Original article (in Serbian) was published on 12/6/2024; Author: Teodora Koledin
“Expel all the blockers from the faculty and fire the professors”. This is, according to Informer’s interpretation, the solution to the crisis in higher education proposed by Dr. Valentina Arsic Arsenijevic, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Belgrade. According to this tabloid, it refers to the so-called “Slovenian model” from “about twenty years ago”, which Professor Arsic Arsenijevic recalled during a morning program on Prva TV. However, the Higher Education Union of Slovenia told Tragac that “nothing like this has ever happened in Slovenia”.
During her appearance on the aforementioned morning show, the professor from the Faculty of Medicine criticized the current student blockades of faculties, describing them, among other things, as “social engineering” and insinuating that they were “externally induced”. On that occasion, the professor also proposed a “solution”, which was allegedly previously implemented in Slovenia to resolve a university crisis:
“For example, in Slovenia, this happened about twenty years ago when they also had some problem at the university. They fired all the professors, announced openings for new professors, and in that way cleaned up and saved their university from agony”, explained Professor Arsic Arsenijevic, adding that she completed her postdoctoral studies at the University of Ljubljana.
To further clarify this alleged event, Tragac first conducted a thorough online search, but it was unsuccessful. The only news of a somewhat similar event in Slovenia dates back to 2016 and concerns the dismissal of professors from the University of Primorska in the Slovenian city of Koper. According to Slovenian media, 12 employees at the Research Institute (ZRS), who were also faculty lecturers, had their employment contracts terminated.
After some time, the court ruled that the dismissals were unlawful and that Rector Dragan Marusic had to reinstate the affected employees within eight days. However, this case does not match what the professor stated during her appearance, considering the time reference and the fact that the dismissals involved only 12 professors at a university that had more than 300 employees at the time.
To address the confusion about the so-called “Slovenian model” of firing university professors, we reached out to sociologist Dr. Gorazd Kovacic, president of the Higher Education Union of Slovenia and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. In his response, Dr. Kovacic indicated that this is disinformation:
“What the professor from the Faculty of Medicine said is pure fake news. Nothing like that has ever happened in Slovenia. The only somewhat similar, but significantly smaller case occurred during a repressive period of socialism, when, at the party’s request, four non-Marxist professors of philosophy and related sciences were expelled from the university”.
We also reached out to our colleagues at the Slovenian fact-checking website Razkrinkavanje.si – part of the investigative journalism center Ostro – to ask whether they had ever come across a case of university professors being dismissed “about twenty years ago,” as described by Professor Arsic Arsenijevic. However, the journalists also said they “do not recall anything like that ever happening in Slovenia”.
