By Jerina Zaloshnja
So, the Albanian Government has taken the plunge and decided to re-organize scientific research in Albania. According to the decision that the Government passed last week, the Academy of Sciences, the main center of scientific research in Albania, ceases to exist. All the research institutes that made up the Academy of Sciences will be attached to Universities. According to the Ministry of Education, the goal of this reform is dual pronged: first, to encourage scientific research in Albania through modern structures or, and second, to strengthen public universities in Albania by attaching a large number of experienced experts to the University faculties, who up until now had been working in seclusion within the Academy. The Government says that this is a Western model which marries scientific research to the teaching process.
In the meantime, this reform in the field of research has been opposed by the Academy of Sciences and its leadership, as well as by the Opposition, which describes this reform as a move that will not assist scientific research in Albania.
The debate on scientific research in Albania began immediately after the collapse of communism. The Academy of Sciences and its Research Institutes a Soviet model, disseminated throughout all the former communist countries of Eastern Europe- survived decades of communist rule, but the role and output that science produced in those times were strictly defined by ideology and controlled by the communist regime. It is difficult to speak about outright scientific research in Albania during communism, particularly in the domain of research in social sciences. The products of Albanian scientific research were tagged mainly for “the home market”, at the most going as far as Kosova or Macedonia.
This is a history that all Albanians are aware of and to them there is nothing surprising about this. What is strange is that for more than one decade since Albania has been open to the world there has been no serious reform at all to change the organization of and the way scientific research functions in Albania. The Academy of Sciences remained almost what it used to be. Young Albanian researchers, qualified in the West have, in general, been obstructed from working at the Academy. The director of a research institute under the Academy of Sciences was appointed by the Government, without any job interview or competition, at a time when there was a law for the acceptance of the simplest employee into the Administration, a law which laid down procedure. The Academy of Sciences itself and its Institutes have not really tried, or if they have, they have failed, to integrate research work into the outside regional or European markets. There is no doubt that the Academy of Sciences that still operates in Albania is a model that malfunctions. In the western countries, membership to an Academy is a honorific evaluation and not a job.
Finally, the Government has decided to change the system of research work, offering a model, similar to that in western countries. Engulfed in a most fatiguing transition, scientific research and the entire education system in Albania currently find themselves in grand confusion.
Although this is the right road of reform in scientific research, it is not sure whether we will end up with the results we wish.
For example, the government says that through this reform in the field of research, the level of teaching at Albanian public universities will rise. However, the professorship of these universities is abandoning these centers of learning, preferring the higher salaries at the private universities which have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain. Now these private universities have begun to teach pharmacists and dentists, within a very short period of time, alongside “the army” of legal experts and political and social scientists they churn out. And all of these private universities which remind one of the former pyramid schemes in Albania are licensed by the Government. In other words, the reform approved by the government is not only connected with scientific research, but with the entire system of education in Albania. And if we maintain that there exists a sector demanding urgent intervention, apart from the public health sector, then that sector is definitely the education system. However, instead of a full reform, the Government is approving special legislation related to scientific research.
In Albania, illiteracy is increasing rapidly and the number of drop-outs from school is ten to fifteen times higher than in 1990. A considerable number of teachers have quit their jobs and even their country, in search of better paid work. This has also been the case amongst the professorship of the universities, and currently, under-qualified teaching staff are employed at the nine year cycle or secondary schools of Albania. The same situation prevails at the universities, without forgetting the private universities which have deepened the crisis of the education system in Albania.
