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Imposing an Ideology in Belarus
The president of Belarus pushes universities to promote the
state's views by rewriting textbooks, firing professors, and
punishing students
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Minsk, Belarus
Higher education in Belarus had it relatively good, once.
While the president of the newly independent country spent
most of the 1990s strengthening his political grip, he
largely left universities alone. Private institutions
enjoyed academic freedom and international exchange. Even
their state counterparts had a degree of financial
independence.
Then, things changed. Some say that universities were
targeted as nests of opposition. Others say it was all part
of a grand design. Clearly by the spring of 2003, the
autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, had higher
education in his sights.
читать дальшеTextbooks began to be removed from libraries, and to be
rewritten to support the president's policies and narrow
view of history. Rectors who flattered the president were
installed. Less-than-compliant professors were forced out.
Potentially controversial doctoral research was cut off.
Largely because it was financed by Western organizations, an
independent humanities institute was shuttered. The
country's foremost private university, arguably the best of
its kind on former Soviet territory -- and also financed by
the West -- was abruptly forced to close.
Mr. Lukashenko, who holds diplomas from teaching and
agrarian colleges, characterized the moves as reform, a
series of measures meant to restore "the best traditions of
the Soviet-era education system." To that end he also
introduced to college campuses the Belarus Republican Union
of Youth, an organization similar to the Komsomol, or Young
Communist League of the Soviet Union.
Yet none of his measures were given greater priority than
what he called "ideological work" with students. This
academic year a mandatory course, "Foundations of Ideology
of the Republic of Belarus" -- whose ill-defined mission
ostensibly is intended to instill patriotism and allegiance
-- is being taught nationwide for the first time.
"They've made higher education a tool of politics," says
Vladimir Dounaev, first vice rector of the European
Humanities University, the highly regarded private
institution that has moved into exile in Lithuania to
survive. "It is a major blow."
Those attempts to bring higher education to heel reach from
the cities to the underdeveloped regions, where recently
established quotas are intended to bring students from
villages, the president's political base, into aca-deme. The
trend is unlikely to ebb anytime soon. Several months ago
Mr. Lukashenko declared victory in a rigged referendum that
allowed him to run for re-election, indefinitely.
Representatives from the United States and the European
Union have appealed to Mr. Lukashenko to spare higher
education from what is tantamount to a reverse perestroika.
He faces sanctions and bans on travel from many countries.
But so far, outside pressures have proven feeble. Belarus
recently ordered a British professor from King-ston
University London to leave the country for unstated reasons
connected to his nonacademic work with youth. It also
revoked the operational licenses of IREX, a U.S.-financed
nongovernmental organization that promotes academic
exchange, and a host of foreign and domestic NGO's.
The Ministry of Education has been unequivocal in ordering
universities to fire professors and lecturers who oppose, or
are not committed to, the state ideology. "If you do not
accept the ideas declared by the government and the
president, do not apply to a state university for a job,"
Mr. Lukashenko has said.
A Vague Directive
The role of ideology in the country has been likened by Mr.
Lukashenko to the role of the immune system in a living
organism. Despite his avowal of its vital importance, its
functions are more than a little fuzzy.
The country's 57 institutions of higher learning -- 43 of
which are owned by the state -- are still unsure how to
teach the "Foundations of Ideology" course. The course was
supposed to have begun in the fall of 2003, but a lack of
direction from the Education Ministry meant that rare
lectures often were composed of selected excerpts from
speeches by the president.
The first substantial textbooks on state ideology were
published only last year, and in many instances are
contradictory in content. Among the several textbooks on the
subject for sale at a popular bookstore in the capital, one
is overtly communist in tone, and another is nationalist.
The author of two of the more moderate textbooks, Yadviga S.
Yaskevich, believes that Belarussians have been suffering
from an identity crisis since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and its accompanying ideology. Bordered by Russia to
the east, and Poland to the west, the country -- which,
prior to 1991, was independent briefly in 1918 -- has been
subjugated by larger forces with competing sets of values.
Responsibility for teaching the course, which consists of 16
hours of lectures and 8 hours of seminars, falls on the
departments of law and political science. In April educators
must propose the first specialties of scholarly expertise
within the field of state ideology.
