Instead of an abstract:Some inevitable preliminary clarifications and acknowledgements

Dear readers,

Let me begin my essay on the Bologna Declaration with an expression of gratitude. I would like to thank our Estonian colleague Voldemar Tomusk for inviting me to take part in the discussion “Bologna initiative in Eastern Europe: Political opportunism or the last chance for a reform”. This was the final step in the track “Prague Summit 2001” of the 24^th Annual EAIR forum, held in Prague in September 2002. What you read now is based on our inspiring debate there. Also, I feel indebted to stress that among the thousands of papers, written by hundreds of authors on the problems of the higher education in the ‘transition’ countries, his writings seem to me the best onesⁱ. No one compares to him as an analyzer of the almost desperate situation in the educational ‘direction’ of the social transformations, evolving in the former socialist countries. Especially in respect of the remarkable insight into the social essence and the regional and global political framework of the educational problems he deals with.

However, on this precise topic of our discussions in Prague (and three more times in Budapest)– concerning the Bologna declaration and its impact and implementation in the European countries - I will allow myself to disagree with many of the claims, expressed by him and my dear friend Nadia Fedotova. I will try to offer some different points of view. In fact the following pages are neither straightforward refutation, nor strict disputation of their statements, or plain disagreement (because I actually agree with many conclusions of theirs, reached from their conceptual framework and general presuppositions).

The following pages are not a writing of the genre of refutation. Rather I will attempt to compose a piece in the genre of apology, to sketch a completely different point of view, from the angle of which will be reached conclusions not exactly incompatible, but somehow incommensurable with the ones that Nadia and Voldemar proposed in Prague in September 2002.

To begin with: Alas, East and West will never meet!

When one reads some of the papers of some eminent Western colleagues, with their sharp merciless criticism and analytical sarcasm, mocking the main ideas of the Bologna ideal, one is immediately reminded of the above mentioned Scottish proverb. (Indeed, in our present case this proverb might be re-phrased as "North and South will never meet”, because Voldemar Tomusk comes from Estonia, Nadia Fedotova from Russia and me – from Bulgaria). Really, on the one side we can encounter the last year’s keynote by Guy Neave, entitled with the ambivalent motto of the epistemological anarchism “Anything goes”ⁱⁱ, and the smashing analysis, proposed by Voldemar and Nadia in Prague. On the other side, everyone can encounter passionate papers, advocating for an immediate implementation of the credit system in some East European countries. It is worth mentioning that there are also other papers, which are written not only by high-ranked university officials, ministers and administratorsⁱⁱⁱ. There are not only “official documents”, but also other pieces of writing, produced by day-light dreamers like some great philosophers in the past, and some present day students and junior university professors.

My greatest intention in this essay is to remind the over-skeptical colleagues that despite the sociological reductionism, the ideas and the ideals do exist. True, some of them sometimes turn out to be naпve neo-romantic utopias. But nevertheless, it is ridiculous over-simplification to emphasize that the Bologna ideals are only stupid contrivances of some clerks in Brussels and some politicians all over the continent. On the contrary: They have their own immanent origin and an enormous inspiring force over many humble university persons, especially in Eastern Europe. The Bologna ideas are immeasurably loftier than what is sometimes reflected in the real ‘Bologna process’, so sarcastically compared by Voldemar to the Kafkian literary masterpiece.

One might ask oneself, whether things are that simple as the platitude that East and West would never meet. Isn't it rather the motto of the cultural anthropology, that is more appropriate here, than the famous saying by Paul Feyerabend^iv? Many talented cultural anthropologists from the former century (like Edward Sapir and Benjamin Worff^v) did their best in order to convince their readers, that the differences between the different people and their different perceptions (of their environment, social and cultural surrounding, and the world in general) are so great, that sometimes it is not an exaggeration even to say, that we are not living in the same world. We live in different worlds. We live in different universes, situated in a same physical space around the globe. And it is mainly the language, that determines this relativity, but it is not only it.

Such is our case now. Guy Neave, for example, expresses how the things look like to him in his universe, from the point of view of a Westerner, inhabiting the hemisphere, where for more than two centuries people have lived: 1) in more or less politically ordered societies; and 2) what is even much more important, in this part of the universe for several centuries now more or less people had had the right of the free movement, and even emigration (indeed this right had remained for many of them a hypothetical and virtual one; it had existed only as a theoretical possibility, which never turned into actuality, but still it had been available at least as a possibility and one’s individual choice).

As all of you know, in a different part of the world it had been otherwise. In the other hemisphere, at least in the second half of the XXth century millions of people have lived in: 1) the political disorder of the ideological tyrannies; and 2) there they have been deprived of the basic human rights, one of which was the possible, the hypothetical or virtual free movement.

