When war is declared on the university

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The situation in Serbia shows that in recent weeks the gloves have come off and frontal attack was ordered from a central place. The usurpers of all institutions attacked the university with all means - from threats, slander, intimidation to salary cuts, power cuts and changes in laws. There is nothing new in that, they did the same thing in 1992, 1998 and throughout the past twelve years, only at a lower intensity. Every time a "duck school" gets the right to organize doctoral studies, when people with proven plagiarism get or keep ministerial posts, when elections for student parliaments are arranged, all this collapses the autonomy, freedom and integrity of the university.

And without a university, you would never get on a plane or in a movie theater, your loved ones would still be treated with leeches, you would never know that the universe exists beyond what your eyes see or that your organisms are controlled by the most diverse incredibly tiny living beings... Why, then, does the source of all that knowledge bother someone so much that they would like to destroy its core? The previous months confirmed the unwritten rule that in Serbia only student protests can inspire a sufficient number of people, last long enough and lead to some changes. Not all succeeded, unfortunately, but without student protests and a university strike there is no hope for any struggle, for which the protest after the crime in "Ribnikar" is probably the best example. I can't explain why that is. It's not just that students are able to articulate their principles and demands, to disappointment in the limited capacities of (systematically destroyed) opposition parties, to universal sympathy for young people who sacrifice themselves for the common good...

The previous statement may sound strange when you remember our admiration for Miloš Obrenović's illiteracy, Tito's inability to learn Serbo-Croatian, or the once very common expression "workers, peasants and honest intelligence". At the first session of the Scientific and Teaching Council, which I attended, they tried to impose a "radical dean" on Filozofsko.

In a full amphitheater, he got two votes. However, my impression is that the public trusts students and is suspicious of professors or scientists, as if they do not feel that they can be on the same team with the latter.

ATTACK ON FACULTIES AS A GLOBAL TREND

This situation is worrying enough to be written about regularly. Unfortunately, there is worse. The Humboldt Foundation has long had a "Scholars at risk" program, which enables a two-year stay at a German university for persons who are exposed to persecution due to the public declaration of their views. Soviet jokes are now being told in Turkey without being aware that they are not original, and they are certainly still applicable in Russia, such as the one in which the prison librarian tells an inquisitive person "We don't have that exact collection, but, if you want, we have a poet", since the president-sultan there built prisons exclusively for political dissidents. In a large part of the world, it is still forbidden for women to study, for the theory of evolution to be taught, for Renaissance paintings to be displayed without covering the genitals... After all, this all happened in socialist Yugoslavia, where, for example, the generation of my mentors was forbidden to study psychoanalysis at the same Philosophical University, because "dialectical materialism had already explained it all".

The autonomy of universities is under attack all over the world, even in places you would never think it could be exposed to it. The United States has never had a ministry of culture, because there money decides everything, from painting to hospitals and prisons. However, they have always invested huge sums of money in research, as there was a consensus that this allowed them both dominance in international relations and justification for arrogance. Now that is also changing, since their new-old president sees the state as a giant private hotel and independently decides what he likes and will reward that, that is, who does not care enough about him and will leave him without working conditions. Harvard, probably the most famous university in the world (in itself, by the way, probably richer than some European countries), is now also under attack, although it would probably be more accurate to say that their problems are known the most because they protest the loudest, and many of their professors and scientists are preparing to move to Canada or Europe or have already done so.

Research funds and politicians are not the only problem, unfortunately. Almost all countries we should look up to have institutions that can ban books, music or movies. For almost a decade, it has restricted freedom of speech, writing and research cancel culture censorship, due to which there is pressure to teach or not to teach about certain topics, humor and life on campuses are restricted. The most important university in Chicago and its units are no longer allowed to officially take a position on any political issue, and although no one has taken away those individual rights from employees, it is easy to imagine how self-censorship must be in such an environment. Let me also mention that in 2021, the official journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association published an article claiming that white babies are born with arrogance towards other races.

It is well known that universities are considered a kind of sacred space where the police are not allowed to enter. The Germans, after getting burned with the dictatorship, introduced absolute freedom of teaching and research to the state universities, which means that no outside body can and must not influence what will be done in the classrooms and laboratories, so that it is theoretically possible that the chosen university professor can teach algebra in trigonometry classes, but also Sanskrit, the "year of the four emperors" or the flora and fauna of New Zealand, or to teach trigonometry in a different language every week. And in that environment, it happened that the police stormed Berlin's Free University and violently broke up protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, without any German television reporting on it (just as no German newspaper would publish this sentence).

RESISTANCE AND CONSEQUENCES

Unfortunately, there is no news in this. Many individuals and institutions have tried throughout history to impose their ideology as the only correct one and to limit free thought or almost completely eradicate it. A few months after coming to power, the Nazis burned tens of thousands of books in one of Berlin's central squares and decreed that art they did not like was banned. degenerate, and in the Soviet Union it was forbidden to apply genetics to humans and every artist knew that a member of his family could end up in Siberia if Stalin did not like a novel or composition. The great monotheistic religions had the most time, so they did the most damage. The most respected Arabic author of the eleventh century considered numbers to be the product of the devil and claimed that every single event in your every day directly depends on God's will, so that science, mathematics and philosophy were declared irrelevant and in time completely disappeared from the Islamic world. The Christian Church fiercely fought against all ancient religions and cults, demolished temples, banned the theater, closed the Academy, cut off tongues and fingers to prevent the spread of ideas. The founding of the universities as we know them today began with the weakening of the absolute power of the church, but it continued to burn independent thinkers and people who wanted to own a Bible translated into their native language until the seventeenth century. (In the case of Modern Greek, church resistance lasted until less than thirty years ago).

There is another very clear reason for the modern war against universities. There can be no doubt that in 1968 the revolutionary protests in Europe and the USA were inspired and initiated in the universities. The Sorbonne, the Frankfurt School, Columbia and Berkeley, and no less "Praxis" and the universities in Zagreb and Belgrade - this was the last great social upheaval that demanded fundamental reforms in both the Western and Eastern "world". And then, according to the American model, the state began to withdraw from the support of one of its most important elements, so universities now depend on external sources of finance, and what enables the rapid movement of money (in English is the acronym STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is highly valued.

In the general academic rush for money, without which it is impossible to organize research, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that all those disciplines that question social trends, nurture and educate critical thinking, open unpleasant discussions and point out anomalies and social pathologies are devalued. Moreover, when one hears from his student days that he must publish as many papers as possible, his strategy can only be to stop reading, to follow only the subdiscipline of the subdiscipline, and publish many versions of more or less the same text, in which there will be no original ideas, much less questions subversive to the one whose funds provide the salaries. I would very much like to be wrong, but I am afraid that there will be no more Chomsky, Fromm, Foucault or Kangrga.

In almost all European countries, the most important universities are not only older than the states themselves, but also wiser and more honest than the state apparatuses. States come to universities for advice, while universities have absolutely nothing to learn from states. This alone should be enough for you to know which side a person of clear conscience must choose in the current conflict that could lead Serbian society either to complete exhaustion or to an unprecedented catharsis. Seseljization and pinkoization threatened to completely destroy the culture, identity and future of the entire people. The defense of the university is not enough, but it is certainly a necessary condition for the defense of all those values.

The author is a psychologist