"A state can't be without ideology," says Ms. Yaskevich, a
vice rector at the Republican Institute of Higher Schools,
which performs research and provides support to
career-oriented scholars, at Belarus State University. She
provides students more history and philosophy than outright
direction. "I'm oriented toward what the student thinks, how
he came to his conclusions ... and do not tell him what to
think."
The Education Ministry, however, is less tolerant of
latitude of thought. At a seminar last September at the
Academy of the Presidential Administration of the
Belarussian Republic, educators were instructed to emphasize
trust and a sense of "personal closeness" with the
president, and to increase the visibility on campuses of the
national flag and coat of arms.
Mr. Lukashenko has said that the basis of state ideology
should be Orthodox Christianity, which he says has
supplanted communism over the past decade.
The rector of Belarus State University, the country's most
prestigious university, plans to write a definitive textbook
to alleviate the vagueness. Vasily Strazhev's prescription
would be familiar to the American electorate: a system of
values, in this case guided by a national idea (Fatherland),
a religious idea (Orthodox Christianity) and a social idea
(fairness).
Mr. Strazhev, like many educators who remain in the good
graces of the government, is sensitive to assertions that
the compulsory state ideology on campuses -- as well as at
workplaces with more than 300 employees -- is integral to
the totalitarian regime of a president regarded widely as
the last dictator in Europe.
"In Belarus nothing is happening that isn't happening
anywhere else, America included," he says. "I can tell you
that, in America, there's also an ideology. In America
there's even a very powerful ideology -- they just don't
call it that."
"I can even envy the success of the American system of
bringing up citizens and patriots, how Americans instill a
love of the country and of its symbols," he says. "But would
you call that totalitarianism?"
The creators of the new curricula, like most educators
interviewed for this story, believe that an official
ideology is necessary in Belarus regardless of who runs the
government. "You only have to be scared," Mr. Strazhev says,
"when ideology becomes totalitarianism."
For some, the line already has been crossed. "Everyone is
afraid," says Mr. Dounaev, of the European Humanities
University. "A sense of totalitarian fear exists in the
country. It is literally the restoration of Soviet times."
While education policies are Soviet in appearance, they are
not in substance. Communists fought for an ideology to gain
power, whereas the government is conjuring up an ideology to
justify power, according to Vitali Silitski, a political
analyst in Minsk.
"The state ideology is brainwashing, so to speak," Mr.
Silitski says.
A New Order
The Chronicle has obtained a copy of an order of the
Education Ministry, dated April 1, 2004, that outlines
"urgent measures" for instilling elements of ideology in
academe. The order, while technically a public document, has
been suppressed by the ministry, which refused several
requests to comment for this story.
Rectors are instructed to enlist students and professors in
promoting the state's official symbols, the institution of
the president, and the president as a personality. They must
promote the spread of the Belarus Republican Union of Youth
in all ways possible, as well as assert greater control over
the content of college newspapers and the Internet. They
must take more severe measures to punish students who speak
out.
The order lists 26 ways in which to increase control over
international cooperation and foreign sources of financing;
to prevent students from working and studying abroad; to
persuade students and professors to celebrate anniversaries
of Soviet achievements; and to monitor and influence the
collective moods in student dormitories.
The Education Ministry is working on a slate of parallel
measures for the reorganization of higher education.
Students whose tuitions are paid for by the state would be
required to work off the costs of their education over three
to five years -- up from two years, and longer than during
the Soviet period -- at a job in a location of the
government's choice. A graduate of Belarus State Medical
University reportedly killed herself rather than obey
instructions to leave the capital to work in a village.
The government has also instructed universities to steer
first-year students into the hard sciences and technologies
in order to replenish the aging work forces in state-run
industry and agriculture. It founded a new university last
fall in Barnavichy, a small city in the west, in part to
directly meet the needs of an economic system in which the
government regulates price and production levels.
It also has ordered universities in the cities to increase
the enrollment of students from villages by up to 17
percent, ostensibly because children in the regions are
underrepresented. "We are going to educate our elite, the
future leadership of the country ... in the regions in
particular," Mr. Lukashenko told students last fall.