Indeed, if it were only these, one could correctly object, that these considerations of mine are a ridiculous confirmation of the statement of our contemporary Greek philosopher Christos Yanaras^vi. He frequently says that what happens nowadays very often in the humanities and the social sciences is a total posthumous victory of the historical materialism, proposed as we all know by Karl Marx. Indeed, to explain the dislike or the opposite, the ardour with which some people accept and others refuse to accept the Bologna ideals only by these undeniable historical circumstances, would be a reductionism of the purest historical-materialistic type.

That’s why I will reinforce my claim. It is not only because we come from countries with a former political totalitarian disorder, that persons like me admire the Bologna initiative. It is not only because in our part of the world we have been deprived for decades of the basic human right of the free movement (even though we are perfectly aware that the actualization of this hypothetical possibility is very often limited by many factors), that we are now inspired by the Bologna goals, aiming at the free movement and exchange of considerable groups of students and academicians. It is not only because, now, twelve years after the beginning of the ‘transition’, we realize that the ‘transition’ is only the first stage of the process of the social ‘transformation’, which will be much more difficult and slower than what was initially assumed. It is not only because the first dozen of years of ‘transition’ sadly revealed to us that the former iron curtain has been replaced by a present silver lace and the ‘deep-structure’ isolation of all our ‘former’ countries will continue to exist for several more decades. True, now it is not the ideological antagonism between the two hemispheres, which predetermines the separation, but the financial determinants, which allow only a very limited number of persons from all our former countries to get occasionally through the hollows of the silver lace, to travel and to communicate with other people from other parts of the world.

Is it only this? The idea of Europe after all…

Of course, not. There are much more reasons than these ostensive facts and immediate circumstances. They had been so passionately explained by hundreds of poets, thinkers, statesmen and intellectuals in the past, beginning with the explicit formulation of the consciousness of the pre-Europeans as distinct-and-different from the rest of the civilized world, proposed by Herodotus in the very Introduction of his famous “History”. The Bulgarian writer and publicist Stephan Popov, for example, had traced in brief“The Idea of Europe through the centuries” in more than 150 lectures, delivered on radio “Free Europe” in 1976 and 1977, some 122 of which were published in a book with the same title recently^vii.

However, this precious book (like many others, written by Bulgarian authors in our mother tongue) is not translated in any of the ‘strongest’ European languages, so maybe it is worth to remind some of the passages of another and more familiar European thinker and writer: Stefan Zweig. In his famous essay “The European thought through the centuries” he has written: “ What else are the peoples, if not collective individuals? That’s why the nations are subdued to a double tendency, on the one side, to underline their national individuality, their spiritual and cultural personality, and, on the other side, always to seek superior supra-national communities, in order to enrich themselves and to share with the other peoples their personal wealth.

Throughout the whole history these two instincts of attraction and repelling, of peace and war, the concentric and the expansive, are in an incessant battle. Once great states and religious formations appear, then they fall apart, after decades and hundreds of years of feud come years of friendship and accord, but as a matter of fact mankind is striving to greater and more fruitful unions, in conformity with the amplification of the width of its sight. Each of these tendencies, the national one and the supranational one, thanks to their mere existence have their cultural and physical meaning, the one of them cannot survive without the other in the spiritual organism of those communities, named state or nation. And their fight is necessary, in order to maintain the creative tension in mankind. However, from these two tendencies I want to consider here only one of them. In an epoch of a national separation I want to stress on the unifying element, on the mystical Eros, which pushes mankind since its very appearance, despite all the differences in language, culture and ideas, to a more superior unity^viii.”

It is a platitude to say that there had always existed and will always exist persons of the spirit for whom the idea of the mystical union between the different peoples, is one of the most vivid, one of the greatest, one of the most inspiring and important ideas. Instead of remaining enslaved by the hatred and the endless warfare, the human beings, who are divided by the boundaries and the states, the idioms and the languages, should try to leave peacefully together. Maybe the first one, who had preached like that, had been the ancient Greek sophists Gorgias, who had expressed similar ideas in one of his speeches in one of the ancient Olympic games^ix. Indeed, in writing like this one it is impossible even to mention not only the names, but also even the typologies of philosophical traditions and schools who had craved for the humanity-and-the-unity of mankind. It is impossible even to enumerate the spiritual and the philosophical approaches, from the view-point of which the idea of Europe is not only the indispensable means in the search for humanity and peace, but also the noblest aim of reasoning and human existence.

