New APPS

The following open letter in support of the autonomy of the universities of the Republic of Macedonia was originally drafted by Todd May for the purposes of being circulated and gaining additional signatories. It is being published here with the names of its current subscribers.  Those who wish to add their signatures are encouraged to do so in the comments. Institutional affiliations are provided solely for the purposes of identification of the individual signers and do not express any official position of the named institutions. 

Those seeking more information about the situation or who wish to discuss it should read and comment on the post below this one. 

 

December 20, 2014

Nikola Gruevski, Prime Minister
Republic of Macedonia
primeminister@primeminister.gov.mk

Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport
Xavier Prats Monné, Director General for Education and Culture
European Union
eacea-info@ec.europa.eu

 

We, the undersigned, scholars and professors from around the world, write to express our deepest concern about the recent actions taken by Ministry of Education and Science to amend the Law on Higher Education, and we wish to express our solidarity with the demonstrators of the Student Plenum and their supporting faculty members and Macedonian citizens.

Any political arrangement that seeks to be called democratic must allow for the autonomy of its institutions of higher education. It is in those institutions that critical reflection on the character of a society—its politics, its economic system, its arrangements of power, and its cultural production—can be performed in a rigorous and unfettered manner by those who are going to be participating in that society. When the institutions of higher education become subject to state control, critical reflection is held hostage to the dictates of those in power. No society can flourish under those conditions. Creativity is stifled, critique is muzzled, independent thought is diminished.

The proposed amendments to the Law on Higher Education, in addition to other recent actions by the Ministry of Education and Science, do not simply undermine the autonomy of universities; they eliminate it. The Ministry has proposed second and fourth year examinations in every course, to be overseen not by those who teach those courses, but by the Ministry itself through the National Board of Accreditation and Evaluation of the Higher Education. Thus the state is attempting to arrogate to itself the power of granting or withholding degrees. Macedonian higher education, both its content and its assessment, will, if these amendments are adopted, become subject to the desires of those who control the Macedonian political apparatus at the highest levels.

The stated goal of these amendments is to address issues of quality in the university system. However, as the Student Plenum has emphasized, the quality of university education must be addressed by its stakeholders, not by an outside power that has an interest in blunting the independence of its universities. Moreover, recent actions taken in response to professors joining the protests against the amendments tell a story not of quality but instead of suppression. The response to professorial involvement in the protests has been to propose that the Ministry must approve the composition of thesis committees and be involved in thesis defenses. This can only be read as an attempt to intimidate university faculty, since it serves no educational purpose.

We commend the Student Plenum and its faculty and citizen support and stand with those thousands of protesters who have marched in Skopje to retain the autonomy of Macedonian universities. Furthermore, we demand that the Ministry of Education and Science abandon its attempt to eliminate university autonomy and return control of the universities to those who educate and are educated in them.

 

Jean-Jacques Aaron, Emeritus Professor, Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Marne-La-Vallée, France

Tariq Ali, Writer, UK

Gil Anidjar, Department of Religion, Columbia University, USA

Gemma Andreone, Professor of International Public Law, University of Naples "l'Orientale", Naples, Italy

Radu Ardevan, "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Alain Badiou, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Una Bauer, Academy for Dramatic Arts, Zagreb, Croatia

Jelisaveta Blagojević, Faculty of Media and Communications, Belgrade, Serbia

Jasna Bogdanovska, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual and Performing Arts, Monroe Community College, Rochester, New York, USA

Ray Brassier, Associate Professor of Philosophy, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Ulf Brunnbauer, Director, Institute for East and Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, Germany

Judith Butler, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Ankica Čakardić, Assistant Professor, Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia

Samir Chopra, Professor of Philosophy, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, USA

Fulvia Ciliberto, PhD in Archeologia Classica, Associato di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte Greca e Romana Università degli Studi del Molise, Italy

Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor, The New School for Social Research, USA

Sven Cvek, Assistant Professor, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Marina Cvetkovska, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Molecular Biology, University of Western Ontario, Canada

Vedrana Cvetkovska, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Neuroscience, University of British Columbia, Canada

