New Law on Higher Education: Whim, Whim, Nobody's to Blame

By: Nenad Veličković/skolegijum.ba

Recently, employees of the University of Sarajevo were invited to respond to a survey related to the draft of the new law on higher education. The survey was prepared by the Rectorate, with the intention of making the voices of those most affected by the law heard more clearly. Based on the phrasing of some questions (e.g., "After reading the draft Law on Higher Education, please assess how secure or insecure you feel regarding retaining your current job?"), it seems the aim was also to pressure the initiators, the Ministry and the Government, to stop or at least slow down this futile endeavor.

The endeavor of enacting a new law on higher education is futile primarily because its purpose is unclear. What is wrong with the existing one should have been collected, listed, explained, and documented somewhere. Members of Parliament, nor the public, have not received such content. This should have been done by a competent commission, which has never been established. Thus, the main reason for enacting a new law, three years after the adoption of the current one, is someone's whim. Perhaps the new Prime Minister and the new Minister could inform the public – whose whim it is. From whom it originates, from whose foolishness the snowball rolls that eventually turns into an avalanche and buries all sense of both the law and higher education.

Following this line of thought, one could also identify the hand that drafted, for example, this phrasing:

"A recognized publication from Article 74, paragraph (2), which is classified into quartiles and is included in another reference citation scientific database, represents a scientific publication included in the Scopus database, classified into one of the four quartiles (Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4), as determined by the SJR (Scimago Journal & Country Rank) citation report. If a scientific publication is classified into multiple quartiles simultaneously according to JCR, the better-ranked quartile is taken as the reference quartile, in cases of related scientific fields." (Article 78. Definition and content of terms from the conditions for election. item g)

What is the subject in the first sentence? Who represents whom? Does a scientific publication from Art. 74 represent a scientific publication included in the Scopus database, etc., or vice versa? Or does it matter? If you are interested in what a quartile is, and you go to the interpretation of terms "used in this law," besides wasting your time because the terms are not listed alphabetically, you will not find an explanation. It is available on the internet:

"A quartile is any of the three quantile values that divide a sorted set of random variables into four equal parts. Thus, we have three values that divide the population (three quartiles). It makes sense to calculate quartiles only with larger populations."

Do you get it? You should, if you are an associate professor or full professor... Who else, if not you?

The language and legal logic of this draft are no better than the language and legal logic of the previous one. Therefore, it is high time that the Ministry stops hiding behind some commissions selected by some Asim and states who is responsible for the fact that a law must be redrafted after three years?

Of course, the answer will be that everyone is responsible, because the proposal was subject to public debate, so everyone participated. And the deputies who adopted it are also responsible, and some Anababić who signed it. Only the commission is not responsible, which arrogantly, i.e., without a proper explanation, dismissed hundreds of remarks from the public debate by ignoring them. And of course, the Ministry is not responsible, nor are the people within it who deal with law and higher education for a salary. Do they have names, and does this quartilization nonsense have anything to do with any of them?

Thousands of people who are vitally affected by this law will not now enroll in law and statistics courses to understand what the community that finances their work expects from them. To whom, on the verge of nerves and their working lives, could some of them say: screw Scopus! Can we, before discussing the draft law, have a small discussion about the terror of statistics over the humanities?

It's not that the Draft has not taken into account some specificities of the humanities. It states:

"For the fields of humanities and social sciences that are not covered by the Web of Science Core Collection reference citation databases, publications classified in another citation base (Scopus) are recognized as recognized publications with quartiles, requiring an equal number of papers in recognized publications, as well as the same journal quartiles defined in paragraph (1) of this article. For the fields of humanities and social sciences that are not covered by the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus reference citation databases, recognized publications are determined by the Rulebook on the procedure and conditions for election to academic titles." (Art. 74.2)

Why would a major Law deal with minor humanities? Is a Rulebook enough for them? But for a legal layman, it is still unclear why the law deals with such trivial matters at all. Why, in other words, doesn't it leave other areas to the Rulebook?

Publishing papers is important because it is one way for the scientific community to become acquainted with new research results and newly discovered knowledge, which, to be generally accepted, must undergo verification by that community. But the belief that citation guarantees verification, limited to a short period, misses the essence of scientific work. The assumption that only journals linked to private citation databases guarantee high scientific standards is also questionable. Academic advancement is not a Eurovision song contest, Dr. Assoc. – twelve points. There is no reason to prioritize this belief in the law. Whatever legislative wisdom decided to take the publication in the most cited journals as the main measure of academic work quality did not think twice. Why, for example, can mentorship (one of the conditions) be replaced by additional papers, but papers cannot be replaced by additional mentorships?

Law:

"In the event that a candidate, when applying for an academic title, could not fulfill the condition of a published book, mentorship, or original professional achievement such as a project, patent, or original method, due to justified reasons, equivalence is introduced as follows:

a) A book can be replaced by three additional scientific papers published in scientific publications found in citation scientific databases.
b) One mentorship in the third cycle of studies can be replaced by three additional scientific papers in citation databases, of which at least one must be published in a scientific journal found in WoSCC databases with a minimum quartile of Q3.
c) One mentorship in the second cycle of studies or academic specialization can be replaced by one additional scientific paper published in a scientific publication found in a citation database, or one publicly presented artistic work in the case of artistic-teaching titles."

When you see through this flawed logic that aims to regulate higher education, you have to wonder why at least one of the three additional scientific papers couldn't be replaced by fifty push-ups (not just at the Faculty of Physical Education!). Okay, thirty. Or, why not replace an unpublished book with ten Our Fathers and three Hail Marys? Or, with one mentorship, one paper, and one voluntary blood donation. Well, or urine.

A reader who is surprised by the cynicism of these lines will understand it if they read the book Academic Charlatanism. There is a chapter there about the enactment of foolish laws in the field of science and education, and there are pages and pages about what science should be today, and how much of it is not at the University of Sarajevo. Therefore, if the creators of such legal messes decide to come out of the closet, they could also consider the criticisms expressed in the public and academic sphere, directed at them.