In this connection I feel tempted to refer in brief at least to one attempt for a philosophical vindication of this idea. In a well-known lecture, delivered in Vienna on the 7^th and the 10^th of May 1935, Edmund Husserl has said: “The European nations are ill, Europe itself is in crisis”^x. As one possible cure Husserl has prescribed the thematization of “the spiritual Europe as a pure problem of the sciences of the spirit^xi”. Husserl has insisted that the history of Europe possessed its immanent philosophical idea, its immanent teleology. The aim of everything, that had happened in Europe is “the break-through and the beginning of development of new human epoch, the epoch of the mankind, which from now on simply wants to live and can live in the free shaping of its existence, of its historical life of ideas of the reason and of infinite tasks (for the rationality).” According to Husserl this idea has its place and date of birth: the ancient Greece in the VII and the VIth century B.C. Then and there a completely new super-rationality had appeared. “Naturally, I have in mind the spiritual form Europe. It does not mean any more different neighboring countries, which influence each other only through trade-wars and fights for power: a new spirit of free criticism and normative positing of infinite tasks mighty imbues mankind. It is born out of philosophy and the particular sciences, pertaining to it. It creates new and infinite ideals!^xii” As in the “Bolero” by Maurice Ravel, Husserl again and again repeats the main motive: “I want to say, that we feel (and despite all its vagueness this feeling is completely right), that our European mankind has its immanent entelechy, which powerfully permeates the changing of the European forms and gives it the sense of a development to an ideal living and being form as an eternal pole”^xiii. For Husserl the concept of Europe – die geistige Gestalt Europas - should be conceived as a historical teleology of infinite aims of reason, and the European living world has been born out of the ideas of reason, i.e. of the spirit of philosophy. In this pathos of the hyper-rationality and in the name of the idea of unified Europe Husserl, like almost all philosophers from antiquity to modernity, has over-estimated and over-valued philosophy: “Among an European mankind philosophy should constantly exercise its functions of archont of all mankind^xiv”. The crisis of the European existence and the seeming wreck of rationalism, according to him could evolve only in two possible directions. The first of them: the Renaissance of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through the heroism of reason; and the second: the degradation to the hostility to the spirit and to the barbarism.

As we know, soon after that had happened the second. The barbarism had defeated the daylight dreams. But nevertheless and despite everything Husserl had not abandoned his hyper-rational utopia and this had helped him to survive. When he had received the sheet of paper notifying him, that the Nazi-authorities had forbidden him to teach and had fired him, he just had turned the sheet of paper on the opposite and had written down what had occupied his thoughts at the moment. He had been convinced that sooner or later the evil would be overpowered. Despite everything that he had experienced, he had the incredible courage to claim: “from the ashes of the great fatigue the Phoenix of new vital depth and spirituality is rising. This is the pledge of a glorious and unbounded human future: because only the spirit is immortal^xv”.

The university, the academician and the problem of knowledge

To be fair, we have to confess that the ‘processes’ for the unification of Europe have too many disputable and questionable sides. Maybe the most painful among them is the agricultural policy of the EC, which will remain the apple of discord for at least a decade. There are even some dark and shadowy spots as the corruption of certain high-ranked administrators of the most important commissions that came to the fore several years ago. And still, there is something, which the Euro-enthusiasts like me might defend as the real pan-European ideal and indisputable noble aim of the union^xvi. I do claim, that for the anthropological species homo academicus, this should be one of the immanent and intrinsic ideas. For a genuine homo academicus, the idea of a ‘common European space’ of whatever should be something admirable. The mere sequence of these two adjectives ‘common European’ should sound as a magical tune for such a person. Homo academicus is the creature, who dwells with the entirety of his or her being in the educational sphere and particularly in the universities (as institutions of higher learning and research). There are persons like me, to whom this “common European space” of whatever seems as an innate idea. Not only because, as we all know, the universities as institutions historically have been established with their most essential forms firstly in Europe. Not only because the real homo academicus is the homo viator, who is in an incessant travel sometimes in the real space and time, sometimes in the infinite spaces of the spirit.

It is mainly because the university as institution is a great European supranational institution. Not only ab origine, because of the history of the mediaeval universities, where were gathered students from different nationalities and the language of teaching and study was the supranational Latin. This historical aspect of the university as institution and its origine is one of the best known and widely recognized traces of the universities as complex social entities. It is so popular that maybe it would be an offense (and waste of time) for the readers to engage their attention with details on this extremely popular facet^xvii.

