Glisic: faculty blockades will leave Serbia short of experts

Public investments minister Darko Glisic said on Tuesday, July 22, that Serbia will face a shortage of skilled professionals in the coming years because of the university blockades. He put the blame on faculty leaderships, claiming they obstruct the completion of studies and that the effect is already visible in fewer defended doctorates and awarded diplomas. The consequences, he said, could be expected in five, six or seven years.

Glisic described students as trapped by the ambitions of university administrations, and attributed the situation to what he called irresponsible policy and corrupted political ambitions. With that, the government for the first time so explicitly tied the duration of the blockades to long-term damage to the education system, shifting the debate from a question of order on campuses to a question of the country’s future workforce.

Where do the faculty blockades come from?

The blockades began as part of a broader student and civic protest that has run since a canopy collapsed in Novi Sad. From an initial demand to establish accountability grew a longer cycle of occupations and suspended classes, in which the faculties became both the site of the protest and its symbol. For a portion of students and professors, halting classes is not the goal but a tool of pressure that lasts until, in their words, the demands are met.

This is where two pictures of the same event meet. The government says teaching must return to normal and that prolonged occupations produce concrete damage, from delayed cohorts to a shortage of future doctors, engineers and scientists. Part of the academic community responds that the cause is not their persistence but the unresolved demands that drove them onto the streets in the first place, and that responsibility cannot be reduced to faculty administrations.

What makes Glisic’s statement new is not the figure about fewer diplomas, which is hard to measure month to month, but the frame he sets around it. Instead of the daily quarrel over who is blocking whom, the minister offers a projection several years ahead and asks that the blockades be judged by the cost he says the whole economy will pay. That moves the ground of the debate from the present moment to a future about which little is yet known.

How much is this an argument, and how much an election message?

The timing of the statement is not accidental. University blockades remain one of the central political questions ahead of the announced elections, so any assessment of their consequences inevitably carries electoral weight. When a government official speaks of a shortage of experts five to seven years out, he offers at once an explanation of the present situation and an argument against continuing the protest.

The opposition and some professors see in that message an attempt to shift responsibility for the crisis onto those who protest, rather than onto the institutions that, in their view, should have answered the demands sooner. For them, a shortage of professionals, if it comes, would be the consequence of an unresolved dispute, not of the students’ decision to enter a blockade.

The argument over education thus becomes an argument over who bears the blame for its cost. The government counts ahead, toward cohorts running late; part of the academic community counts the days without an answer to its demands. And when you hear that blockaded faculties will leave Serbia short of experts, where do you see the real cause of that shortage, in how long the protest lasts, or in what set it off?