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Letter to Prime Minister Rama: Ten arguments against a project - the decision that dissolves the Academy of Albanological Studies

2023-05-30 13:13:23Pikëpamje SHKRUAR NGA ARTAN FUGA*
Letter to Prime Minister Rama: Ten arguments against a project - the decision
Artan Fuga

Centuries of efforts to protect our national identity look at your feather, Mr. Prime Minister!

Ten arguments against a project – the decision that dissolves the Academy of Albanological Studies

Dear Prime Minister Edi Rama,

Amid hesitations, I decided to write to you about a project-vkm text that is said to be placed on your desk for signature in the next few hours. It is about a draft decision text of the Council of Ministers (vkm) that the Ministry of Education has formulated, with which it is envisaged to merge the institutes of Albanianology, together with them the Academy of Albanian Studies, turning them into units within the structure of the Academy of Sciences. This vkm text has already been circulating for several days in the media, on social networks, word of mouth and ear to ear among intellectuals, university students, researchers or even people who may not have anything to do with books, in the entire public opinion, causing plenty of worry. Not to mention the confusion in the minds and hearts of ASA researchers.          

An inner voice insisted that I not express my opinion, because whatever it is, it has already become routine for me that it is not heard. In the Academy of Sciences there is the strongest and most complete censorship that can be imagined against me. Someone even told me that if you want this law to come into force, then publicly express your objections to it. And yet, I'm doing mine.

I still have a glimmer of hope somewhere deep in my conscience, although now the issue passed in the political register I feel that it has hardened enough into a challenge between political camps, while for us researchers, university students, Albanianologists, the department does not really ask what we think. It seems that what matters is who holds the seal of power and not who has the knowledge of the field of science for which it is decided.

Despite all these opposing circumstances, I am convinced that You will reject that vkm text and the relation that accompanies it, no longer sign it! There, according to what intuition tells me, having no valid argument, there will be no force to convince Your will to pass Your feather over it. No argument at all! It is all badly edited, both in content and in form, by officials who stay away from Albanianology, not to mention they have long since run away from science and knowledge. I decided to write these lines because, in the first place, it is my duty to do so as a member of ASH, otherwise, if I remained silent, I would be nothing but an unworthy person, especially if the danger I feel for Albanian sciences will not share with you. On Your hand that will hold the signature quill, You know as well as I do, they look at centuries of efforts to develop our Albanian culture, and as many centuries of effort to study and preserve and educate and transmit it from generation to generation. The weight of centuries is too heavy to be left to be judged by a vkm containing a few dryly written lines, without arguments, and then to place them like cold, soulless stones on the table as a decision for signed by the prime minister of Albania.

There are some acts that charge us with responsibility not just to the living today, because these, however important, are still temporary, after a few years or decades they will no longer be on earth; the responsibility and weight that weighs on these sublime occasions, comes rather from those who are not alive: From our great dead, and from those who are not yet born, but will be, will see us hereafter without giving us apologies in decades and centuries. This weight is, I think, what will certainly weigh on that feather you hold in your hand. Because the immortality that the human being seeks, as an old sorceress or beggar said one day, two thousand or hundreds of years ago, to Socrates, does not lie in the living, but in the dead. To those who have been and to those who will come. Before this weight everything else becomes small and unimportant.

I spoke out against the absorption through the merger of the Academy of Albanological Studies from the Academy of Sciences, where I, along with others, am a part. So I have no personal interest in what I write. But when I read the vkm project and its companion relation, I was speechless and out of breath for a few minutes due to the shallowness of the argument used, as well as the ease with which they dare to direct your will where they want. I'm starting with my arguments. Please take some time out of your busy work day.

One of the arguments of the partisans of this absorption of the institutes of albanology within the Academy of Sciences is, as they have expressed continuously for two or three years, that once, in the past, according to them, the institutes of albanology were within the system of the Academy of Sciences. Neither more nor less they want to say that the natural place of Albanianology is in the Academy of Sciences. This approach is a complete mutilation of history. The Academy of Sciences of Albania was established by Enver Hoxha, by decision of the political bureau of the Party of Work of Albania, in 1972. 

