Is Macedonia Ready for a Western Style University?

In 2008 Prime Minister Gruevski expressed interest in establishing a world-class English language university. Professor Peter Bock of George Washington University was contacted and given the task to design the university, to be based on the US educational system. A year later the University for Information Science and Technology was born with six foreign professors (including this author) and Blagoja Samakoski as its first Rector. Since then, all of the foreign professors that were initially hired have been dismissed, Danco Davcev replaced Samakoski as Rector, three additional foreign professors were dismissed, one Teaching Assistant was promoted to Assistant professor and to Vice Rector in matter of two weeks, the university administration was accused of nepotism for hiring several family members, the Rector and Vice Rector were accused of plagiarism, and the university is being sued for breach of contract by two of the dismissed foreign professors.

The question now is, is Macedonia ready for a world-class English language university? Based on the opinion of professor Peter Bock, the architect of this new university, and the experiences of the former foreign professors, the answer is most definitely, not yet!

Prime Minister Gruevski failed to realize that for this type of university to succeed,  it needs a level of financing that the government is not ready to support, and it needs to be governed by, and function in the sort of academic culture that unfortunately we all found lacking in Macedonia.

The average nine month starting salary of an assistant professor in the technical fields in the USA is in the range of $80.000 and higher. The salary for experienced associate and full professors can easily reach above $150.000. How many professors from the US is the Macedonian government willing to hire at these salaries? I should note that the salaries at the university in Ohrid were, and still are two or three months late. Some foreign professors had to borrow money just to meet day to day expenses. In the letter of dismissal of one foreign professor, the current Rector indicated the professor's demand for timely arrival of his salary as one reason for his dismissal.

The integrity of a university in the US and in western Europe rests on academic culture that is defined by collegiality, academic freedom, freedom of speech, the rule of law, academic integrity, shared governance, and respect for student rights. What we experienced at the university in Ohrid was a culture of fear originating from the highest levels. Students being threatened with dismissal, for expressing negative opinions about the university or its administration. Dismissed professors being threatened with lawsuits for defamation of character. A faculty senate that can only be described as a farce. The Rector is the highest authority in the senate, and he also has the authority to dismiss any foreign professor for any reason. That being the case, what foreign senator would be willing to vote against the wishes of the Rector, knowing that he can be dismissed at the stroke of the Rector's pen?

Having taught at two major universities in Macedonia I have come to know what most Macedonians already knew, that cheating and plagiarism is rampant throughout the entire educational system. But, when a Rector and Vice Rector have been discovered to have plagiarized parts of their major research, it is inconceivable that the Minister of Education would give them full support in running the university. It is unlikely that any US universities would be willing to cooperate with a university that tolerates plagiarism.

Currently the Rector seems to have the authority to break a contract for employment of any foreign professor, as has been the case with five professors thus far. The only regress a professor has is to sue the university. However, as one foreign diplomat has advised one of these illegally dismissed foreign professors, justice in Macedonia is not always blind. So, the question now is, how many respectable professors would be willing to leave a job at a university in the US, move their family to Macedonia and work under the conditions described here? Not many, unless they are desperate for any job. And if the Macedonian government continues to manage the university in Ohrid as it has up to now, it should expect to hire only desperate foreign professors.

A Macedonian version of this post appeared in PlusInfo.

Employment at University in Ohrid

Recently the University for Information Science and Technology in Ohrid, Macedonia, published the guidelines for hiring foreign professors. They can be found here. Any foreign professor considering applying for a position at this university should first consider asking some important questions and contacting former foreign professors who had worked there.

First of all, consider that a contract with this university, or with any government institution in Macedonia, is not worth the paper that it was written on. The university has the right to break the contract at any time for any reason whatsoever, and there is absolutely no recourse for the employee whatsoever. You may sue the university, as several professors have already done so, but justice in Macedonia is never blind. Keep this in mind if you intend to move to Macedonia with a family.

