Page 160 - Šolsko polje, XXXI, 2020, 3-4: Convention on the Rights of the Child: Educational Opportunities and Social Justice, eds. Zdenko Kodelja and Urška Štremfel
P. 160
šolsko polje, letnik xxxi, številka 3–4
Closure
I have been discussing and corresponding with my colleagues work-
ing at public universities in Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia and Bosnia and
Herzegovina on the topic covered in the article. We agreed that the facts,
circumstances and assessments presented in this article also apply to
the university environment and legal policy regarding the university in
these countries. However, a Latvian colleague, who works as a universi-
ty lecturer at a public university, felt that the critical descriptions and as-
sessments in the article concerning public universities could be general-
ised, and added with concern his empirically supported thesis that in the
Baltic States the policy of attributing greater importance and value to ac-
ademic work published abroad cannot be overlooked, even if in his opin-
ion the administrative criteria for determining the value of such work are
less strict than, for example, in Slovenia or Croatia. Therefore, I decided
to take a risk with the thesis reflected in the title of the article: it is not just a
critical assessment of Slovenian public universities, it is a feature of the uni-
versity environment and legal policies that have the most overlaps in post-so-
cialist EU member states (comp. Chankseliani and Silova, 2018; Lemon,
2002; Silova, 2009).
We can rightly be very concerned that this problem will escalate in
the short term. In Slovenia and all the other EU member states. With the
official start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the study process has
shifted from classrooms and lecture halls to the world wide web. Instead
of personal contact between professors and students, communication has
taken place via apps like ZOOM and Skype. We are now entering a new
watchdogs” for socially active (in the Aristotelian sense “politically active” citizens,
so-called political entities or political animals) representatives of various professions,
knowledge and socially active citizens (‘activists’). Which is comparable, if not entirely
equivalent, to the status of the media, public and private, and particularly journalists.
Such status is granted by the Court to all those persons who, through their public work,
strive for a contemporary observation of social events, for the investigation, research,
analysis and commentary of social events, for their listing in publicly accessible works
intended for the general public, sharing the knowledge and ideas with the general public
and in the ‘public interest’. Above all, all socially active people who, through their public
relations, work, comment on, criticize and expose unconstitutional, illegal or corrupt
actions of political functionaries, the most influential persons in society or power and
decision-making centres, the ‘modern, contemporarily elite’. The judicial recognition of
such status by the Strasbourg Court for those who do so, and consequently the additional
judicial protection of this status before national courts, is an important ‘normative’
Event (deliberately written with a capital letter), which is much more important than,
for example, the annual public announcement of “word of the year.” This is a normative
institutionalisation (through judicial law-making) of a very important, necessary and
indispensable form of informal control in society – at the highest supranational judicial
level. Even if, on the other hand, one would rightly expect that the national courts, and
especially the Constitutional Courts of the EU member states, to do so much earlier.
158
Closure
I have been discussing and corresponding with my colleagues work-
ing at public universities in Poland, Bulgaria, Croatia and Bosnia and
Herzegovina on the topic covered in the article. We agreed that the facts,
circumstances and assessments presented in this article also apply to
the university environment and legal policy regarding the university in
these countries. However, a Latvian colleague, who works as a universi-
ty lecturer at a public university, felt that the critical descriptions and as-
sessments in the article concerning public universities could be general-
ised, and added with concern his empirically supported thesis that in the
Baltic States the policy of attributing greater importance and value to ac-
ademic work published abroad cannot be overlooked, even if in his opin-
ion the administrative criteria for determining the value of such work are
less strict than, for example, in Slovenia or Croatia. Therefore, I decided
to take a risk with the thesis reflected in the title of the article: it is not just a
critical assessment of Slovenian public universities, it is a feature of the uni-
versity environment and legal policies that have the most overlaps in post-so-
cialist EU member states (comp. Chankseliani and Silova, 2018; Lemon,
2002; Silova, 2009).
We can rightly be very concerned that this problem will escalate in
the short term. In Slovenia and all the other EU member states. With the
official start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the study process has
shifted from classrooms and lecture halls to the world wide web. Instead
of personal contact between professors and students, communication has
taken place via apps like ZOOM and Skype. We are now entering a new
watchdogs” for socially active (in the Aristotelian sense “politically active” citizens,
so-called political entities or political animals) representatives of various professions,
knowledge and socially active citizens (‘activists’). Which is comparable, if not entirely
equivalent, to the status of the media, public and private, and particularly journalists.
Such status is granted by the Court to all those persons who, through their public work,
strive for a contemporary observation of social events, for the investigation, research,
analysis and commentary of social events, for their listing in publicly accessible works
intended for the general public, sharing the knowledge and ideas with the general public
and in the ‘public interest’. Above all, all socially active people who, through their public
relations, work, comment on, criticize and expose unconstitutional, illegal or corrupt
actions of political functionaries, the most influential persons in society or power and
decision-making centres, the ‘modern, contemporarily elite’. The judicial recognition of
such status by the Strasbourg Court for those who do so, and consequently the additional
judicial protection of this status before national courts, is an important ‘normative’
Event (deliberately written with a capital letter), which is much more important than,
for example, the annual public announcement of “word of the year.” This is a normative
institutionalisation (through judicial law-making) of a very important, necessary and
indispensable form of informal control in society – at the highest supranational judicial
level. Even if, on the other hand, one would rightly expect that the national courts, and
especially the Constitutional Courts of the EU member states, to do so much earlier.
158