What could be more interesting is the claim, that the university as institution had not been supranational only in the remote past of the Middle Ages. The eternal essence of the university is supranational. Certainly, in the deplorable history of mankind countless awful periods of the opposite had been recorded. The universities many times and in many countries had been forced to pursue a ‘nationally’ predetermined ‘truths’ or ones, that had been known in advance, issued for instance by the “doctrine for the supremacy of the Arian race”, or the thesis for the “international working-class solidarity”. And so on and so forth.Regimes and ideologies of all kinds had solved in advance the outcome of “the independent academic research” in too many countries and in too different historical circumstances. Nevertheless, the real university, when it happens to be situated in relatively calm historical periods, in relatively favourable social and political milieu and to enjoy at least some academic freedoms, is de facto supranational institution, because of an undeniable fact: it pursues, creates and disseminates knowledge. The sum total of the angles of every triangle, as we all know, according to the Euclidean geometry, is equal to 180 grades in each country. There are however other geometries, the ones of Riemann (?) and Lobachevsky, for instance, according to which there are other types of spaces, for which this is not true. However, the fundamentals of knowledge even though not absolutely and eternally valid, are certainly at least supranational. Sub specie aeternitatis they are neither temporarily, nor even less nationally bounded.

Here a more attentive reader could raise the following objection: How is that? In the beginning of this text it was claimed from the point of view of the cultural anthropology, that we are living in different worlds and our perceptions of the surrounding world is predetermined by too many specific factors, among which language is the first one, which influence us enormously. Subsequently, we cannot claim that our knowledge, the knowledge of all human race is the same all over the world. What was written in the previous paragraphs seems as an outright contradiction to the point of view, expressed in the beginning of the apology. Indeed, there is a problem, but this is not an inconsistency. When defending the Bologna ideas and ideals primarily with the concept of the university as institution, which seeks for the acquisition and the dissemination of knowledge, we are not led to the opposite of the views of the cultural anthropology, the linguistic and the ontological relativism. The insistence on the supranational character of the university as institution per se and the supranational essence of knowledge does not lead inevitably to the conclusion that there is universal and/or absolute knowledge. Of course, there isn’t anything in our finite human knowledge that could be vindicated as universal, eternal and absolute. If there is something, which is accepted by us as universal, eternal and absolute, these are the fundamentals of faith (for those of us who confess some kind of religion or belief). Still, the absurdity of the contrary claim, that all our human knowledge and also, the immense universe of our ignorance (especially in the modern times) is nationally bounded and predetermined, seems self-evident. Unfortunately, as we all know, nationally bounded and predetermined is the ‘knowledge’, proposed in some particular disciplines, and above all in the ‘national’ histories.

That’s why anyone (like me), who is: 1) homo contemplativus, who is metaphysically inclined to some kind of insights and ideas (the range of them is enormous, since we can begin with the concepts of Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, and we can finish with Stephan Zweig and sir Karl Popper (with his conception about the third world), the phenomenology of Husserl or the hermeneutic of Hans-Georg Gadamer); and 2) identifies herself or himself primarily as homo academicus is obsessed by the Bologna ideals.

Certainly, I have to admit that there is something additional and personal. Three years ago, in the spring of 1999 one million Albanians were forced to leave their homes and slept on the still frozen earth in tents. Several millions of Serbs were bombed. Thousands of innocent people died. Here, it would sound ridiculous to complain that parts of one missile fell on the roof of a house in Sofia… However, then I realized that I abhor the phrases “national identity” and “national interests”. The whole human history is an extended proof for the consequences of the persecution of this ‘ideals’. For me, the cosmopolitan attitude, expressed even in ancient Greece by some sophists and the Stoics, seems much more preferable. It seems to me self-understandable that the mere nature of the proper academic work, regardless of the fact whether it is done in a research institute or in a predominantly teaching institution, demands the intellectual communication with other colleagues, from other countries and places. And it is true even for some specific studies as the juridical disciplines or the ‘national’ histories. The great epoch of the European humanists, as all of us know, had been the ‘golden age’ of such genuine academic and spiritual friendships^xviii. And to stress once more, as a homo academicus who lives on the Balkans, where rivers of blood were spent in the past dozen of years I can confess that very often I curse in my self one of the greatest idols among the human notions – the ‘national identity’. Isn’t it the exclamation of Erasmus “Ego civis mundi esse cupio” (“I long to be a citizen of the world”) that could sound to an academician as a more human innate idea, than the forcibly intruded consciousness for the ‘national belonging’?