The Education Ministry is also suspected of being behind the
recent call for a review of the dissertation of a prominent
writer, Ales Pashkevich. A panel of experts from the Higher
Examination Board, which oversees postgraduate study, had
recommended the publication of Mr. Pashkevich's research on
the work of 20th-century Belarussian ИmigrИ writers. It also
had been approved by academics at Belarus State University
and Gomel State University.
But the dissertation was marked for review by the
examination board after war veterans condemned it as work
that did not conform to the state ideology.
Siarhei S. Vetokhin, a vice rector at the Republican
Institute of Higher Schools, confirms that other topics for
dissertations have been discredited. The theses, however,
are small in number and related almost exclusively to the
political, not the hard, sciences, he said.
"It really stinks," says Mr. Silitski, a former associate
professor at the European Humanities University who came of
age in the early 1990s, when the country was flush with
independence and Mr. Lukashenko was still the director of a
communal farm.
"At first I became sad, but I'm a social scientist, and I
have to understand the logic of the process. I also
understand that it's not forever," he said. "But you can
forget about things changing [for the better] until the
regime is gone."
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A36
February 25, 2005
________________________________________________________
An Institution Is Shuttered for Its Western Ways
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Minsk, Belarus
This was supposed to be the last semester of undergraduate
study for Olga Rak, who was majoring in languages and
international economics at the European Humanities
University here. Instead, she has dropped her studies
altogether.
Ms. Rak was several weeks away from the beginning of her
final year at the best private university in the country
when it was abruptly ordered closed by the government. Some
1,300 students were stranded by the move, which the
country's president has since said was steeped in politics
and deliberately made young people the victims of adult
games.
"This event changed all our lives," said Ms. Rak, who
intends to resume her studies next fall at a university in
France. "I sort of prepared for it, but we still didn't
think it would happen. I still can't believe it happened."
The closure was the culmination of several years of pressure
by the government to bring the European Humanities
University, which is financed by Western organizations,
increasingly in line with the ideology and autocratic
policies of the administration of President Aleksandr
Lukashenko.
As a result, the students and the professors who taught them
have been labeled as dissidents. Dozens of former students
have left the country for universities in Europe and the
United States, while those who have been absorbed into the
system of state universities are being forced to repeat
classes, and years of study.
Among the Best
Mr. Lukashenko has said that initially he viewed the
European Humanities University as an "interesting and
attractive project" because it brought in foreign lecturers
and issued diplomas recognized outside the country. (State
universities still operate largely according to the Soviet
model.)
But when it became clear, he told local reporters, that the
university's goal was to create "a new elite" who would
"carry Belarus to the West," its days were numbered.
Professors at the university, many of whom formerly taught
at state institutions, are now seen as pariahs too dangerous
to take back. So the university has moved into exile in
neighboring Lithuania in order to survive, and is providing
distance learning from there. Its rector, Anatoliy
Mikhailov, and his family, now live in Russia and the United
States.
"We thought that EHU was the best of all other universities,
that there was no way they could close it because, as far as
knowledge is concerned, it was the best," said Maria
Yemilyanova, a third-year student majoring in languages and
civil law who has since enrolled in Belarus State University
here.
"We are kind of hoping that EHU will open up, somehow,
somewhere else," she said. "When you think about it,
Mikhailov is our papa, and EHU is our alma mater -- our
parents, it works out. ... So, for now, everybody who has
gone away is holding within him the aura of EHU, and the
hope of one day coming back."
Some students, in fact, are still taking classes -- across
continents, across oceans -- to uncertain ends: European
Humanities University diplomas are no longer recognized by
the government. Yet the loss of classroom space in the real
world has not carried over into the virtual world. Some
professors continue to work daily from the computer lab at
the university's administrative building.
Viktoriya Kalesnikava has been studying in the United States
but still takes classes at European Humanities via the
Internet. "I have three different virtual classes, and every
week I write a paper and send it off by e-mail," said the
senior at Cabrini College, a Roman Catholic institution in
Pennsylvania.
Ms. Kalesnikava was working last summer in a small resort
town along the Atlantic coast of southern New Jersey when
she learned that she would not have a university to go back
to in the fall: "It was a real shock. We knew that it could
happen. ... But I never thought that it could be so real."
She has remained a philosophy major at Cabrini, which she
describes as a "paradise" for scholarship. "Still, I really
miss my old study group, our spirit of working together, our
discussions," she said. "We were really interested in
learning and discussing different things from different
points of view. ... Our teachers, our lecturers, were really
serious people."