Freedom of speech at this university is expressly forbidden both for students and for professors. In fact, you may be sued for defamation of character (of an individual, of the university, or of the Ministry of Education, or the country as a whole) for stating anything "negative" about any of these. The term "negative" is interpreted as anything that is contrary to what is expressed by these institutions. Below is a link to a letter by the Rector of the university where he states that this is one of the reasons for the dismissal of one foreign professor.

Nine foreign professors were dismissed during the first two years in the existence of the university. Some were dismissed even AFTER they and the university had already signed a contract. None of them were given a reason for the dismissal. In fact, the Rector of the university is not legally obliged to give a reason for a dismissal of a foreign professor.

The Faculty Senate is NOT independent. I would strongly advise you NOT to be a member of the Senate, if the position is offered to you. The Rector of the university is the Chair of the faculty senate. The Rector has the right to disregard any decisions by the faculty senate. During senate discussions it is not advisable that you express an opinion that is contrary to that of the Rector, otherwise you job may be in jeopardy, as it recently happened with two foreign professors.

The contract that you will sign is very short and it does not provide too many details about your responsibilities. For this reason I would advise you to include the following details in your contract::

1. An exact list of the courses that you will be required to teach during your employment. Otherwise they may ask you to teach a course for which you are not qualified to teach, and they may dismiss you for not doing a good job teaching it.
2. The exact number of contact hours during the week. How many hours during the week will you be expected to be in the classroom.
3. How many office hours will you be expected to have for consultations with students.
4. What other responsibilities are you expected to have, their exact nature, and how many hours each week for each responsibility.
5. Will there be student evaluations of your teaching and what will be the exact format. This is very important because in the recent firing of three foreign professors the Rector of the university "ordered" the president of the student senate to "manufacture" evaluations for only these three professors.
6. MOST IMPORTANT! Will my salary be paid on time? Be aware that your salary for each month must be approved by a ministry in Skopje, and there is nothing the university can do to quicken the process. You will NEVER get your salary on time. Sometimes it may be two or three months late. Bring lots of cash with you to last you at least three months. If for whatever reason you get dismissed, it is not very likely that you will get the salary for the last month or two.

Do not expect a professional atmosphere at this or at many other institutions of higher education in Macedonia. They simply don't have the culture of professionalism in their educational system. Expect students to be cheating on all of the exams in one way or another, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. You will be expected to simply forgive them and give them another chance, and another, and another, until they pass the final exam.

Plagiarism is rampant in Macedonia, and you should expect it from your students and from many of your Macedonian colleagues. There are no laws or rules against plagiarism in Macedonian educational institutions. It was recently discovered that both the Rector and the Vice Rector of the university had plagiarized major parts of their research, and the government did absolutely nothing about it. There was no legal way for the Ministry of Education to punish them for this infraction.

Consider seriously contacting the current and former foreign professors at the university before making any final decisions. You can get the email addresses of the current professors from the university's we page. Below is a list of some of the former professors:

George Mitrevski, USA mitrevski@gmail.com
Matthieu Puigt, France mpuigt@gmail.com
Matthew Ager, England matthew.a.ager@googlemail.com
Etienne Shneider, France et.schneider@gmail.com
Gregory Hillhouse, South Africa gregory.hillhouse@gmail.com
Aurora Rana, Philippines au.1201@gmail.com
Peter Bock, USA, the "architect" who came up with the original design for the structure of the university pbock@gwu.edu

Below are links to English translations of two interviews in a Macedonian newspaper:

Interview with Dr. Etienne Schneider
Interview with Professor Peter Bock

Also read my posting on the firing of foreign professors where you will find numerous other documents.

Access to scholarly journals in Macedonia

The Ministry of Education in Macedonia announced that it had signed an agreement with a British company to make fifty international journals with "impact factor" available, or electronically accessible to Macedonian scholars. The list of journals can be found here: http://www.mon.gov.mk/novosti/741--impact-factor. First, I would like to applaud the Minister for his effort to make accessible to Macedonian scholars literature on which all scholars rely on for their research. I looked at the list, and many of the titles are familiar to me. I still would like to raise some questions about this project.