The Bulgarian Higher Education as a species in the genus “totalitarian and post-totalitarian university”

Whenever I encounter typological models of the universities as institutions, proposed by foreign Western colleagues, I feel that something is missing. Let’s look to one popular outline, sketched by Roeland In ‘t Veld,of the four general types ‘in the Western hemisphere’^xix: the Napoleonic, the Newmanian, the Humboldtian and the American university:

“The Napoleonic tradition fits into the broader centralistic tradition of the French state, with universities in a position of extreme dependence on the state. The main decisions concerning the affairs of a university are all made at the national level, even including the appointments of functionaries and professors. The individual university has hardly any autonomy at all. Such a system has produced universities with a public character, with curricula defined by national government, and the universities’ main task being teaching. The most important research is performed in separate institutes outside the universities. Student access to studies in general is free, and is based on the diploma received after the secondary school exam. The student fee is low, and the drop-out rate is considerable… University buildings are a matter of national concern. The universities’ internal organisational structure is described in great detail in the national legislation. National committees decide on appointments of professors… The financial regime is much like that of the ministries. The discretion of the university itself is minimal. The principle steering instrument is regulation… Given France’s international position this tradition has spread to a number of countries”.

The Humboldtian type was developed in the same period as the Napoleonic, and “it characterises a university with its back to the rest of the world as far as its primary processes are concerned. The research it performs is aiming at pure science, the accumulation of knowledge, and absolutely independent of any societal interest. The core expression here is Interessenlosigkeit, the absence of any outside interest. This type of university has much akin with a cloister. The teaching is a derivative of research, and it is characterised by the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn, by Lehr- and Lernfreiheit. The learning process is aiming at an academic, research oriented attitude, the unity of teaching and research is continuously stresses. The curricula are designed inside the university and not decided upon by any external authority. The decisions on the presidency and on the professorships are also made inside the university, although a regional authority may have the right of formal appointment. Education is free of charge. Access is open but can also be restricted by a numerous clausus or a numerus fixus. This concept of a research university has been widely disseminated and can be recognised in some shape all over Europe and in other continents”.

Speaking about the American type the author states that in this higher education system there is such diversity, that scarcely one single model could be pointed out as basic. “However there is one specific characteristic of a considerable number of American universities… the idea that a university exists in order to render services to society, its external orientation towards society at large can be considered as the prime reason for its existence… This openness pervades both its primary processes, and teaching and research, which have to be justified as activities serving the broader interests of the society. Such an orientation enables the university to operate both in a public and a private environment, thus combining a rather successful mix of task and market oriented processes. It continuously redefines its mission and its core activities in response to societal change, not in a mechanistic way but through a reflexive process. Its face is directed towards the world, but its own set of values are held in great esteem”.

The fourth type is named after Cardinal Newman and “concerns aspects of the British university, that is less visible and explicit elsewhere. The central objective of the presence of students at the university is only partially accounted for if one restricts it to the teaching of knowledge and skills, as the preparation of students for later life, and the balanced development of students’ personalities are also considered important. Therefore a university can not only consist of faculties, but also of colleges, and often the most influential teacher is not the professor, but the tutor. It is not by chance that the continental method of standardisation of degrees at Oxbridge was absent until recently. Students were prepared for their future position as the elite of the Empire, and the reproduction of societal values was a very important part of this type of education”.

The author of this typology has rightly designated, that these are the four general types of universities ‘in the Western hemisphere’. And what about the universities in the other part of the world? Perhaps in order to understand what had happened in our part of the world, in order to grasp what is going on now and to have some insight into the possible future developments, the methodology - typologization in the higher education sciences has to be enriched (at least) with one more type: the totalitarian and the post-totalitarian university. And there, in this type a great variety of sub-types will emerge, because the crude and brutal imposition of the totalitarian regimes in all Central and East European countries after the Second World War, especially in the sphere of the higher education, met national substratum that was very specific for each country. For instance, in the countries of the Visegrad four had existed universities with century long traditions, more or less similar to the Humboldtian type.

In Bulgaria the higher education had begun in 1888, but in the first half of the XXth century the University of Sofia and other institutions of higher learning had grown rapidly. The founders of these higher educative institutions had graduated mainly in Germany, France, Italy and England and had been driven by the desire to establish modern and European in character high schools in Bulgaria. They had stressed on ‘the European’ in contrast to the Russian cultural and educational influence in the decades of the so called Bulgarian National Revival and the Russian political influence since the liberation of Bulgaria in 1878 till the proclamation of the Bulgarian independence in 1908, when the Bulgarian state finally liberated itself from its liberators as well. They had succeeded in their efforts. In several successive collisions with different political subjects, especially in the first three decades of the century, the academic community in Bulgaria had acted as a fighter for extreme institutional autonomy, which was justified in the eyes of society with a decent and very detailed annual accountability. The first half of the XXth century in Bulgaria is a period in which the higher education sphere had tried to adhere as closely as possible to the Newmanian prototype, and in the same time had certain traces of the German mandarin tradition in the professorship and the habilitation procedures. In respect of the management and the governance, the Sofia University had created the example of the self-regulation, the collective decision taking and the rotational presidency: all mandates lasted only one year; all academics in a department in turn had been chairs of the given department for a year; all departments in rotational order had elected the dean of the faculty; all faculties in rotational order had elected the rector. On a national level was established a consultative non-governmental Supreme Educative Court, which acted as a rather self-confident policy adviser in respect to the Ministry of Enlightenment (sic!) If we add to this, that in some matters the faculties had had great independence and their own rulebooks and procedures for the acquisition of the Doctor’s degree, for example, we will see, that quite soon since its founding the Bulgarian higher education system had acquired an European face with a distinct Anglo-Saxon profile^xx.

