Nis Faculty Files Complaint Against Minister Stankovic
Faculty leadership filed a criminal complaint against Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic over unpaid salaries and refusal to comply with a court ruling on three disputed departments.
The Faculty of Philosophy in Nis has filed a criminal complaint against Education Minister Dejan Vuk Stankovic with the Higher Public Prosecutor’s Office in Belgrade, specifically its Special Department for the Suppression of Corruption. The contents of the complaint were made public on the evening of September 25, and the Faculty accuses the minister of failing to enforce a court ruling in conjunction with abuse of his official position.
The complaint covers the period from May through July 2026, up to and including July 31. During that time, the Faculty claims, the minister refused to comply with the Administrative Court’s rulings and to restore the situation at the Faculty to what it had been before the dispute over the separation of three departments.
Dispute over three departments
The dispute concerns the separation of the departments of History, Serbian Studies, and Russian Language and Literature from the Faculty of Philosophy and their merger into the newly founded Faculty of Serbian Studies. The Serbian government launched that process in October 2025, and some staff and students have opposed it from the start, calling it illegal and politically motivated.
In mid-June 2026, the Administrative Court suspended enforcement of the Ministry of Education’s decisions that had altered the Faculty’s operating permit and stripped it of accredited study programs. That effectively restored the previous legal situation for the duration of the court proceedings. According to the criminal complaint, the minister went on enforcing the suspended decisions even after that ruling.
What the minister is accused of
A separate part of the complaint concerns July 31, 2026, when Stankovic issued a decision changing the coefficients used to calculate staff salaries at the Faculty. That decision, according to the Faculty, cut the salary calculation coefficient to 5,150.67 and reduced the number of funded staff positions to 210.99. As a result, the complaint states, budget funding was withheld for 39 teaching and associate staff, and the damage to the Faculty exceeded 1,500,000 dinars.
The complaint itself states that the minister, acting as an official, “knowingly and willingly refused to comply with the Court’s rulings and to restore the previous legal and factual situation at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nis.”
66 days without pay
Faculty staff have not been paid since July 20. Dean Vladimir Z. Jovanovic told a press conference that the leadership had already noticed in late June that the Faculty had not received the approved appropriations for the next six months.
“Sometime in late June, we noticed that the Faculty of Philosophy was the only faculty at the University of Nis that had not received the approved appropriations for the next six months to function normally, both in terms of operating costs and in terms of salaries for staff who had done their work properly. For that reason, we started contacting the Ministry of Education very early and asked to be told why the Faculty of Philosophy alone had not received those appropriations. We ran into a wall of silence,” Jovanovic said.
According to Jovanovic, the Ministry’s reply did not arrive until August 20, by email, from an unsigned official of the Department for Higher Education and Finance. It stated that the Faculty and the University of Nis should act in line with a Serbian government decision from November 6, 2025.
On September 18, through the law firm of Jovan Rajic, the Faculty also filed a lawsuit with the Administrative Court against the Ministry of Education over withholding the coefficients for 39 employees without explanation. The criminal complaint against Stankovic followed a few days later.
According to the Independent Faculty Union, staff at the Faculty, from the doorman to full professors, had gone 66 days without pay as of September 24. Teaching assistant and union executive board member Velibor Petkovic says work at the Faculty is nonetheless continuing.
“After exactly sixty-six days of repression, we are still here. We do our jobs regularly, our students take exams and study in clean, well-ventilated rooms, the administrative services carry out their regular work, and for sixty-six days no one, from the doorman to full professors, has received a single dinar of their honestly earned wages,” Petkovic said.
According to Petkovic, staff are getting by mainly on solidarity assistance. Seven completed donation agreements have raised over two million dinars, of which 1.5 million came from the IT community, and every employee who did not decline the help also received 10,000 dinars in solidarity aid.
“We are defending the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of higher education, and we respect the word of the Administrative Court,” Petkovic said, adding that the Faculty would not agree to break the law.
The Ministry of Education has not yet commented publicly on the content of the criminal complaint. The next move rests with the Special Department for the Suppression of Corruption, which must assess whether there are grounds to open proceedings against the minister.