1. Why only fifty? Is it a matter of cost? How did the Ministry decide on which fifty journals were needed by Macedonian scholars. 
2. Did the Minister conduct a survey of Macedonian scholars and based his selection on what they needed, or did he simply look at some list of journals that were rated with the highest impact factor? Does anyone remember the fiasco with the project to translate hundreds of textbooks into Macedonian? The project still continues, but a word of mouth tells us that hardly any of these textbooks are actually used in Macedonian universities. The list of textbooks to be translated was put together by the Ministry without consulting the professors in the field. Some have suggested that the Ministry should conduct a survey to find out where in fact these books are used, and the Ministry has refused to do this. In my opinion, because they may not want to see the results. Will these journals suffer the same fate?
3. All of the journals on the list are in English, most likely because they are publish in an English speaking countries. Are there no scholarly journals with "impact factor" published in other languages? Should scholarly research published in other languages not be considered by Macedonian students and scholars? Is the Ministry assuming that all scholars in all fields in Macedonia are fluent in English? 
4. Will this effort not lead to more plagiarism, something that the Ministry wants to abolish with it's recently announced software? Will this not give students and scholars easier opportunity to simply translate research into Macedonian and submit it as their own? Is the plagiarism software capable of detecting translated plagiarized texts?

My advice to the Minister on this and other similar topics is that if he truly wants to improve scholarship in Macedonia first he needs to liberate himself from the "impact factor" myth. To do so, first someone needs to enlighten him that "impact factor" in scholarship is nothing but a myth. There are many, many scholars in the world who conduct extremely significant research in a field where there are perhaps only couple of dozen other scholars doing similar research. Their research is published in journals with very small circulation. Should their work be considered as any less significant simply because the journal doesn't have the impact factor of Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Psychology Today, etc.?

Relying on the "impact factor" myth to improve education and scholarship can only result in a myth that once Macedonia imports journals with "impact factor", the country will begin producing educational institutions and scholars with "impact factor".

The Minister of Education needs to be aware that generally speaking Macedonian scholarship and the Macedonian system of higher education is in terrible, terrible shape. Before even thinking about putting the system on the "impact factor" track, many other political, organizational, ethical and social changes have to take place first. The system needs changes from the ground up with the effort of all stakeholders, not just the ministry of Education

Can the problem of plagiarism in Macedonia be fixed with software?

Today (May 9, 2011)  Minister of education Nikola Todorov announced that the Ministry has commissioned new software to detect and fight plagiarism at Macedonian universities. I discussed the issue of plagiarism in Macedonia in another post. Here I would like to comment on the Minister's approach to the problem.

First, there has not been a public announcement or discussion about the nature of this software, such as who is developing it, what standards will be used, etc. As an aside, I am familiar with many information technology projects in Macedonia that received wide media coverage, and at the end they never saw the light of day, or the end result was totally useless. My personal opinion is that this new software will suffer the same fate, mainly as a result of the government's total ignorance of the root causes of the problem.

Here is how the Minister describes the project. The system will work with texts written in Macedonian, Albanian, English and other languages. So far so good. All scholarly works in the possession of the Ministry of Education will be archived in the system. The system will also include all student seminar papers, final graduation papers, masters theses, dissertations, textbooks, and all other scholarly research papers and projects. The system will become functional in six months! GOOD LUCK!

First, let me address the technological hurdle. I assume that whoever received the grant to design this system has convinced the Minister that they can duplicate Turnitin, the most well known plagiarism detection system. Is the Minister really so naive to believe that duplication of Turnititin is possible based on the available experience and resources in Macedonia? Here are some statistics from Turnitin:

• 150+ million archived student papers
• 90,000+ journals, periodicals & books
• 1+ million active instructors
• 14+ billion web pages crawled
• 10,000 educational institutions
• 20+ million licensed students
• 126 countries

All of this can be duplicated in just six months and at the cost of only twenty-thousand euros?

