Higher education is in a vicious circle whereby ignorant and corrupt politicians systematically fail to reform an education system, which then in turn reproduces ignorance all over again.
Since its establishment in 1970, the University of Prishtina (UP), the main institution of higher education in Kosovo, has been an important symbolic institution. In socialist Yugoslavia, it represented a key building block in the Albanian struggle for cultural and national affirmation and a beacon of light after years of cultural darkness and political oppression under General Rankovic’s control. Yet, its biggest misfortune lies in the symbolic status that it has held ever since.
The University of Pristina (UP) has been and continues to be a troubled institution. This has prevented it from fulfilling its actual academic potential and mission. Instead, it has served other purposes and interests – national, political, party and careerist.
In the 1970s, the prevailing logic about higher education in Kosovo was that of rapid expansion informed by the need and goal of closing the gap with other republics and other ethnic groups/nations in Yugoslavia. This led to a radical increase in the number of students, also conditioned by the fact that studying became financially and linguistically more accessible to Albanians not only from Kosovo but also those from Macedonia, Montenegro and south Serbia. So, whereas in 1953 there were 153 Albanian students enrolled at the University of Belgrade, by 1981 the UP had 26,000 full time students – making Kosovo the region with the highest student population in Yugoslavia, 26 per 1,000 inhabitants, as opposed to 14 per 1,000 in Slovenia and Croatia.
The rapid increase in the number of students at UP had a negative impact on academic criteria and quality with UP graduates struggling to be competitive in a wider Yugoslav labour market, let alone internationally. Already in the 1970s there was a quality gap between the first generation of Albanian academicians who had acquired degrees from Belgrade and Zagreb and their students at the UP. For all the contribution they made in establishing and expanding UP, these academic ‘pioneers’ also bear the responsibility for degradation of academic criteria and failing to match timely standards in Yugoslavia as a result of the institutionalisation of advancement based on family, regional and ethnic connections, not academic qualifications.
UP’s political and symbolic weight was only increased in the 1980s following the student protests and the ensuing political tensions. Similarly, in the 1990s, UP’s functioning within the ‘parallel system’ of education, created after the Serbian regime shut down all higher education in the Albanian language, had the purely symbolic and performative function of reaffirming Kosovar statehood against its Serbian control. Similarly, the 1997 student protests questioned both Serbia’s rule and LDK’s and Rugova’s political domination.
In the post-war period, UP has become a very important political resource for the main contending parties in Kosovo’s highly politicised context. Whereas LDK struggled to retain its control over the education system that it had established in the early 1990s, PDK was eager to increase its influence by co-opting university professors into the party. Political pressures on UP eventually subsided, but they came at very high price for education in general. Namely, they went hand in hand with the mushrooming of private institutions of higher education – the main aim of which is financial gain – and at a later stage, new public universities. As a result, according to the Kosovo Accreditation Agency, at present, there are 29 private and eight public higher education institutions in a country of 1.8 million people! With public universities in shambles, private universities practically selling degrees and no modern vocational training whatsoever, the higher education in Kosovo has turned into a giant pyramid scheme and a nightmare for Kosovo’s exceptionally young population.
Today, UP and other public universities are controlled by interest groups and clans whose interests and motives are financial rather than political. As a result, higher education is trapped in a vicious circle whereby ignorant and corrupt politicians systematically fail to reform an education system that in turn reproduces ignorance. The quality standard of the higher education in Kosovo is best represented by the plagiarism affair of former rector Ibrahim Gashi (who was ousted after protests for publishing in a dubious pay-to-publish journal), deplorable CVs of current deans and heads of departments, war veterans’ protests for admission of their peers without question, student protests for endless resits and miserable international ranking.
UP as the country’s main public university has yet to introduce research-led programmes, internationally indexed peer-review journals, international research co-operations, and academic promotion based on genuine and original research work other than handbooks, booklets and all sorts of other non-peer reviewed publications.
46 years after its establishment and 17 years since the end of the war, UP struggles to honour its mission to contribute to knowledge production and training of young people capable of competing in a wider and dynamic labour market. Although one can hardly grasp the sheer scale of tragedy that has befallen UP and higher education in the midst of the ongoing tear gas, political feuds, and individual and collective aimlessness, its legacy will certainly outlive the current parochial political interests and continue to hunt the country for generations to come.
Dr. Gëzim Krasniqi is the Alexander Nash Fellowship in Albanian Studies at the University College London. He got his B.A. at the University of Prishtina in 2005.