"In general, although our university was not old, it created
a special spirit that united us -- and that's something,"
she said in a telephone interview. "I really like it here,
but if I could get a degree from EHU, I would."
The director of the philosophy department at the European
Humanities University, Ryhor Miniankou, is the former head
of the philosophy department at Belarus State University. It
would be impossible for him to return, however: Because of
his association with European Humanities, he is a marked man
in Belarussian education circles.
He and his colleagues have exhausted their vacation days,
their sick days. "We'd like to stay here and work, and we're
trying to figure out how," he said. "Soon, they're going to
fire us."
Inevitable Closure
The European Humanities University was founded in 1992 by a
group of academics and the Belarussian Orthodox Church to
revive what administrators called a spirit of balance
between church and academe. It was secular in its teachings,
however, and modeled largely on American universities.
Sources of financing, too, were largely American, chief
among them the Open Society Institute, through its
higher-education support program, as well as the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation,
and the European Union.
It began with 67 students, and had grown last fall to more
than 1,300 students.
Not even the government could deny its academic merit. A
2003 report by the Ministry of Education rated the
university first overall among all private institutions, and
second only behind Belarus State University -- the country's
wealthiest and largest, with 6,000 students -- among classic
and pedagogical universities, both public and private.
The unpublished report, a copy of which was obtained by The
Chronicle, was suppressed by the ministry. It would not look
good if the ministry once praised the very institution that
it was trying to discredit and, eventually, shut down.
The university's demise had been planned over several years,
Mr. Lukashenko asserted last fall at a public gathering. Yet
the end came swiftly. On July 21, the government informed
university officials that it would terminate the lease of
its main building. On August 1, the Education Ministry
revoked its license -- on grounds of insufficient classroom
space.
The closure, in one respect, was inevitable in the hardening
political climate. "It would have been very difficult for us
to survive and preserve our mission," says Vladimir Dounaev,
the first vice rector. "A university without academic
freedom and autonomy already isn't a university."
Reincarnation?
University administrators are restructuring the institution
to become a regional university with campuses in Lithuania
and, perhaps, Poland, that would bridge old and new Europe
and unite their universities with those in former Soviet
republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Major financial backers have pledged to continue to support
the institution and its expanding mission. The university
also has enlisted as partners two universities in Lithuania,
and one in Germany, as well as the American Councils for
International Education, a not-for-profit educational
organization.
Training and language programs would continue in Minsk under
current plans, but most major programs of study would be
provided from Lithuania via distance learning.
"Of course it's not the same university," Mr. Dounaev says,
"but perhaps it will be even better."
Despite years of planning, the Education Ministry was poorly
prepared for the university's closure: State universities
struggled to absorb its student body and have been
uncompromising in refusing many credits from the outlawed
institution.
Most students are being told that they must repeat classes
in cases where the curriculum at the European Humanities
University differed from the strict standards for state
institutions, which happened more often than not. Ms.
Yemilyanova was accepted by Belarus State University on the
condition that she repeat a year, even though the state
university offers less than half the credits that EHU
offered in civil law, her major.
Moreover, the annual tuition for Ms. Yemilyanova at Belarus
State is $1,500, as opposed to $700 at European Humanities.
"My salary for a year is almost exactly the sum of annual
tuition," says the student's mother, Irina, a single mother
who also has a teenage son.
Ms. Rak opted to work this year for a French company here
after she was told that most of her credits would not
transfer to Belarus State University. She would have had to
study an additional three years, she said, plus take 29
exams to verify her aptitude in a battery of subjects.
So she intends to return to her studies next fall, only at
one of the universities in France that has agreed to take in
students from the European Humanities University at no
charge, or at reduced tuition.
"The university is closed," she says, "but we also have the
whole world before us. Ironically, we now have many
possibilities."
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A38
Imposing an Ideology in Belarus
The president of Belarus pushes universities to promote the
state's views by rewriting textbooks, firing professors, and
punishing students
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Minsk, Belarus
Higher education in Belarus had it relatively good, once.
While the president of the newly independent country spent
most of the 1990s strengthening his political grip, he
largely left universities alone. Private institutions
enjoyed academic freedom and international exchange. Even
their state counterparts had a degree of financial
independence.
