Apology for University Values

This writing deals with the situation at the University of Pristina and its debates in the context of core debates, elaborate and organic approaches to the world's university idea, and mechanistic access to us, with potentially dangerous consequences to our knowledge, University and our nation.

As an institution of higher education and research, the university has history of less than a thousand years. Although the predecessor has had in Africa and Asia, the first universities in Europe are the foundations of the XI and XII centuries (Bolon, Paris, Oxford), born in the Gulf of the Catholic Church, originally to educate clergymen and government officials.

By a elite institution for many centuries, at the end of the last century, the university opened to more people and knowledge. The number of universities increased, the number of students now turned to about 50% of those who finish pre-university education. This explosion and massiveity has often gone to the expense of quality, although a scale of elliism has been maintained in the world, since there is a university hierarchy, catching it in Great Britain and the U.S., but also found it.

To get closer to the object of this text, the situation at universities in Kosovo, with a focus on Pristina University, which is far better off when we initialize the existence of a sovereign hierarchy even in us, we will commemorate that in the last few centuries, as society evolved and sciences of humanitarian knowledge have developed, it has been debated about the nature and mission of the university and its ties to the society of the state, now even in the national and secularist. The book “The Idea of a University” is the most familiar issue in the English - speaking world. (The idea of the University) that Henry John Newman had written on the basis of the speeches he had held in 1852. There is the most influential book in English in those 150 years for the public ideals of higher education. Of course, this is not the place to elaborate on the main ideas of this book, except to point out that it does not view research (research) as a university relevant function. Most useful for discussing social, economic and political conditions around Britain's University today are the books of Stefan Collins, “What Are Universities For?” (What are universities for? Displaying of Universities” (Tue spoke of universities, Verso, 2017), to which this scripture refers. The renowned scholar, professor of English literature and intellectual history at Cambridge University, Stefan Collin (Collini), has become the most critical and argumentative voice on university marketing trends (commercialization) in the context of British government policies. His reviews are also of weight and benefit to our university, because in Britain, as in Kosovo, universities are public, although in Britain's case public-private design has been a little clouded because of the state-placing (in credit) student payment system. Students' fees in Britain are the highest in Europe -- 9000 pounds (10000 euros) annually, while in Kosovo among the smallest.

Pristina University was founded in 1970, originally for Albanian and Serbian teaching, though since then The UP's has in a way been National University for Albanians in the former Yugoslavia. Keeping as a parallel university (undrathed) in the years of the first Republic of Kosovo in the 1990 ' s, the university has survived with difficulty, with its effects today, 18 years after the war.

Pristina University “hasan Pristina” is huge, not only the largest in Kosovo, but also among the largest in the region. (For comparison, both traditional British universities, together by Oxford and Cambridge, have fewer students than the University of Pristina).

At the time when our state holds the University of Pristina and has opened others in the regions (Prizren, Peja, Gjakova, Mitrovica, Gjilan, Ferizaj) primarily as high education institutions for teaching (a little bit of no research!), recent discussions on the situation in Universities, both within the institution and outside, rock with an intermediate issue not with a holistic, organic, but completely public, mechanical, prisism, and university staff advance. This has become national issues from segments of civil society (not so civil), but not from the state and university itself. The consequences of such a assembly, with the mechanicist paradigm, can be alien to our university and society. As this danger is highlighted, access to the University should be reevaluated, with the goal of almost late, turning back from the blind road under pressure from an unrecognizable department that teaches to oversee the University in the name of the people.

As it is known, there has long been the main conversation, supposedly in an effort to set higher academic standards, about the number and magazines/platforms of scientific publications that qualify for election/reelection/advancing in assistant titles, assistant professor, associate professor and regular professor. Not for their quality, unfortunately. And worse still, with a measure frame turned into numbers that applies equally to science and social knowledge -- sometimes called social science in our disk. A <x1-region of assessment procedures for selection, re-election and promotion of academic personnel at Pristina University has been put into circulation these days. It has long been discussed, and the arguments of professors who say this is the wrong course have been ignored with inexplicable wine. All of this on behalf of setting standards, in an effort to make knowledge/major scientific and translated in numbers. Says Collin “not everything that lifts weight can be counted/translated into” (“Not everything that accounts can be counted”, 2012. 120) as if it were being confronted with this very narrow, mechanistic thinking of the ideas and makers of this policy in us. It objects to gross bibliometer learning to institutionalise as a measure of measurement (only) on the basis of superstitious belief that numbers somewhat avoid the dangers of prejudice and subjectivity. Stefan Collin is systematically protected, as the author of this writing tries to do here, humanitarian knowledge, social science, or whatever we call it. Thus defines Oxford's English dictionary (OED), which he embraces, and is given here translated: “File of Knowledge (learning) that deals with human culture; academics that jointly include this branch of knowledge, such as history, literature, ancient and modern languages, justice/juristrudence, philosophy, art and music<8>.

