not 
something to wonder about....

Source: Belgrade weekly "Vreme",
December 30, 1996   *****

Yoshie