The drastic political changes that had begun with the triumphant entry of the Red “Army-Liberator” in September 1944 led to dramatic upheavals in all aspects of the political structure, the economic and the societal establishments in Bulgaria. In December 1947 had been proclaimed the new republican constitution and in 1948 had been passed The Law for the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, The Law for the People’s education and The Higher Education Act.

Since then till the present day (sic!) the Bulgarian higher education system is a hybrid of Napoleonic and Soviet-Stalinist features. Even the collective name that has been imposed for the different higher education institutions in Bulgaria was the same as in the former Soviet Union. Instead of speaking of universities, institutes, colleges and academies, all of them were gathered in one genus and labeled “higher education providers” – “висши учебни заведения”. In Bulgaria, as in the former Soviet Union this hybrid Napoleonic-Stalinist model was characterized by three main features: extreme centralization; total unification; and ideological predetermination of the overall scientific, research and teaching activities. It is not an exaggeration to say that in socialist Bulgaria and now, 13 years after the beginning, we have only one state university, only one model, that is multiplied in different cities and towns. True, it has different disciplinary profiles: classical faculties in several classical-type universities; engineering and poly-technical institutes; medical, dentistry and pharmaceutical academies; academies for sports and arts; veterinary and agricultural institutes, etc. However, all these state higher education providers have the same departments-faculty structure; they have the same 4-years duration of the mandates of the governing positions, and a possible consequent re-election; the same timing of the academic year (two semesters, 15 weeks each of them); and, what is of greater importance – the same curricula, issued by the Unified State Requirements, published in the “Official Gazette”^xxi; the same teaching staff- professors and dozents, who travel from university to university to deliver to different students the same lectures on the same subject…The totalitarian university (exemplified in the former Soviet Union and Bulgaria) was characterised also by strict numerus clausus, determining the number of the students by the Ministry of education; numerus clausus for the habilitated academic positions, as well, and absolute unification and centralisation for the conferring of degrees, the Professors’ and the Dozents’ positions, who are elected by national bodies, the Specialized Scientific Councils (SSCs) and approved by the Higher Attestation Committee (HAC). Here two peculiarities should be stressed. Firstly, the Chair and the members of the HAC and the Chairs of the SSC are appointed by the Prime Minister. Secondly, the members of these councils vote for the candidates (for the two Doctor’s degrees, and for the becoming professor or dozent) anonymously, without being experts in the given specialty of the candidate, and without having read the doctoral theses and/or the publications. They relay only on the opinion of the two recensents and on all other possible extra-academic considerations.

The only trace of autonomy and self-governance in our higher education providers in the totalitarian regime and nowadays is the capacity of the academic staff to elect the Deans and the Rectors (and the Presidium of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) via the anonymous vote of the members of the assemblies of the faculties and the universities. They are called ‘general assemblies’, but in fact are representative assemblies, in so far only a small amount of the members of the academic community participates in them.

The appearance of several private universities in this context is more than encouraging. Only for ten years they have proved that the universities as institutions could have different structures; that they could launch new specialties and faculties; that they could introduce other accession procedures for the students, different type of degrees and titles; different management of the university life and more effective maintenance of the university buildings and property.

The main objective of the totalitarian university in Bulgaria in the period 1948-1989 was the production of “hoch-qualifizierte Specialisten”. It is on purpose, thatI quote this famous expression from the well known writing by Karl Jaspers: “The idea of university”^xxii. The congeniality between the universities under the fascist and the communist role is evident, as the congeniality between the fascism and the communism in general. This overall goal, the production of the highly qualified specialists, necessary for the building of the “bright future”, as Jaspers clarifies implies that such an university has nothing in common with the self-sufficient Humboldtianism. On the contrary, all aspects of the research and the teaching in the ‘higher education providers’ should lead to the fulfillment of the great ‘societal’ task: the creation of the faithful Party- and state nomenklatura. The students and the teaching staff in the HEI, the researchers in the scientific academies were conceived as persons, who are educated not for their own sake or for the pursuit of some noble scholarly tasks, but for being the instruments for the achievement Party-State purpose: to be the new intelligentsia, the functionaries in the construction of the social utopia.