There are three forms of plagiarism prevalent in Macedonia: copying form previously published texts, paying someone to write the paper, and submitting an entire work (paper, thesis, dissertation, etc.) that has already been submitted by someone else. Although plagiarism of the second and third type is quite rare in most western country, it is quite prevalent in Macedonia. I think probably the Minister's aim was to fix the problem with the third type of plagiarism, which does nor require enormous technological knowhow. However, is the Minister really aware of what kind of resources are needed to archive ALL electronic media? Is he really not aware of the kind of resources available for such projects to Google and Turnitin? Twenty-thousand euros just ain't gonna do it!

Let's assume that the initial archive will consist only of texts in the possession of the Ministry of Education, and the archive will be continuously built up with new texts (seminar papers, scholarly papers, etc.). As far as I know, currently there is no legal basis in Macedonia to require authors to submit their works to this plagiarism detection system. Although this Minister would probably have no qualms about proposing such an amendment to the current law on higher education, even though such a law will most likely be in conflict with the law on copyrights. Let's suppose such a law is passed. Is the Minister not aware of the practical hurdles in archiving such documents?

The Ministry of Education probably has some good statistics on the number of theses, dissertations and scholarly papers published in Macedonia and has figured that it won't take much of an effort to archive them. But let's talk about student seminar and graduation papers. I don't know how many students are enrolled in universities in Macedonia, but 80,000 is probably a conservative figure. Let's say each semester about 20,000 are required to write a seminar or a graduation paper. 

1. How will the submission of their papers be handled practically?
2. Will each professor be legally required to require students to submit their paper?
3. Will there be a fine for professors who don't obey?
4. Will there be a fine for students who don't obey?
5. Who will be in charge of controlling students and professors to make sure they have obeyed, and what kind of resources are needed to do so? Will each faculty need to hire an individual responsible for controlling and maintaining the paper submission process?
6. Will there be seminars and workshops for students and professors where they can get instructions on how to submit papers?

As envisioned, this software will probably be quite capable of discovering exact, or almost exact copies of papers in its database. At my home institutions, as well as at other universities in the US plagiarism also includes:

1. Quoting another person's actual words, complete sentences or paragraphs, or an entire piece of written work without acknowledgment of the source; 
2. Using another person's ideas, opinions, or theory, even if it is completely paraphrased in one's own words without acknowledgment of the source;
3. Borrowing facts, statistics, or other illustrative materials that are not clearly common knowledge without acknowledgment of the source

More complete definition of plagiarism can be found on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism). I'm just not convinced that a twenty-thousand euro software can be capable of detecting all of these types of plagiarism.

Here are few more important questions.

1. What happens when an individual has submitted and is discovered that he has plagiarized a thesis or dissertation? Is he simply told to go back and write another one? And what if it is discovered that the second, and third, and fourth versions have been plagiarized as well?
2. What happens if it is discovered that a professor had plagiarized a paper, thesis or dissertation 5, 10, or 20 years earlier?
3. What happens to a student who has plagiarized a seminar paper? I noted in a previous post that I had the experience at a Macedonian faculty where ALL students in a seminar had plagiarized their seminar papers. Remember, according to the system of student assessment in Macedonian universities, students don't "fail" a course, they pass or fail exams, which they can retake as often as they please until they pass them. There is no legal procedure where a professor can say to a student, "Your paper is plagiarized, you fail the course, you must repeat the entire course." There is also no legal way for a faculty to punish repeat offenders by dis-enrolling them from the faculty for a period of time. So, students risk very little if they plagiarize, and at the end the risk is really worth it.

In his announcement Minister Todorov also says, "With the development of this software this decades long problem in higher education should stop." Minister Todorov and all educator in Macedonia should be aware that plagiarism is not a problem only in institutions of higher education in Macedonia, but for decades it has been part of Macedonian educational culture. It's prevalent from pre-school, first grade, and so on. If there is an easier way to write a paper, and if the person responsible for assigning and controlling the written project doesn't really care much, and if there are really no significant consequences, then why bother putting in the effort to write something original. My personal opinion is that all this is a result of the fact that generally speaking in Macedonian culture there is very little respect for knowledge and self-improvement. Parents, who should be most responsible for educating and enlightening their children, are also most responsible for promoting a culture of favoritism, cheating, and plagiarism.