Gianfranco Dalia, Assistant at the Department of Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Irine Darchia, Higher Education Reform Expert (HERE) Tbilisi State University, Georgia

Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, NY, USA

Hajdi Elzeser, Lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik, Detmold, Germany

Steven Foulke, Associate Professor of History, Ottawa University, Ottawa, KS, USA

Steven Franks, Indiana University, USA

Johan Galtung, University of Oslo, Norway

Henry Giroux, McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest, Dept. of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Ontario, Canada

Armando Gnisci, European Academy, London, UK

Octavian Gordon, Department of Church History, Biblical Studies and Philology
Faculty of Orthodox Theology University of Bucharest, Romania

Andrej Grubacic, Anthropology and Social Change Department, California Institute of Integral Studies, USA

Peter Hallward, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK

Srećko Horvat, Independent Scholar, Croatia

Jere T. Humphreys, Professor of Music, Arizona State University, USA

Miroslav Izdimirski, Institute of Balkan Studies with Center of Thracology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgaria

Igor Janev, Institute of Political Studies, Belgrade, Serbia

Leigh M. Johnson, Department of Religion and Philosophy, Christian Brothers University, USA

Neven Jovanovic, Department of Classical Philology Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Akel Ismail Kahera, Anderson, South Carolina, USA

Karl Kaser, Professor, Southeast European History and Anthropology, University of Graz, Austria

Edward Kazarian, Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, Rowan University, USA

Gal Kirn, Humboldt Research Fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

Amy Knoles, Acting Associate Dean, the Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, USA

Jovan Kostov, Junior research and teaching assistant in Computational linguistics, University Paris-Sorbonne, France

Mark Lance, Professor of Philosophy and Justice and Peace, Georgetown University, USA

Jo Littler, Senior Lecturer in Culture and Cultural Industries, City University London, UK

Cathrine Malabou, Professor Of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK

Marko Marinčič, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of Classics, Slovenia

Todd May, 1941 Memorial Professor of Philosophy, Clemson University, USA

Giovanni Moccardi, Assistant at the Department of Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Ioana Munteanu, Lect. Dr. at the Department of Classical and Neohellenic Philology Faculty of Foreign Languages University of Bucharest, Romania

Michael O'Rourke, Dublin, Ireland

Sorin Paliga, University of Bucharest, Romania

Saska Petrova, Lecturer, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, UK

Robert Pichler, Institute of Slavic Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

Liedeka Plate, Radbound University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Nina Power, Senior Lecturer, Department of Humanities, University of Roehampton, UK

Ludovica Lo Presti, Assistant at the Department of Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Sara Pugliese, Assistant Professor of European Union Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Jacques Ranciere, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Université de Paris VIII (St. Denis)

C. D. C. Reeve, Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Irena Sawicka, PAN,Warsaw, Poland

Mary Ellen Heian Schmider, Adjunct Full Professor, American Studies, University of Maryland University College; Graduate Dean Emerita, Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA

Jonathan Matthew Schwartz, Associate Professor, Ph.D Еmeritus, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Lee Schweninger, Professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA

Irina Sedakova, Institute for Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia

Pande Shahov, BMus, PgDip (RCM), PhD (London) Royal College of Music, UK

Mariagiovanna Silvestri, Assistant at the Department of Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Svetlana Slapšak, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Anthony Paul Smith, Assistant Professor of Religion, La Salle University, USA

Andrej N. Sobolev, Philipps-Universitaet Marburg, Germany

Barry Stocker, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey

Namita Subioto, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Misko Suvakovic, Professor at Faculty of Drama and Arts, Beograd, Serbia

Rosaria Tiri, Assistant at the Department of Law, University of Naples "Parthenope", Naples, Italy

Silvo Torkar, SAZU, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Kiril Trpkov, University of Calgary, Canada

Gianni Vattimo, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy

Kimberly Wilson, Department of Teaching and Learning, Temple University, USA

Bereket Yebio, Mölme University, Sweden

Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

Mateo Žagar, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Miloš Zatkalik, Professor, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia

Slavoj Žižek, Birkbeck Institute for Humanities, UK