Then, things changed. Some say that universities were
targeted as nests of opposition. Others say it was all part
of a grand design. Clearly by the spring of 2003, the
autocratic president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, had higher
education in his sights.
читать дальшеTextbooks began to be removed from libraries, and to be
rewritten to support the president's policies and narrow
view of history. Rectors who flattered the president were
installed. Less-than-compliant professors were forced out.
Potentially controversial doctoral research was cut off.
Largely because it was financed by Western organizations, an
independent humanities institute was shuttered. The
country's foremost private university, arguably the best of
its kind on former Soviet territory -- and also financed by
the West -- was abruptly forced to close.
Mr. Lukashenko, who holds diplomas from teaching and
agrarian colleges, characterized the moves as reform, a
series of measures meant to restore "the best traditions of
the Soviet-era education system." To that end he also
introduced to college campuses the Belarus Republican Union
of Youth, an organization similar to the Komsomol, or Young
Communist League of the Soviet Union.
Yet none of his measures were given greater priority than
what he called "ideological work" with students. This
academic year a mandatory course, "Foundations of Ideology
of the Republic of Belarus" -- whose ill-defined mission
ostensibly is intended to instill patriotism and allegiance
-- is being taught nationwide for the first time.
"They've made higher education a tool of politics," says
Vladimir Dounaev, first vice rector of the European
Humanities University, the highly regarded private
institution that has moved into exile in Lithuania to
survive. "It is a major blow."
Those attempts to bring higher education to heel reach from
the cities to the underdeveloped regions, where recently
established quotas are intended to bring students from
villages, the president's political base, into aca-deme. The
trend is unlikely to ebb anytime soon. Several months ago
Mr. Lukashenko declared victory in a rigged referendum that
allowed him to run for re-election, indefinitely.
Representatives from the United States and the European
Union have appealed to Mr. Lukashenko to spare higher
education from what is tantamount to a reverse perestroika.
He faces sanctions and bans on travel from many countries.
But so far, outside pressures have proven feeble. Belarus
recently ordered a British professor from King-ston
University London to leave the country for unstated reasons
connected to his nonacademic work with youth. It also
revoked the operational licenses of IREX, a U.S.-financed
nongovernmental organization that promotes academic
exchange, and a host of foreign and domestic NGO's.
The Ministry of Education has been unequivocal in ordering
universities to fire professors and lecturers who oppose, or
are not committed to, the state ideology. "If you do not
accept the ideas declared by the government and the
president, do not apply to a state university for a job,"
Mr. Lukashenko has said.
A Vague Directive
The role of ideology in the country has been likened by Mr.
Lukashenko to the role of the immune system in a living
organism. Despite his avowal of its vital importance, its
functions are more than a little fuzzy.
The country's 57 institutions of higher learning -- 43 of
which are owned by the state -- are still unsure how to
teach the "Foundations of Ideology" course. The course was
supposed to have begun in the fall of 2003, but a lack of
direction from the Education Ministry meant that rare
lectures often were composed of selected excerpts from
speeches by the president.
The first substantial textbooks on state ideology were
published only last year, and in many instances are
contradictory in content. Among the several textbooks on the
subject for sale at a popular bookstore in the capital, one
is overtly communist in tone, and another is nationalist.
The author of two of the more moderate textbooks, Yadviga S.
Yaskevich, believes that Belarussians have been suffering
from an identity crisis since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and its accompanying ideology. Bordered by Russia to
the east, and Poland to the west, the country -- which,
prior to 1991, was independent briefly in 1918 -- has been
subjugated by larger forces with competing sets of values.
Responsibility for teaching the course, which consists of 16
hours of lectures and 8 hours of seminars, falls on the
departments of law and political science. In April educators
must propose the first specialties of scholarly expertise
within the field of state ideology.
"A state can't be without ideology," says Ms. Yaskevich, a
vice rector at the Republican Institute of Higher Schools,
which performs research and provides support to
career-oriented scholars, at Belarus State University. She
provides students more history and philosophy than outright
direction. "I'm oriented toward what the student thinks, how
he came to his conclusions ... and do not tell him what to
think."
