Nestorovic Movement: Ministers to Blame, Not Rector

The Mi Snaga Naroda movement of Prof. Branimir Nestorovic sent the srpske.rs newsroom a statement today, August 24, naming for the first time who it holds responsible for the University of Belgrade’s fall on the Shanghai Ranking of the world’s best universities. The message arrived by email at 12:51 PM, with a request from the movement’s press office that it be published in full. The newsroom verified the sender.

The University of Belgrade landed in the 501 to 600 bracket in the latest edition of the Academic Ranking of World Universities, better known as the Shanghai Ranking, a year after sitting in the 401 to 500 bracket. The ranking itself is the occasion for this statement, not its subject: srpske.rs has already covered the drop in a separate report, Shanghai Ranking: University of Belgrade Falls Out of the Top 500.

A Decree as the First Argument

The statement’s opening charge concerns a change to how much research time professors are required to log:

The peak of this government’s incompetence and shamelessness shows in the fact that on March 24, 2025, the Government of Serbia used a decree to cut professors’ scientific research work from 20 hours a week down to just 5, only to reverse course with a new decree less than a month ago and restore the original arrangement. The consequence of a year and a half of quadrupling that cut, in effect crippling scientific research work, is plainly visible in the fall on the Shanghai Ranking. The government has thereby proven it has no vision beyond administrative violence against science.

The date lines up with the official register of regulations. Serbia’s caretaker government did amend the Decree on Norms and Standards for the Working Conditions of Universities and Faculties on March 24, 2025, lowering the research norm from 20 to 5 hours a week while raising the teaching norm to 35 hours. That decree was reversed to the earlier ratio in late July 2026, and Article 6 now again sets 20 hours a week for each.

Politics Instead of Science

The movement frames the ranking fall purely as a product of state policy toward science:

The fall into the 501 to 600 bracket is the direct result of a policy that values a party membership card over scientific work, and that systematically drives the best young doctors of science out of the country. This government does not want an enlightened public and a strong university, because it cannot manipulate educated, conscious citizens. What it wants is cheap labor and diplomas from private instant colleges.

The same argument runs through its take on assigning blame to the University itself, which it calls a classic diversion:

This is a textbook, cheap political maneuver meant to shift attention away from the real problem: the decades-long, deliberate and chaotic destruction of Serbia’s education and science system. The University of Belgrade did not collapse overnight, and no single person is responsible for it. It was dismantled systemically.

The movement also points back to where the University once stood:

We remind the public that our university was among the world’s top 300 about a decade ago, not thanks to the state, but purely through the superhuman effort and individual dedication of a handful of our top scientists. The state did not support those people, it let them drift, allowing wealthier foreign universities to essentially buy up their citations and points.

The figure checks out, and if anything understates the case. The University of Belgrade was ranked in the 201 to 300 bracket in 2016, in the 301 to 400 bracket a year earlier, and first entered the Shanghai Ranking in 2012 in the 401 to 500 bracket.

Five Ministers Named

The core of the statement is a list of names:

The people chiefly responsible for this scientific collapse sit in ministerial chairs, not in the Rectorate. Responsibility for the devaluation of education, which threatens to become irreversible, lies with those who run this country and who deliberately shape the budget so that science gets scraps. Where is the responsibility of education ministers Mladen Sarcevic and Prof. Slavica Djukic Dejanovic, and now Dejan Vuk Stankovic? Where is the responsibility of Dr. Jelena Begovic, the minister of science, technological development and innovation? What has Finance Minister Sinisa Mali done, apart from making sure hundreds of millions of euros get thrown at dubious projects and entertainment, while our faculties have no money for basic scientific research and international journals?

The movement names five people by name: former education ministers Mladen Sarcevic and Slavica Djukic Dejanovic, current Education Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic, Jelena Begovic, and Finance Minister Sinisa Mali. One correction is needed here: Begovic is not the current minister of science, technological development and innovation, as the statement describes her. The ministry’s own website lists academician Bela Balint as minister; he took the post on April 16, 2025, the day parliament elected Djuro Macut’s government. Begovic served from October 26, 2022, until that date. That means she was still in office on March 24, 2025, when the decree the movement cites was adopted, so the substance of the charge falls within her term and only the present-tense title is wrong.

The statement closes with a direct message to the government:

The Mi Snaga Naroda movement has this message for the regime: stop looking for scapegoats and look in the mirror instead. You are the ones who signed Serbian science’s death sentence!

What the Government Has Said

The movement’s claim that the government is pinning the blame on the rector has grounding in statements made over the past few weeks. First Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Sinisa Mali wrote on Instagram on August 16:

This is a direct consequence of everything the blockaders and University rector Vladan Djokic did over the past year and this one. Instead of fighting for better, higher-quality education, the rector went into politics.

Education Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic said a day later, on August 17, that there is a serious degree of irresponsibility among the University’s leadership and its faculties, describing the fall as a testament to how rector Djokic understands autonomy in practice. Prime Minister Djuro Macut called the drop a serious alarm today, on Radio Belgrade’s morning program, and a cumulative consequence of a loss of continuity in teaching and research. He announced that if the University itself does not urgently respond, the government will bypass the Rectorate and work directly with the vice deans for science at each faculty. He did not name the rector, nor did he address the government’s own responsibility.

As of publication, there had been no response to the Mi Snaga Naroda movement’s statement from the Government of Serbia, the Ministry of Education, or the Ministry of Science, Technological Development and Innovation, and neither Stankovic, Mali, nor Begovic had replied to it.

The movement currently holds five of the 250 seats in Parliament, in the parliamentary group of Prof. Branimir Nestorovic’s Mi Snaga Naroda. Sources differ on how many it started with in 2023: Danas reports that 13 MPs were originally elected from Nestorovic’s list, with the group shrinking to five after Aleksandar Pavic’s departure, while Wikipedia lists six MPs elected under the movement in 2023.