But Albanianology has been around for years, decades, why not say a few centuries before that year 1972. This means that for centuries Albanianology does not have any necessary connection with what is called the Academy of Sciences; was before her. Neither Marin Barleti, nor Frano Bardhi, nor Gjeçovi, nor Ndre Mjeda, nor Fishta, nor Koliqi, have ever been members of the Academy of Sciences that the party created by decision of the political bureau in the not so distant year 1972. Therefore, who gives as an argument for this absorption of albanology by the Academy of Sciences, repeating shamelessly or out of ignorance that "this has been the successful tradition of the past, the institutes of albanology within the Academy of Sciences", he either does not know the history of science in Albania, or he doesn't even bother to fabricate monstrous frauds.

To justify this desecration of albanology, our great albanologists of the last fifty or seventy years don't even bother to speak. They steal their pure and noble work and effort, and again shamelessly and heartlessly integrate them into the Academy of Sciences. They need an absorption that happened in history to invent the absorption they want. They cannot at all distort the creative history of Cabeji, Kostallar, Buda and all that generation of researchers who left their bones in the chairs of the National Library, or others, if they are no longer martyrs of Albanology, in prison cells. In those days, the Academy of Sciences was as much about prisons as it was about the bright hall of the Academy. It is known that Albanology was not created by the academy of sciences, but it was Albanology that created the academy of sciences. These luminaries of the study of the Albanian collective spirit that I mentioned and others as honorable as them, giving all their contribution to the Albanian institutes that today want to merge, did not work and create at all within the assembly of the Academy of Sciences. They made it possible that much later, about thirty years after the Second World War, conditions were created for Albania to say that it has scholars at the academic level.

But let's come later, that is, today. The history of these last three decades speaks against the bureaucratic absorption that they want to achieve these days. Do they have arguments to vote for this "absorption", to be silent about it, or to "play with two gates", those academics who have excelled in their work for at least 15 or more years, with their works of big or small, after being researchers within those institutes of albanology that want to merge them today? Can they be persuasive when they accept, even worse, demand the merger of the institutions where they have merged their knowledge and effort, have merged their leadership talent, without ever saying: "Look, there is no work here!" Or they say: "Albanology or the institute that I direct, needs to be directed by the assembly of the Academy of Sciences, where there are only them!!!

Here, let me clearly express a great surprise. Ministers all over the world, and in the history of the Albanian state, find it natural to keep within the system that they lead various agencies and institutions that in some way depended on them. And the Minister of Education, through this VCM project, wants to remove the institutes of Albanianology from her system!!! It is understood what pressure she must be under to undertake this action.

In the companion relation of the project - vkm prepared by the Ministry of Education, as I wrote to you, completely poor and mediocre, there are surprises that cannot but cause surprise. There are just no arguments there. It is asserted in black and white that as long as the three major projects of albanology, i.e. the rewriting of a history, the dictionary of the Albanian encyclopedia, the dictionary of the Albanian language, are administered as such by the Academy of Sciences, then the institutes of albanology should also go where these projects are set!!! Such reasoning can only be fabricated by non-scientific motivations, only illogical passions can make anyone's mind deviate in this way from the path of reason. Right? To "go" the projects to the institutions that have the competence, the energy and scientific skills to tackle and crown them with success, or do the institutions go where the projects are? Of course, any reasonable person would say that it is the first option and not the second that is worth pursuing.

Where is it worth realizing the dictionary, encyclopedia, history? In relevant institutes and departments, or in an institution run by an assembly, with honorable members perhaps, but where most of them have no scientific connection with each of the projects in question, that is, no connection with history, or with linguistics, or with the encyclopedia. It is even happening, Mr. Prime Minister, that the great encyclopedia dictionary project is led by people who do not have any scientific competence in the conception and realization of encyclopedias!!! Moreover, all this is done by mentioning You, abusing Your name, hitting with Your authority anyone who dares to open an alternative dialogue, or worse, to criticize the way things are being done.

