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University of Pristina

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The University of Prishtina (Albanian: Universiteti i Prishtinës, Latin: Universitas Studiorum Prishtiniensis) is a public university located in Priština (Albanian: Prishtina), the capital of Kosovo. Currently, the University of Prishtina has fourteen faculties and three higher education schools. Its intake is overwhelmingly drawn from the Kosovo Albanian population. The language of instruction is Albanian, though instruction can also be organised in other languages. The academic year runs from 1 October through 30 September, organised in two semesters, with 30 weeks' teaching per year.

The university has been described as being "at the very core of political conflict and the self-esteem of Albanian Kosovars". It was for many years accused by Serbian nationalists of promoting ethnic Albanian separatism in Kosovo, and following the rise to power of Slobodan Milošević it was purged and its Albanian staff were replaced with Serbs. The university faculty effectively split into Serbian and Albanian halves, with the Serbian staff controlling the campus and the sacked Albanian staff going "underground" for much of the 1990s, providing education in secret for Kosovo Albanian students.

The Albanian faculty regained control of the campus after the end of the Kosovo War in 1999. The Serbian faculty relocated to the northern Kosovo town of Kosovska Mitrovica, where it has operated - effectively as a rival university - under the name of the University of Priština (Serbian: Univerzitet u Prištini). Both faculties are recognised by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Serbian faculty is additionally recognised by the Serbian government.

Statistics and university organisation

In the academic year 2004/2005, Albanian university counted 28,832 undergraduate students, 15,596 (54.1%) men and 13,236 (45.9%) women; 28,567 (99%) students were of Albanian ethnicity, 125 (0.4%) Bosniaks, 114 (0.4%) Turks, and 25 (0.1%) of other ethnic groups. Serbian university had around 18,000 students and 1,000 staff members in 1999. In the academic year 2005/2006, its enrollment quota was 1,253 students.

About 3,000 students receive bachelor or master degrees every year at University of Prishtina, the majority in social and human sciences. More than 50,000 have graduated from the university since its establishment.

Unlike most other European universities, Albanian University of Prishtina operates as a loose association of faculties, each with a legally autonomous status and administrative structure. This has been criticised by the World Bank as leading to a redundant duplication of programmes and facilities, hindering an effective prioritization of programmes.

Faculties and Higher Education Schools

Serbian university

File:University of Priština logo.png
University of Priština (Serbian) logo

Albanian university

File:UniversityOfPrishtina.gif
University of Prishtina (Albanian) logo

History

The beginnings

The first faculties of the future University of Priština were opened in early 60s with full support in staff and finance from the University of Belgrade. In the beginning, most of the faculties have operated as external units of the University of Belgrade. As nearly all members of the staff were Serbs, the education was performed in Serbian language. Since autumn of 1966, after Brioni session of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, education in Albanian language was forcibly introduced, if a class had even a single assistant who was Albanian.

As the number of faculties grew, in the beginning of the 1970 the University of Priština was established as a separate institution to address the demands of the local population for better educational faculties. Its foundation came in conjunction with an increased package of degree of cultural and, eventually, political autonomy for the Albanian-majority province.

It had four faculties: philosophy, law, engineering and medicine. All of the faculties were doubled to ensure exact equality between the two peoples, with duplicated teaching, library stock, administration, publishing and journals. Rather than being a conventional bilingual university, it was described as being more like two universities under one roof.

The university attracted controversy almost from the start, with the Serbian Minister of Education later accusing it of being one of several "centres of actual and theoretical separatism." As early as 1971, there were Serb and Montenegrin protests against the opening of the university. According to a Kosovo Communist leader at the time, the university had faced strong political opposition from the Serbian Communists (even though it had the support of Tito), "as the founding of the university was taken as a harbinger of autonomy for Kosovo."

In the 70s, the university was enlarged rapidly in regard to teaching in Albanian language, from 7,712 total students in 1969/70 to 43,321 in 1980/81, the highest number of students ever. Ideologically it acted upon strengthening of Albanian national conscience. The university was the scene of repeated Albanian nationalist protests. In 1974, at least 100 students were arrested for participating in nationalist protests.

The 1981 demonstrations

The university was the focus of major student demonstrations in 1981. Although the authorities again blamed the protests on nationalist radicals, there were a number of contributing factors. Kosovo's cultural isolation within Yugoslavia and its endemic poverty resulted in the province having the highest ratio of both students and illiterates in Yugoslavia. A university education was no guarantee of a successful future; instead of training students for technical careers, the university specialized in liberal arts, in particular in Albanian literature and culture. Graduates with these qualifications could find little work in Kosovo apart from in the state bureaucracy and local cultural institutions. There were even fewer prospects outside Kosovo for those who had only been educated in the Albanian language. This created a large pool of unemployed but highly educated, and resentful, Albanians - prime recruits for nationalist sentiment. It was no coincidence that a later leader of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, Hashim Thaci, first came to prominence as a student radical at the university.