This overall task was normatively imposed by all legislative documents in the totalitarian period. Now, 13 years after the beginning of the transition period, it is again the same. Despite the fact that twice absolutely different Higher Education Acts have been passed in the National Assembly (in 1990 and in 1995). Despite the fact that more than 100 amendments have been made to the second Act in 1999, not only this mission remains unaltered, but also the majority of the other components and elements of the totalitarian higher education system remain unaltered^xxiii. The exceptions are few: the introduction in 1999 of the three traditional and century-long established degrees (bachelor, master, doctor); the allowance the Faculty councils to appoint the professors and the dozents in some cases, provided that there are at least 15 persons in the given Faculty Council, who possess degree in the same specialty as the candidate – a condition, which rarely can be satisfied …

Now, 13 years after the beginning of the transition period the perseverance with which the totalitarian model in the higher education system is sustained, seems astonishing. One of the most disturbing features of the ‘transition’ is that the interrelations between the academy, the society and the state remained unaltered. The university organism functions in a manner, in which it functioned in the social environment of the totalitarian epoch. It is subdued to the state and the central government administration and totally irresponsible to the society. To mention but two things which the society deserves: firstly, the detailed annual accountability, which had been a tradition in the first half of the XXth century. Secondly, of a crucial social relevance is the needed drastic change in the procedures for the development of the academic potentials and human resources. For the past twelve years the population of Bulgaria had diminished with almost one million, mainly due to the emigration of the most educated, independent, self-confident and entrepreneur compatriots. According to the data of the WB 67% of the Bulgarians who had accomplished higher education, have emigrated in the past dozen of years. If these demographic tendencies continue to evolve by 2050 the Bulgarian population will be 2.5 times less than now, whereas France and the United Kingdom will be 2.5 bigger. No matter how much one dislikes the expression “human capital” and the theory it designates, one can see from the statistical data and the census, made two years ago, that there are disastrous tendencies in this important social profile. In this respect it with be nice the academic authorities to stop to exculpate themselves with the low level of the wages in the academic sphere and to stop their obstructions to all attempts for renovation of the ‘system’ for the acquisition of the titles and the degrees. To preserve this ‘system’ of the anonymous voting for the qualities and the capacities of a person, who has worked passionately on something at least for a decade, having in mind that these 20-25 persons, who vote, haven’t read his or her thesis, articles and books, and are not familiar with his or her teaching performance, means only one thing: the young generation of actual and potential Bulgarian academicians will continue to be completely demotivated to work and live in this country.

As in the socialist times with the then centralized planned economy, the state (the Ministry of Education and Science) determines the number of the students not only in the state, but also in the private universities. It sounds incredible, but it is true. The numerus clausus and the severe restrictions in the accession of the students are still kept. In the totalitarian epoch this was even comprehensible, because in the planned economy with the artificially kept zero-unemployment, all graduates received some kind of a job with a definite destination: the so called “разпределение”, or “destination”, which obliged the graduate to work at least three years in a position and place, where (s)he was directed to go by the Party organization in the given higher education provider . Now the numerus clausus has a financial vindication. If we consider the mechanisms and the factors, which determine the amount of the budget received by the higher education institutions annually, we will see only and solely quantitative criteria (the number of the students, the number of the teaching persons, the amount of sum, necessary for the maintenance of the buildings, etc.) and absence of the qualitative assurance altogether. Having in mind that all this happens in one of the poorest European countries, which underwent a hyper-inflation and financial collapse at the end of 1996 and in the beginning of 1997, it will be easy to understand why the majority of the decision-takers inside the university community insists on the extensive, quantitative measures for the development of the academe. And vice versa, the decision-makers on the governmental level do the opposite. When restricting the number of the students each year, the political figures often say: “These are the limits of the system”.

There is however an innovative minority which insists on the following: Obviously, it is high time to abolish ‘The System’, this obsolete totalitarian model for the structuring, the financing and the functioning of the higher education system here. It’s high time for modernization, but will it actually occur?

Is the Bologna ‘process’ a panacea for all these diseases?

Some people might mock as much as they like the Bologna ideal and compare it to the Kafkian masterpiece “Der Prozess”, as Voldemar Tomusk does. However, in our context of post totalitarian environment and post totalitarian higher education ‘the Process’ is one of the best remedies to change ‘the System’. True, the Bologna process, if it eventually begins to evolve in our country as well, will not solve all the problems, but at least will cure the most desperate diseases.