My point above is to point to the fact that, contrary to the Minister's statement, plagiarism is not a problem only in institutions of higher education. The seeds of plagiarism are planted by the parents, and teachers in primary and secondary schools don't make much of an effort to weed out the problem. This is the reason why by the time a student enters the university the problem is really too large to handle with a 20,000 euro software. 

So, do you really want to fix the problem with plagiarism in higher education? 

1. Start fixing the problem with the parents.
2. Start fixing the problem from pre-school and first grade. Educate teachers on how to recognize plagiarism. Don't require individual teachers to be responsible for punishing offenders. That will most likely lead to bribery. Rather have each school organize a committee consisting of teachers, director, parents, etc., decide on the punishment. Make it clear at the beginning of every school year what the rules and consequences for cheating and plagiarism are and really stick by them.
3. Have the Minister assign someone at the Ministry of Education to gather documents form US universities on how they handle issues with plagiarism. You'd be surprised how well the rules work. I can tell you this from my own personal experience. I teach literature courses where students are required to write papers, and almost every semester I get one or two students who have plagiarized their papers. But after the plagiarism is discovered, and the student's parents (who are paying tens of thousands of dollars for their education) find out, and the student is forbidden to attend classes during the following semester, you can be certain that, that student will never plagiarize a paper again.

Plagiarism at universities can be rooted out within one year if professors and administrators really want to put in the effort. With the help of Google it takes me no more than five minutes to detect if a text has been plagiarized from some online resources, which is the most prevalent way that students plagiarize. Universities must have very strong and enforcible policies against plagiarism. Students should NEVER be given a second chance to write a paper in place of one that has been plagiarized. The minimum punishment should be repeating a course in which plagiarism has occurred. The next level should be dis-enrolling the student for one semester and for one year. The highest level of punishment should be dis-enrolling the student from the university forever. Plagiarizing a thesis or dissertation should require the highest level of punishment. The student should be dis-enrolled from the university forever, and the offence should be noted in the student's records. After one of these happens to one or two students, you can be sure that it won't take too long for others to realize that plagiarizing is just not worth the effort.

Finally, Minister Todorov should be commended for recognizing the problem and for trying to do something about it. I have yet to read any practical and successful solutions proposed by educators or by educational institutions. It is just unfortunate that the minister is attempting to solve this problem in a way that is certain to lead to failure. Rather than focusing all resources in detecting plagiarism, more effort should be put in making sure that it doesn't take place, or at least is reduced substantially.

Problems with textbooks at Macedonian institutions of higher education

The problem with textbooks at Macedonian institutions of higher education has been endemic for many decades, going back to pre-independence days. Until about two years ago there were only two universities in Macedonia, one in the capital Skopje and the other one in Bitola. There was not enough of a demand for textbooks written in Macedonian to justify the expense of writing textbooks for courses where the total enrollment in a course in the country might be less than 100 each year. Since Serbo-Croatian was a mandatory foreign language course for all students in Macedonia beginning in the fifth grade, it was expected that all college students were proficient in that language. It was, therefore, much more convenient for professors to assign textbooks in Serbo-Croatian, or in Bulgarian, a closely related language to Macedonian.

Another practice which was common and still continues to this day, is for professors to distribute their lecture notes to students, and students are tested based strictly on the content in these notes. Some professors publish their lecture notes either through the university's publishing service, or by an outside publisher. Students have frequently complained that they feel obligated to purchase these notes/textbooks before they are permitted to take an exam. The selling of these materials is usually left to a professor's assistant, who keeps track of the names of those who have purchased a textbook. Many students seem to favor this system because they feel that it makes it much easier for them to pass a course. They can show that they are supporting financially the professor's endeavor, and it's also much easier for them to commit to memory a few pages from lecture notes, than having to read a textbook of several hundred pages. In 1974/1975 I was a visiting student at University in Skopje and I lived in a house together with a student from the Medical Faculty and one from the Faculty of Economics. Neither of them attended classes, and they passed all of their courses by committing to memory their professors' lecture notes. Many times I had arguments with my house mates because just before an exam they kept me up all night with their loud recitations of their lecture notes.