The Education Ministry, however, is less tolerant of
latitude of thought. At a seminar last September at the
Academy of the Presidential Administration of the
Belarussian Republic, educators were instructed to emphasize
trust and a sense of "personal closeness" with the
president, and to increase the visibility on campuses of the
national flag and coat of arms.
Mr. Lukashenko has said that the basis of state ideology
should be Orthodox Christianity, which he says has
supplanted communism over the past decade.
The rector of Belarus State University, the country's most
prestigious university, plans to write a definitive textbook
to alleviate the vagueness. Vasily Strazhev's prescription
would be familiar to the American electorate: a system of
values, in this case guided by a national idea (Fatherland),
a religious idea (Orthodox Christianity) and a social idea
(fairness).
Mr. Strazhev, like many educators who remain in the good
graces of the government, is sensitive to assertions that
the compulsory state ideology on campuses -- as well as at
workplaces with more than 300 employees -- is integral to
the totalitarian regime of a president regarded widely as
the last dictator in Europe.
"In Belarus nothing is happening that isn't happening
anywhere else, America included," he says. "I can tell you
that, in America, there's also an ideology. In America
there's even a very powerful ideology -- they just don't
call it that."
"I can even envy the success of the American system of
bringing up citizens and patriots, how Americans instill a
love of the country and of its symbols," he says. "But would
you call that totalitarianism?"
The creators of the new curricula, like most educators
interviewed for this story, believe that an official
ideology is necessary in Belarus regardless of who runs the
government. "You only have to be scared," Mr. Strazhev says,
"when ideology becomes totalitarianism."
For some, the line already has been crossed. "Everyone is
afraid," says Mr. Dounaev, of the European Humanities
University. "A sense of totalitarian fear exists in the
country. It is literally the restoration of Soviet times."
While education policies are Soviet in appearance, they are
not in substance. Communists fought for an ideology to gain
power, whereas the government is conjuring up an ideology to
justify power, according to Vitali Silitski, a political
analyst in Minsk.
"The state ideology is brainwashing, so to speak," Mr.
Silitski says.
A New Order
The Chronicle has obtained a copy of an order of the
Education Ministry, dated April 1, 2004, that outlines
"urgent measures" for instilling elements of ideology in
academe. The order, while technically a public document, has
been suppressed by the ministry, which refused several
requests to comment for this story.
Rectors are instructed to enlist students and professors in
promoting the state's official symbols, the institution of
the president, and the president as a personality. They must
promote the spread of the Belarus Republican Union of Youth
in all ways possible, as well as assert greater control over
the content of college newspapers and the Internet. They
must take more severe measures to punish students who speak
out.
The order lists 26 ways in which to increase control over
international cooperation and foreign sources of financing;
to prevent students from working and studying abroad; to
persuade students and professors to celebrate anniversaries
of Soviet achievements; and to monitor and influence the
collective moods in student dormitories.
The Education Ministry is working on a slate of parallel
measures for the reorganization of higher education.
Students whose tuitions are paid for by the state would be
required to work off the costs of their education over three
to five years -- up from two years, and longer than during
the Soviet period -- at a job in a location of the
government's choice. A graduate of Belarus State Medical
University reportedly killed herself rather than obey
instructions to leave the capital to work in a village.
The government has also instructed universities to steer
first-year students into the hard sciences and technologies
in order to replenish the aging work forces in state-run
industry and agriculture. It founded a new university last
fall in Barnavichy, a small city in the west, in part to
directly meet the needs of an economic system in which the
government regulates price and production levels.
It also has ordered universities in the cities to increase
the enrollment of students from villages by up to 17
percent, ostensibly because children in the regions are
underrepresented. "We are going to educate our elite, the
future leadership of the country ... in the regions in
particular," Mr. Lukashenko told students last fall.
The Education Ministry is also suspected of being behind the
recent call for a review of the dissertation of a prominent
writer, Ales Pashkevich. A panel of experts from the Higher
Examination Board, which oversees postgraduate study, had
recommended the publication of Mr. Pashkevich's research on
the work of 20th-century Belarussian ИmigrИ writers. It also
had been approved by academics at Belarus State University
and Gomel State University.
But the dissertation was marked for review by the
examination board after war veterans condemned it as work
that did not conform to the state ideology.