In addition, the Serb and Montenegrin population of Kosovo increasingly resented the economic and social burden incurred by the university's student population. By 1981, the University of Pristina had 20,000 students - one in ten of the city's total population.

The demonstrations started on March 11, 1981, originally as a spontaneous small-scale protest for better food in the school cafeteria and improved living conditions in the dormitories. They were dispersed by police but resumed two weeks later on March 26. This time, the police used force to disperse a sit-in by Albanian students in a dormitory, injuring 35 people and arresting 21. The violence provoked a mass uprising, with tens of thousands of people demonstrating across Kosovo. The federal government imposed a state of emergency and rushed up to 30,000 troops to the province. Riots broke out and the Yugoslav authorities used force against the protesters, killing many of them (up to 300, according to Amnesty International).

Following the demonstrations, the university faculty and students were purged of those deemed to be "separatists." 226 students and workers were tried, convicted and sentenced to up to fifteen years in prison. Many Albanians were purged from official posts, including the president of the university and two rectors. They were replaced with Communist Party hardliners. The university was also prohibited from using textbooks imported from Albania; from then on, the university was only permitted to use books translated from Serbo-Croatian. The demonstrations also produced a growing tendency for Serbian politicians to demand centralization, the unity of Serb lands, a decrease in cultural pluralism for Albanians and an increase in the protection and promotion of Serbian culture. The university was denounced by the Serbian Communist leadership as a "fortress of nationalism".

1990 to 1998

The Serbian politician Slobodan Milošević successfully exploited the Kosovo issue to propel himself into the Presidency of Serbia in 1989. At the end of the 80s the constitution of Serbia was changed and autonomy of Kosovo reduced, followed by a systematic purge of the province's institutions, replacing Albanians with Serbs.

Management of provincial universities (of Priština and Novi Sad) was transferred from provincial authorities to Belgrade. The University of Priština was a key target. The existing curriculum was abolished and replaced with a Serbian one. Its Albanian faculty was dismissed under a variety of dubious pretexts (such as "leaving the faculty building during working hours" ) and replaced by Serbs. The Rector, Professor Ejup Statovci, was imprisoned after writing a letter asking for the university buildings to be returned to the Albanian faculty and students. His Serbian replacement, Professor Radivoje Popovic, explained the official reasoning for the changes at the University:

Our first task was to remove the hatred for all that is Serbian which had been accumulated here for decades ... This factory of evil, established with the basic intention of destroying Serbia and the Serbian name ... is now destroyed thanks to the coordinated action of the Government and university personnel ... Our university has the ultimate object of renewing Serbian thought in Kosovo and Metohija.

Popovic was seen by Albanians as a high-profile symbol of Serbian oppression in Kosovo; on January 16, 1997, he was seriously injured in a car bomb attack by KLA member Nait Hasani.

The composition of the student body also changed drastically. A new enrolment policy was implemented which - in theory - provided for a one-to-one ratio between the two language groups, i.e. 1,580 full-time students in each, commencing from the start of the 1991-92 academic year. In practice, Albanian language students have boycotted the education since, reducing the Albanian student body from 27,000 to nil. This was welcomed by many Serbs, as funding would now be spent only on non-Albanian students. Remaining Albanian professors have continued to work for a while, however after year and a half of boycott, they were technological surplus and were mostly dismissed. Those who were needed have been offered to work on education in Serbian language, however because of threats and pressure directed to them by other Albanians very few remained. Thus, Albanians have effectively shut themselves out of the university entirely: there were no Albanian-speaking staff to teach the students, and no Albanian-speaking students for the staff to teach.

The Albanian language education then continued in private facilities as part of the unofficial parallel shadow state, a self-declared Republic of Kosovo that had been established by Kosovo's Albanians, enabling the education of some 30,000 Albanian students to continue. The university also called itself the University of Priština, was financed by Albanian diaspora and paralell tax system, and existed without any connection to the academic system, whis led to worsening of the quality of education (for example, students of medicine had no access to clinics, laboratories or other necessary equipment). However, the university professors have reported about a large number of graduates, magisters and doctors: the university issued graduation certificates in the name of the Republic of Kosovo which were not recognized by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. State security forces subjected the parallel schools to repeated raids and harassment.

In the second half of the 90s, Government of Serbia started negotiations with Albanian leaders about the university, which in 1998, as the crisis in Kosovo was building, led to an agreement between the Serbian authorities and Kosovo Albanian leaders to permit the return of Albanian students to the university. Three buildings of the university were turned over to the Kosovo Albanians on May 15, 1998. However, Kosovo Serb protesters staged violent protests against the transfer and eventually had to be evicted by government forces. The buildings were extensively vandalised, with furniture and equipment deliberately damaged to make it unusable.

