Many of Serbia’s academics were out on the streets at the weekend, joining student-led protests marking one year since the collapse of a train station canopy that killed 16 people in Novi Sad. Students blamed the collapse on alleged government corruption, and started still ongoing mass demonstrations that included blocking roads, university faculties and laboratories.
What started as demands for justice slowly turned into a wider movement calling for political change. This was met with oppression and growing restrictions on academic freedom and democracy, according to students and academics. These restrictions included a directive in March that limited academics to spending five hours a week on research – an eighth of their time.
Sofija Stefanović, a physical anthropologist at the University of Belgrade, describes a deteriorating situation in the last few months and says that ‘students are being beaten, expelled from universities and even arrested’ while the government is using the crisis to pass policies detrimental to higher education and research.
Such reports have recently been recognised by the European parliament, which issued a resolution on 22 October that ‘strongly condemns’ the government’s ‘retaliation against employees in the education and cultural sectors for supporting the protests, including job losses, salary reductions, the presence of police on university campuses and the withdrawal of funding for public universities’.
Amid such conditions, academics say that research funding is also being disrupted, and they fear that the government is planning policy changes to impose stricter control.
Vladan Čokić, a molecular oncologist at the University of Belgrade, says university research centres are faced with the state withholding or delaying payments of material costs such as consumables, electricity and laboratory costs. ‘This means that faculties have fewer funds not only for research, but also for basic needs.’
He says the state is planning new models of financing higher education that would eliminate the possibility of additional work by faculties, restricting the financing ‘exclusively through the Serbian government, which would thus directly control the work of faculties’ including salaries ‘which are now among the lowest in the region’. This is in addition to challenges posed by the policy restricting the time academics can spend on research, which curtails their chances of leading a project or receiving international grants that often call for half of their time.
It’s still too early to measure the impact of the change, says Čokić, who is also a member of the Academic Solidarity and Engagement Network, but he and others are seeing other problems related to payments of research costs.
‘Domestic science funding is effectively stalled – no new calls for projects have been open lately and the ones which started more than a year ago are still not awarded to anyone,’ says Neven Isailović, a senior research associate at the Institute of History Belgrade.
Another worry is that the government is increasingly appointing loyalists to leading positions in research organisations, which some academics fear is to redirect research funding to those who obey the government. ‘Some directors of the state-owned scientific institutes who were directors who supported students and universities were substituted by people more loyal to the authoritarian regime,’ Isailović says.
Srđan Atanasovski, an official at the Trade Union of Science of Serbia says that ‘arbitrary and retaliatory dismissals by directors and the re-composition of governing boards’ of scientific institutes have led the union to issue a warning last month. The statement questioned the legality and impact of ‘frequent dismissals and appointments of acting directors’ which ‘do not contribute to the long-term stability of scientific research institutions, nor to their ability to fulfill their mission in the interest of society and the scientific community’.
Many see hope in possible pressure from the EU, as Serbia is a candidate member state. Milka Sokolović, a biomedical scientist who heads the European Public Health Alliance, says the recent European parliament resolution demonstrates a ‘growing awareness within EU institutions about the severity of the crisis in Serbia’.
She would like to see ‘targeted sanctions against those implicated in corruption or violence’ and that EU funding is ‘tied to verifiable reforms and measurable progress on the rule of law, media freedom and judicial independence’. But she fears any generalised sanctions might hamper research and make things even worse.
Chemistry World approached the Serbian government for comment.
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