Siarhei S. Vetokhin, a vice rector at the Republican
Institute of Higher Schools, confirms that other topics for
dissertations have been discredited. The theses, however,
are small in number and related almost exclusively to the
political, not the hard, sciences, he said.
"It really stinks," says Mr. Silitski, a former associate
professor at the European Humanities University who came of
age in the early 1990s, when the country was flush with
independence and Mr. Lukashenko was still the director of a
communal farm.
"At first I became sad, but I'm a social scientist, and I
have to understand the logic of the process. I also
understand that it's not forever," he said. "But you can
forget about things changing [for the better] until the
regime is gone."
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A36
February 25, 2005
________________________________________________________
An Institution Is Shuttered for Its Western Ways
By BRYON MACWILLIAMS
Minsk, Belarus
This was supposed to be the last semester of undergraduate
study for Olga Rak, who was majoring in languages and
international economics at the European Humanities
University here. Instead, she has dropped her studies
altogether.
Ms. Rak was several weeks away from the beginning of her
final year at the best private university in the country
when it was abruptly ordered closed by the government. Some
1,300 students were stranded by the move, which the
country's president has since said was steeped in politics
and deliberately made young people the victims of adult
games.
"This event changed all our lives," said Ms. Rak, who
intends to resume her studies next fall at a university in
France. "I sort of prepared for it, but we still didn't
think it would happen. I still can't believe it happened."
The closure was the culmination of several years of pressure
by the government to bring the European Humanities
University, which is financed by Western organizations,
increasingly in line with the ideology and autocratic
policies of the administration of President Aleksandr
Lukashenko.
As a result, the students and the professors who taught them
have been labeled as dissidents. Dozens of former students
have left the country for universities in Europe and the
United States, while those who have been absorbed into the
system of state universities are being forced to repeat
classes, and years of study.
Among the Best
Mr. Lukashenko has said that initially he viewed the
European Humanities University as an "interesting and
attractive project" because it brought in foreign lecturers
and issued diplomas recognized outside the country. (State
universities still operate largely according to the Soviet
model.)
But when it became clear, he told local reporters, that the
university's goal was to create "a new elite" who would
"carry Belarus to the West," its days were numbered.
Professors at the university, many of whom formerly taught
at state institutions, are now seen as pariahs too dangerous
to take back. So the university has moved into exile in
neighboring Lithuania in order to survive, and is providing
distance learning from there. Its rector, Anatoliy
Mikhailov, and his family, now live in Russia and the United
States.
"We thought that EHU was the best of all other universities,
that there was no way they could close it because, as far as
knowledge is concerned, it was the best," said Maria
Yemilyanova, a third-year student majoring in languages and
civil law who has since enrolled in Belarus State University
here.
"We are kind of hoping that EHU will open up, somehow,
somewhere else," she said. "When you think about it,
Mikhailov is our papa, and EHU is our alma mater -- our
parents, it works out. ... So, for now, everybody who has
gone away is holding within him the aura of EHU, and the
hope of one day coming back."
Some students, in fact, are still taking classes -- across
continents, across oceans -- to uncertain ends: European
Humanities University diplomas are no longer recognized by
the government. Yet the loss of classroom space in the real
world has not carried over into the virtual world. Some
professors continue to work daily from the computer lab at
the university's administrative building.
Viktoriya Kalesnikava has been studying in the United States
but still takes classes at European Humanities via the
Internet. "I have three different virtual classes, and every
week I write a paper and send it off by e-mail," said the
senior at Cabrini College, a Roman Catholic institution in
Pennsylvania.
Ms. Kalesnikava was working last summer in a small resort
town along the Atlantic coast of southern New Jersey when
she learned that she would not have a university to go back
to in the fall: "It was a real shock. We knew that it could
happen. ... But I never thought that it could be so real."
She has remained a philosophy major at Cabrini, which she
describes as a "paradise" for scholarship. "Still, I really
miss my old study group, our spirit of working together, our
discussions," she said. "We were really interested in
learning and discussing different things from different
points of view. ... Our teachers, our lecturers, were really
serious people."
"In general, although our university was not old, it created
a special spirit that united us -- and that's something,"
she said in a telephone interview. "I really like it here,
but if I could get a degree from EHU, I would."