The most unusual and, perhaps, especially valuable for what universities do is “specifically what can't be captured by metrics (metric units) that are increasingly using societies to measure the value”, Collin finds in the book published this year (2017, pp.). 25). It is referring to the bibliotry of the eightyth century and the cliche of the impact factor (impact factor) of the 2000 ' s, although he himself was a retired professor of Cambridge University, which, with these metrics, makes it to the top of the world university rankings. British researcher in his books disputes the narrow concept of universities as institutions that train labour force and apply findings to create economic growth (2017, pp. 33), as well as the validity of these rankings, by asking whom they serve, although severely criticized, as quantitative measurements of quality, which are made in excess. He, said in summary, calls it a failure to translate quality-based judgments into calculated measurement measures (2017, pp. 57). Human life involves many unfathomable forms of value, while “thinking and understanding activities automatically resist opportunities to measure properly with quantitative metrics” (f. 151," says Collin in his book Circular. And Further! 190): The global “raditions are of little value: they are mainly guidelines for a degree of spending in great science, not for the quality of education offered by universities, and especially not for how well they serve the country's culture, sonicir”. Collin ruthlessly brands what he calls “iphystinism of the narrow-minded” of policymakers in the field of education, because, as he puts it, the university's main task is to “expand and deepen human understanding, because, in the long run, from this successful strain of society overall brings out the greatest benefit” (f. 205).

And to reach the end of this review of the university idea generally and with a focus on the place of humanitarian knowledge in it, it means that as we listen and hear even more in the years to come about the need for a more global and globalistic look, it will be stressed that <x0-reliance of many humanistic disciplines with local cultures will always remain closer than in other”, says Collin, to illustrate: <x2PE of the greatest work in the sciences of nature, and even in very social sciences, where it can always become a global economy, where it will become a lot more funding there. However, suppose the study and teaching of Swedish history will always be done especially in Sweden or Italian literature in Italy, and so on. (2017, hf. 228-9. Here we could translate for ourselves for our environment: study of Albanian culture and literature in Kosovo and Albania, let us guess. An even cheaper translation, for the deaf, in these national spaces, in Kosovo and Albania, will need studies in Albanian of humanitarian, social, philosophy, foreign culture literature, primarily European, in the cradle of which the Albanian culture and authentic literature were born.

It was seen from the review up here, I believe, that the attempt to quantify knowledge with numbers and tables, ignoring judgment, evaluation, is a serious disfigurement of the nature of humanitarian knowledge. So harmful, if not fatal, is the idea that publications in national and regional magazines are invalid, and that publishing on certain platforms, although with vlerial reparation, is the remedy for all.

The University of Pristina, but also the Kosovo Academy of Sciences and Arts and some other institution, without much investment in the field of research, have managed to create a small magazine publishing industry, some of which with nearly semi-story traditions, such as the Albanian Language, Literature and Culture Centre, the 1974 Faculty of Philology institution, the most well-known in the national and international plains. (The director of this seminar I was myself in several warrants, once a science secretary. )

Publishing in national Philological and other magazine magazines in Kosovo and Albania has been declared invalid for election and academic staff advancement at the University of Pristina. The University of Tirana has not done this, let's guess. They're worth it, and these works are promoted to university titles. Such a absurd decision: disqualified research work and its results within our institution makes you laugh and cry at the same time. If this madness were institutionalized, as you learn, the new regulation for advancing the academic staff of the UPI would have tragic consequences for the fate of humanitarian knowledge generally on us, and especially of the knowledge that clings to our national culture. Why would anyone say that? Because, as Collin points out, these knowledge is closer (he says, in the original, intimatically, to the place and culture the university is shooting at, in our case in Kosovo. Who would publish in Kosovo and Albanian magazines if not local scholars from the region? From Germany, Britain, France, the United States, Japan? Not unless local scholars, who should have the main burden on their publication, publish local journals. No one has the right to do so, for a knowledge cultural treasure that was created is not just our own, but of those who created it, ours, and of those who come after us. We are simply, at this stage, a trust agency, to preserve the heritage and to advance if we can, for new generations. That's it.

And, one thought at the end. It is not my merely apology for albanology studies, which are still the most authentic for the nation and country, but the broader for humanitarian studies. Albanology as a whole of studies of Albanian specifics (languages, literature, culture, history, etc.) would be reflected and atrophied in studies of any reserve (indigent population and culture, as it were) if looked out of the European arena, its ties to peoples and cultures in antiquity and modernity, discharging knowledge and methods of studies in the world today. Philological studies (languages and literarys) have been raised in this interaction and on the basis of dietary radiation that can be left out of study and valued as a valuable contribution when other philologists make it in comparison studies. By the way, how can it not be assessed as a contribution to the general knowledge and national culture and Albanian publication of writers and philosophers like Proust, Joyce, Heidegger, or Sartre, to name just a few of the XX-century greats? Where Albanian studies would be today without the great contribution of Ibrahim Rugova, Rexhep Ismajli and Sabri Hamiti, who in the 1970 ' s conducted high studies and close specialisations in France, to authorities, such as André, peaked Martinettes, Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette? The results of their research brought our academics to Kosovo and applied them to national culture, to albanological studies, which without these contributions, at the time that Enver Hoxha's Albania was disfigured in communist dogma, Social Realism and others, would be much poorer, not to say atrophy in the fields of philological studies, literature and culture. With the currently proposed nomenclature, their publications to us, known for their peak, would not qualify for promotion at the University of Pristina. Absurd, right?

Determining conformity with violent and arbitrary means, no matter that the initial motives of the initiatives of these policies may not necessarily be evil, produces bad consistencys for the democratic spirit (that democracy is not only procedure and numbers) for our cultural and social life. For the nation and the university, however, the flow was heavy.

Muhamet Hamiti is associate professor at Pristina University Faculty of Philology “Hasan Pristina”. Last year, he published books with essays and literary studies “Literary Trust” and “Modern procedure“.