I understand the decision according to which you entrusted the Academy of Sciences with the successful crowning of the three major projects mentioned above. But, in the implementation of this task, to justify this belief, the Academy of Sciences, as required by law, had to build dynamic institutional partnerships with all institutes of albanology and relevant departments, planning the work, developing theoretical and methodological platforms, etc. Everything would have to be realized through an inter-institutional cooperation. Instead, friend after friend, friend after friend, to face the big projects that are being talked about, various individuals have approached, seeing their commitment as a completely individual relationship of theirs with the Academy of Sciences. Without at all denying anyone's personal merits,

Even the Academy of Albanological Studies has not been, in my opinion, proactive, like the leadership of the Academy of Sciences, to create an institutional cooperation in the realization of the three major projects of Albanology. Nor does the Ministry of Education seem to me to have put enough water on the fire to be a mitigating factor in this failed institutional interaction. He has stayed away from the realization of these important tasks. And in response, it finds it easier to do the most wrong thing, as it is known to happen, that is, to bring to your table a mediocre vkm text and not based on any scientific argument.

The other argument that the Ministry of Education has put forward in relation to the VCM project remains weak and powerless. It is about that argument that claims that there is no other job for the institutes of Albanianology than to deal with the compilation of the history of the Albanians, with the dictionary of the Albanian language, as well as with the dictionary and the Albanian encyclopedia!!! Of course, these are big projects, which must be carried out successfully, but not how they started. It is infuriating to find out what concept of scientific research he, or they, have used this type of argument. Scientific research in Albanianology must definitely cope with the tasks that come from the realization of the three projects in question, but it can never be defined by them, nor be limited by them. Another is scientific research in the field of linguistics, literature, anthropology, history, ethnography, etc., and other the placement and publication of these results in the appropriate form in dictionaries or publications of this nature. There is no scientific researcher who does not know this; it has been forgotten by those who have abandoned the field of knowledge and scientific research for decades. Even the bureaucrats who formulate documents without knowing anything about the field that those documents should regulate administratively do not know. I can already see the free hand that will be left to the superiors of science to say to scholars and scientific researchers: "Don't leave a drop, those archival searches of yours, don't leave a drop those monographs, those expeditions, etc! Only deal with writing the voices of the projects in question!” He, she, those who wrote this argument forget that a scholar becomes capable of synthetically summarizing the results of his scientific work, only after he has developed over the years and continues to deepen his deep, fundamental, comprehensive research, much wider than the drafting of voices in dictionaries and encyclopedias. Ask to be informed, dear Mr. Prime Minister: The new dictionary is being drawn up through source materials that bring new study expeditions to the field, that is, from new linguistic flows, resulting from new research into the lexicon of words, or is it are those data "chewed", i.e. the lexical fund is used, which constitutes the already archived database?

 The brutal absorption of the institutes of albanology within the structure of the Academy of Sciences, dear Mr. Prime Minister, will create an institutional hierarchy between the scientific researcher who does the work, that is, the one who cultivates albanological science, and the entire vertical structure, a superstructure that will stay on it with grace or without grace. There are at least seven "floors" that will weigh on the scientific researcher and the fruit of his hard work: the department, the scientific council of the relevant institute, the section of the Academy of Sciences together with the relevant commission, the assembly and above all, the top of pyramid, the presidency and the president of the Academy of Sciences. today,

I put before you, Mr. Prime Minister, the imminent danger that also has to do with the demographic degradation of scientific researchers in the field of Albanianology, and not only. By placing the institutes of albanology, as such, or even worse, in the rudimentary form of study-research units (a term without any meaning in the European landscape of scientific research) under the tutelage of the Academy of Sciences, we risk that researchers of albanology , with an admirable average age for scientific research in the field, let's put them under the "hyqk" of academics who have an average age of over seventy years and above. We, I believe, are of one mind that the new Albanian Albanology should be based on a new, not outdated, age structure, which, in addition to the charm of a wisdom gathered over the years, certainly also suffers from stereotypes, hardened dogmas, ideologies that generations have suffered during the rich but also painful Albanian history. Instead of freeing young researchers to think about Albanianology more fresh, with vitality and new methods, we are thus putting them under the "rule" of eternal leaders, who once wrote history, literature, language, ethnology Albanians, have tried their luck once, and now with selfishness, which sometimes even catches us researchers, they want to rewrite once again from scratch what they wrote once. Imagine what "brakes" will be under the work wheels of the new generation of researchers in this field! we are thus putting them under the "rule" of eternal leaders, who once wrote Albanian history, literature, language, ethnology, once attempted their fate, and now with selfishness, which sometimes even catches us researchers, they want to rewrite once again from scratch what they have written once. Imagine what "brakes" will be under the work wheels of the new generation of researchers in this field! we are thus putting them under the "rule" of eternal leaders, who once wrote Albanian history, literature, language, ethnology, once attempted their fate, and now with selfishness, which sometimes even catches us researchers, they want to rewrite once again from scratch what they have written once. Imagine what "brakes" will be under the work wheels of the new generation of researchers in this field!

