More than two months after the city administration of Nis proposed the allocation to the Ministry of Education Faculty of Serbian Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis, right before the New Year, the document was submitted to the public. I guess that's why it looks more like a letter to Santa Claus than a feasibility study.
Evil tongues will say that they remembered it late and wrote it afterwards, that they started the establishment with their throats full of strawberries, not knowing the procedures and criteria, and pushed the document through in the shadow of the end of the year. The document, as we shall see, speaks in favor of evil tongues.
In short, he says: Globalization is bad. The Serbian language, culture and identity, especially in the south of Serbia, are under attack from hybrid threats. Fewer and fewer young people study Serbian studies and history, and Russian has always been at a minimum.
Who you gonna call? Faculty of Serbian Studies. We will get more technical easily. And the biggest problem is not that this faculty will not deglobalize the world, even if there are threats - it would not remove it, nor that it will only further reduce the number of students in these disciplines.
The problem is that it is not a feasibility study - not even in outline.
Shape
The feasibility study is built on three basic steps: need-solution-implementation.
It starts from the need recognized at the level of the community or its institutions, elaborates several solution options, compares them with each other and with the current situation, and singles out the best while elaborating its implementation. It has a tightly defined structure: introduction, objective, methodology, analysis of the current situation, analysis of options, financial analysis, risk analysis, conclusions and recommendations.
The published document only has elements of financial analysis (part of the second chapter, and indirectly the fifth) and analysis of the current situation (the number of enrolled students in the last 12 years in the second chapter). Everything else was left out.
The first chapter gives an ideologically motivated interpretation of the development of education and universities in Serbia, completely irrelevant to the feasibility study.
The second one is titled The Faculty of Serbian Studies as an independent higher education and scientific institution, and is thematically disjointed to the point of chaos.
On nearly one hundred pages, it discusses the mission and conception of the new faculty, financial issues, discusses individual departments taken from the Faculty of Philosophy (for some reason, not the centers, they are separated in a separate chapter).
History is clearly an obsession of the author of the text, because this chapter is also full of historical overviews. Of all, only finance has a place in the feasibility study.
The third chapter talks about the planned centers (mostly stolen from Filozofskogo), the fourth about the planned new departments, and the seventh about the planned new institutes.
Consideration of all units of the organization, but of completely different content, could form part of one section each of the chapter on analysis of options and recommendations - alongside the same consideration of relevant alternatives.
At the end, the unnumbered passage is titled Instead of a conclusion. In fact, the entire document should have a title Instead of a feasibility study.
The goal, methodology, option analysis, risk analysis are completely missing, and without more options there is no real recommendation. There are traces of current state analysis and financial analysis, but unusable content.
Content
The feasibility study must begin by listing the client, the terms of reference, and a list of authors with their expertise and study domains covered, and be determined by the issue of conflict of interest.
Its meaning is to consider all relevant alternatives, based on the criteria determined by the legal framework and narrower goals explicitly and concretely specified by the client, through some standard framework, including status quo, taking into account the degree of fulfillment of criteria and objectives, costs, risks and ways to control them.
It must describe precisely the empirical and analytical methodology by which this was done (quantitative models, case studies) and the data validation procedure. Based on all this, she recommends the best alternative and its implementation. Finally, it must present exact parameters for monitoring and evaluating the achievement of goals and the fulfillment of criteria.
The submitted document does not mention the client, the task, or the authors, nor does it mention any conflicts of interest. It does not base its goals on the law, does not consider any alternative option, does not conduct a survey among teachers, among students, in the local community, does not deal with risks, does not propose models for evaluating results, and does not specify, and does not have, any exact methodology (projection of the number of students, analysis of labor market needs, analysis of graduate absorption capacity, long-term cost projection).
There is no strategy for internationalization and international cooperation (except for a superficial mention of the Erasmus+ program) (how to profile the identity-isolationist faculty internationally). There is no analysis of the consequences for the Faculty of Philosophy. The document contains some financial considerations, but superficial, contradictory and without professional analytical foundation.
If there is no feasibility study, what is there in this document? There is pathos.
The text, which should represent objective expertise, abounds in emotional expressions of the type struggle for language, culture, identity, or national obligation, or else identity, cultural and symbolic rampart.
There is pub chauvinism, the one laced with conspiracy theory, freed from all responsibility, which degrades its own people even more than others.
Words with roots srb (Serbia, Serbian, Serbs) are used more than 1.200 times on 170 pages of text. The document is a tirade of primitive, kitsch nationalism sought by the faculty. Go to any page, read any sentence, and you will see linguistic clumsiness, logical incoherence to the point of contradiction, empirical groundlessness, ideological bigotry, argumentative failure, and misunderstanding of the science he talks about.
You will see an obsession with national security, a chauvinistic interpretation of history, and status. The basic assumption is that the role of the university is educational, to ideologically unify young people according to the needs of the government, so the new faculty is recommended as a weapon in the fight against globalization, security threats, the decline of national enthusiasm and student anarchy. Of course, without a causal chain by which that faculty will bring the promised fruits.
Examples of faculties in other countries are falsely cited as similar to the proposed one, tendentious and dilettantish misinterpretation of quantitative data is given, unfounded accusations are made.
All in all
This is only a small part of the picture. It was necessary to stay within the limits of a decent volume, and to think about one's own health. Live intensively with the awareness that someone who neither understands the parameters and criteria for establishing a faculty, nor is able to write a simple administrative document, gets the opportunity from the authorities to destroy one and establish and run another faculty. If we let him.
Autor is a professor of Slavic linguistics at the University of Graz
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