The director of the philosophy department at the European
Humanities University, Ryhor Miniankou, is the former head
of the philosophy department at Belarus State University. It
would be impossible for him to return, however: Because of
his association with European Humanities, he is a marked man
in Belarussian education circles.
He and his colleagues have exhausted their vacation days,
their sick days. "We'd like to stay here and work, and we're
trying to figure out how," he said. "Soon, they're going to
fire us."
Inevitable Closure
The European Humanities University was founded in 1992 by a
group of academics and the Belarussian Orthodox Church to
revive what administrators called a spirit of balance
between church and academe. It was secular in its teachings,
however, and modeled largely on American universities.
Sources of financing, too, were largely American, chief
among them the Open Society Institute, through its
higher-education support program, as well as the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Eurasia Foundation,
and the European Union.
It began with 67 students, and had grown last fall to more
than 1,300 students.
Not even the government could deny its academic merit. A
2003 report by the Ministry of Education rated the
university first overall among all private institutions, and
second only behind Belarus State University -- the country's
wealthiest and largest, with 6,000 students -- among classic
and pedagogical universities, both public and private.
The unpublished report, a copy of which was obtained by The
Chronicle, was suppressed by the ministry. It would not look
good if the ministry once praised the very institution that
it was trying to discredit and, eventually, shut down.
The university's demise had been planned over several years,
Mr. Lukashenko asserted last fall at a public gathering. Yet
the end came swiftly. On July 21, the government informed
university officials that it would terminate the lease of
its main building. On August 1, the Education Ministry
revoked its license -- on grounds of insufficient classroom
space.
The closure, in one respect, was inevitable in the hardening
political climate. "It would have been very difficult for us
to survive and preserve our mission," says Vladimir Dounaev,
the first vice rector. "A university without academic
freedom and autonomy already isn't a university."
Reincarnation?
University administrators are restructuring the institution
to become a regional university with campuses in Lithuania
and, perhaps, Poland, that would bridge old and new Europe
and unite their universities with those in former Soviet
republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Major financial backers have pledged to continue to support
the institution and its expanding mission. The university
also has enlisted as partners two universities in Lithuania,
and one in Germany, as well as the American Councils for
International Education, a not-for-profit educational
organization.
Training and language programs would continue in Minsk under
current plans, but most major programs of study would be
provided from Lithuania via distance learning.
"Of course it's not the same university," Mr. Dounaev says,
"but perhaps it will be even better."
Despite years of planning, the Education Ministry was poorly
prepared for the university's closure: State universities
struggled to absorb its student body and have been
uncompromising in refusing many credits from the outlawed
institution.
Most students are being told that they must repeat classes
in cases where the curriculum at the European Humanities
University differed from the strict standards for state
institutions, which happened more often than not. Ms.
Yemilyanova was accepted by Belarus State University on the
condition that she repeat a year, even though the state
university offers less than half the credits that EHU
offered in civil law, her major.
Moreover, the annual tuition for Ms. Yemilyanova at Belarus
State is $1,500, as opposed to $700 at European Humanities.
"My salary for a year is almost exactly the sum of annual
tuition," says the student's mother, Irina, a single mother
who also has a teenage son.
Ms. Rak opted to work this year for a French company here
after she was told that most of her credits would not
transfer to Belarus State University. She would have had to
study an additional three years, she said, plus take 29
exams to verify her aptitude in a battery of subjects.
So she intends to return to her studies next fall, only at
one of the universities in France that has agreed to take in
students from the European Humanities University at no
charge, or at reduced tuition.
"The university is closed," she says, "but we also have the
whole world before us. Ironically, we now have many
possibilities."
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 51, Issue 25, Page A38
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03.03.2005 в 01:39-
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03.03.2005 в 02:25-
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03.03.2005 в 11:25-
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03.03.2005 в 18:34-
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09.03.2005 в 13:16А можно поподробнее про книжки о белорусской идеологии?
Хотя бы имена и названия?
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09.03.2005 в 20:00http://www.nmnby.org/articles/240504/climate.html
http://www.russiane.org/documents/analitics/329.html
http://religion.ng.ru/concepts/2000.../5_apology.html
http://www.ucpb.org/rus/show1day.sh...wday=14-08-2003
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14.03.2005 в 23:03Спасибо!!!