In the last few years English has become a required foreign language for all students in primary and secondary schools. So, university professors and students now rely much more on textbooks and other literature written in English. The problem now is that textbooks written in English are usually published either in the USA or in Great Britain, and their prices are exorbitant and beyond the means of great majority of Macedonian students. Nevertheless, professors regularly assign these textbooks in their courses. So, what is a student to do? Fortunately, digital copies of many of these textbooks can be found online on torrents and can be easily downloaded and re-distributed to other students. Because of their cost, it is very rare to find these textbooks in a public or university library. The library of one technical university in Macedonia as of this date has all of 22 books in its entire collection (http://www.uist.edu.mk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=97&Itemid=429&lang=en). By assigning impossible to find or purchase a textbook Macedonian professors in fact promote breaking international copyright laws.

I am familiar with the case of one professor at a faculty in Macedonia who assigned a list of twenty books written in English for a seminar. One of the students in the seminar approached me to find out if I have any of the assigned books. Unfortunately, I did not have any of them, nor could they be found anywhere in Macedonia other than in the professor's private library. The students in the seminar ended up borrowing and duplicating from the professor some of the books. Another student who had taken the same seminar the previous year told me that she duplicated about 3,500 pages in the course of the seminar.

The new law on higher education in Macedonia requires professors to post reading lists for their courses at the start of each semester. A cursory look at these lists indicates that these are either books written by the professor, or they are foreign books written in English. The lack of and easy access to textbooks does not seem to have been much of a concern to most professors. The Ministry of Education in recent years has tried to alleviate this problem by financing the translation of several hundred textbooks and other literature into Macedonian. While this on the surface may seem to be a logical solution, so far it has done very little to solve the problem.

First, no one is really sure how the Ministry selected the books to be translated. At news conferences and at book promotions the Minister claims that the books were selected by a committee of highly competent professors. But, it's hard to find a public list of these committee members anywhere. In other words, the book selection process was not transparent and it did not reflect the specific need of professors in specific areas.

Second, the word from the field is that the translations were done so poorly and in such haste that many of the textbooks are practically unusable. Apparently none of the translators were specialists in the fields in which they were translating. Translating is not a very highly paid skill in Macedonia, and to save money the government hired those translators who could complete the task at the cheapest possible rate.

Third, and most most important, the Ministry of Education approached this project without considering the specific needs of professors in the field. It was a top-down approach, and many professors resented being told which textbooks they should be using in their classes. Therefor, for all practical purposes the textbook translation project will end up being useless and a total waste of funds.

Now the question is, could the Ministry have handled this project in a different way so that it could have provided useful textbooks to professors and their students? The answer, in my opinion, is definitely yes. As a first step the Ministry should have distributed a survey to professors in the field to find out what are their specific needs. The Ministry should have set up a committee in each field to discuss possible lists of textbooks. All discussions and decisions should have been public and transparent. Once a selection was made, a textbook should have been translated by a group where there is at least one professor who is a specialist in the field. The next step before publishing should have been a testing period in the classroom for one year to see if the textbook is really appropriate for a given course. Only after that a decision on publishing the textbook should have been made.

When the Ministry of Education gets a complained that there is a lack of textbooks, the Minister's reply is often that professors should be writing textbooks since they are best qualified in their field. It is quite apparent that the Minister has absolutely no concept of what it takes to write a quality textbook. The reason why there are so many Macedonian textbooks of such poor quality is because they are written by highly qualified professors in the field, who have very little understanding of pedagogy. In addition, professors who are highly qualified to write high quality textbooks don't have an incentive to do this because there is no reward in it since the market is so negligible.

So, is there a solution for the problem with textbook at Macedonian institutions of higher education? The problem is not unsurmountable. However, as long as decisions about textbooks are made by political appointees, such as the Minister of Education, who don't have any practical experience in the educational process, it is certain that this problem will continue for the foreseeable future.