By absorbing the institutes of Albanianology from the Academy of Sciences, we not only destroy these scientific structures that existed long before the idea of ​​an Academy of Sciences, as an auxiliary of the party, was born in the mind of Enver Hoxha. Dramatically, as well as comically, the leaders of the Academy of Sciences are heading towards the drying up of this Academy of Sciences itself. Unfortunately, today's leadership of this Academy has not had any sound imagination to implement the law in force for the Academy of Sciences. It acts in opposition to that law, therefore it is also persistently and quickly seeking to change it, to take it underfoot. Most of what this Academy of Sciences does to date, unfortunately, by mistake, are auxiliary scientific activities that every ordinary scientific institute has on the periphery of its attention to carry out. In today's conceptions of the Presidency of the Academy of Sciences, the question arises what will this Academy, above all its assembly, do when the institutes will be within the structure of that institution? According to the concept applied today by its leadership, there is nothing left to do.

The Academy of Sciences is not its presidency, but its assembly. That institution only makes sense if it is understood as a forum of academics acting as a wise community. But, as Gustav Le Bon, a thinker of science and crowd psychology, wrote a hundred years ago, even a community of academics outside their field of scientific competence is just a crowd, like any crowd that is led in the streets and squares from personal interests, from propaganda dogma, from momentary passions fueled by the desire for power. Why do I say this? We assume that we take the institute that deals with studies in the field of anthropology and ethnology into the structures of the academy. How many anthropologists and ethnologists are there in the assembly? We're talking two or three. Others in these fields, we are like the "crowd" that does not understand the depth and innovations of the relevant science. It is we, engineers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, archaeologists, biologists, seismologists, computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, etc., who understand from the fields mentioned as much as any person with a high school education understands from a field after reading something about it. of Wikipedia. This is how the assembly of the Academy of Sciences pretends to direct the scientific institutes it wants to absorb? This is the reason why a model like the one proposed in the vkm project is difficult, almost impossible, to find in the most advanced scientific countries, in the USA and in Western Europe. Taking the assembly of the Academy of Sciences out of the game, this absorption will do nothing but place these institutes, as study-research cores (???), under the absolute power of the president of the Academy of Sciences.
           

Mr. Prime Minister, centuries see us today! They see you with a feather in your hand. Will the derma be given to albanology, or will it survive?

 I'm not in the habit of praying. But, if this would ease the pressure on you from that vkm project text, and the non-scientific lobbies behind it, I have no hesitation for the first time: Please: Please do not sign that bastard bureaucrats hungry for power! Please listen to the voice of intellectuals without thirst for power who are calling for help, support and fair treatment, do not listen to the calls of those who want power at any cost; I pray that if we the living are not high enough to weigh upon Thy feather, hear the dead or the future yet unborn who are following Thy feather, seeing Thee and speaking to Thee today!

Thanking you for the opportunity you gave me to read my arguments, I assure you that the information that comes to you institutionally about what I wrote above is truncated, it is censored, so it does not reflect the diversity of opinions of albanologists and researchers of others in the universities, they are not the ones that would have been worthy to take on the pen of the signature of an Albanian Prime Minister in the third decade of the XXI century!

Please listen to the wise voice of Albanian albanologists! They do not speak the language of politics, they have no political goals. I, personally, remain at your disposal for any need that arises for an in-depth report based on detailed facts!

With respect,

Artan Fuga

Doctoral professor at the University of Tirana

Member of the Academy of Sciences

Doctor of philosophy at the University of Tirana

Doctor in Communication and Information Sciences at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris II, France

Habilitated doctor for scientific direction at Paris X University, France

Associate Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, France

Decorated "Grand Master" in Albania and with the Golden Academic Palm from the Prime Minister, France.

Associate lecturer at ITSMI, France


Në përputhje me standarded JTI

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