Kosovo War and aftermath

The Kosovo War of 1999 completely disrupted both the official university and its shadow counterpart. After issuing of the Resolution 1244 and coming of KFOR most of the staff and students have fled from Kosovo in early June 1999; by August 1999, only two months after the war's end, the Serbian population of Priština had fallen from 40,000 to under 1,000. . Those who stayed were subjected to violence and forced out of the university buildings, most drastic examples being the murders of professor and a staff member of the Faculty of Economy in the faculty's very building, and of the husband of a professor of the Faculty of Physical Culture.


The university abandoned Pristina in September 1999 and its faculties were then relocated to various cities in and near Kosovo. Faculties of Medicine, Agriculture, and Natural Sciences and Mathematics were relocated to Kruševac; of Law and Philology to Vranje; of Teacher Training and Physical Culture to Leposavić; of Arts to Varvarin; of Economy and Philosophy to Blace; and of Civil Engineering, Mining and Metallurgy, Mechanic Engineering and Electrotechnics to Kosovska Mitrovica. The Albanian shadow university moved into the university buildings in late 1999 and resumed teaching under the name of the University of Prishtina; university archives were destroyed, with books and other documents in Serbian thrown out of the buildings and burned (in contrast, pre-1989 archives were preserved).

The education in Serbian university proceeded in very harsh conditions, without adequate buildings, staff and students housing, funding or even literature. In 2001, the faculties were returned to Kosovo, but not to Priština. The University has resisted efforts to re-unite the Serbian and Albanian faculties. In 2002, UNMIK recognised its existence.

Outside observers have noted that the dispute over the fate of the national education system parallels the greater debate over the future of Kosovo itself, with the two sides seeking to establish their own rival visions rather than compromising on a shared approach. According to a report by the OSCE, "there has not been any sign of genuine tolerance or attempts to find a common ground between the Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serb communities regarding the consolidation of their educational system."

External links

References

  1. ^ Reviews of National Policies for Education. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. 2003. pp. 344–62. ISBN 9264100717.
  2. ^ "Numri i studentëve sipas përkatësisë nacionale që studiojnë në Universitetin e Prishtinës" (PDF). University of Prishtina (Albanian). Retrieved February 7, 2006.
  3. ^ Seobe akademaca (2003-04-29). "Seobe akademaca". NIN 2731.
  4. "Број слободних места за упис у другом кругу на факултетима чији оснивач је Република Србија у школској 2005/2006. години". Ministry of Education and Sport of Serbia. Retrieved February 7, 2006.
  5. Kosovo: Economic and Social Reforms for Peace and Rconciliation. World Bank. 2001. p. 114. ISBN 0821349422.
  6. ^ "Универзитет у Приштини". Ministry of Education and Sport of Serbia. Retrieved February 7, 2006.
  7. ^ "Fakultetet". University of Prishtina (Albanian). Retrieved September 13, 2006.
  8. ^ Sladjana Djuric (No. 240-241). "Izmesteni univerzitet". Republika. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ^ Kostovicova, Denisa (2005). Kosovo. Routledge. pp. 44–45, 103–104. ISBN 0415348064.
  10. ^ Tadeusz Mazowiecki (1993-11-17). "Fifth periodic report on the situation of human rights in the territory of the former Yugoslavia". Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ^ "Pasqyra e studentëve të Universitetit të Prishtinës për periudhën 1969/70-2004-05" (PDF). University of Prishtina (Albanian). Retrieved February 7, 2006.
  12. Ramet, Sabrina P. (1992). Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991 (2nd edition ed.). Indiana University Press. p. 193. ISBN 0253207037. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  13. ^ Mertus, Julie A. (1999). "The 1981 Student Demonstrations". Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War. University of California Press. ISBN 0253207037.
  14. Устав републике Србије. pp. Articles 6 and 108-112.
  15. "Hasani: Toward independence with the KPC (Koha Ditore)", UNMIK Local Media Monitoring, 27 March 2002
  16. "Measures Agreed on Implementation of Education Accord". Kosova Information Center. 1998-03-28. Retrieved 2006-09-05. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  17. Kofi Annan (1998-06-04). "Report of the Secretary-General Prepared Pursuant to Resolution 1160 (1998) of the Security Council". United Nations Secretary General. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  18. Sremac, Danielle S. (1999). War of Words: Washington Tackles the Yugoslav Conflict. Praeger/Greenwood. ISBN 0275966097.
  19. Ljiljana Staletović (September 18 2001). "Studenti vraćaju Kosmet Srbiji". Glas Javnosti. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  20. "North Kosovo will be a model for the operation of local self-government". Serbian Press Agency SRNA. 2005-10-12. {{cite news}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help)
  21. O. N. (April 1, 2002). "Univerzitet u Prištini postao deo evropskog akademskog prostora". Glas Javnosti.
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