There are persons here who would object that the totalitarian patterns here in the higher education had been overthrown even in 1990, when the Federation of the Independent Students’ Clubs demanded immediate abolishment of the so called ‘ideological disciplines’. Indeed, many people in Bulgaria firmly believe that the removal of the disciplines ‘dialectical materialism’, ‘historical materialism’, ‘scientific communism’ and ‘history of the Bulgarian Communist Party’, was enough to get rid of the totalitarian matrix in the higher education. In the socialist times these disciplines had been obligatory for all the students and omnipresent in all the curricula, and even one of the final exams, preceding the conferring of Diploma, was the Governmental political exam, covering the quintessence of the dogmatic, taught in the obligatory ideological disciplines.

However, the mere removal of the previous catechism and the addition of some new and unthinkable in the previous epoch specialities are far from being sufficient. The most essential of the essential – the essence of the curricula in almost all the specialties remained unchanged. They remained monodisciplinary and dominated exclusively by obligatory subjects. This is deplorable not only in respect of the transmission and the dissemination of knowledge, which pertains to the very essence and the eternal mission of the universities. The curricula petrifaction and above all the so-called ‘the hidden curricula’ reveal that the totalitarian matrix is still here. To explain to some of the readers, who might happen to be unfamiliar with the concept

‘hidden curriculum’. ‘The hidden curriculum’ is the how of the education, whereas the plain curriculum is the what. The curriculum is the sum total and the composition of the studied subjects and – in some cases - their order, grouping, modularization, sequence etc. ‘The hidden curriculum’ is the complex of the seemingly external circumstances and accompanying factors in the teaching of the student.

The curriculum according to the Rulebook of the Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridsky” from 1998, art. 76 determines “the name, the number and the allocation of the studied disciplines for the years and the semesters of the study, the horarium of the disciplines; the forms of the teaching and the control over the absorption of the knowledge and the way of the graduation”.

Let’s explain this definition, because maybe some of the readers, who have understood it, still can not assimilate it. In fact, the teaching in the higher education institutions in Bulgaria not only in the totalitarian past, but even now is done according to this concept of curriculum, proposed in this, just quoted definition. All the disciplines that have to be studied by a certain student in a given study are known and predetermined in advance. They are not only enumerated. They are allocated for a certain, fixed and unchangeable period of the study. They are irreplaceable. They have a certain duration and method of teaching: lectures + seminars. (Although in brackets, because it is different from the main argument, it is appropriate to stress here that the seminars are the best thing in the higher education system in Bulgaria. There are countries, we know, where the students are allowed to have only lectures and written exams. In such a case till the very end of one’s study one may not utter a single word with one’s colleagues or the professors.) If we add to these, that the amount of the obligatory disciplines, compared with the number of the optional, is almost everywhere in ratio 5:1, (and in some specialities above 90%), we will see how immeasurable is the freedom and the individual choice that a humble student is allowed to have here and now. Also, another thing can not be spared. The study of the curricula in the majority of the specialties in the state universities reveals insurmountable compartmentalization. When some experts like Guy Neave sarcastically present the intentions of the Bologna-thinkers, they do that with the tacit assumption that all over Europe there are Newmanian and Anglo-Saxon or Humboldtian universities. It is curious what will happen when they at least for a second admit that some of the universities in some of the countries east from Berlin are neither Newmanian, nor Humboldtian.

Also, here some people say: “In Oxbridge they don’t have credit system as well”. Certainly, in Oxbridge they don’t have credit system, but have many other things as the tutorial teaching and the individual work, the enormous choice which the student has to compose her or his own curriculum, to chose the lecturer and the persons, whose seminars to attend. In Oxbridge and in many other continental universities the student combines either major and minor, or even three different disciplines with modularised subjects.

We have none of these. And even in some respects in the second half of the 90-ies here have been registered backward developments. In the totalitarian times and in the beginning of the 90-ies some universities allowed the acquisition of the so-called ‘second specialty’, but later on the obligatory curricula became so overburdened, that the second specialty vanished.

It seems to me that these are serious reasons for the longing for the Bologna ideas. Some of my dear colleagues and friends criticize some of the intentions of the ‘process’ and above all – ‘the greater employability of the graduates’. For me this is beyond suspicion. Compared with the present day monodisciplinarity and the study of each discipline in the fortress of the selected specialty, which does not allow any random arrows of any other disciplines, belonging to other specialty even in the same faculty, to get into the fortress, the Bologna idea is remarkable.

So, someone hardly would be surprised with the final conclusion that these decades-old curricula predetermine not only the limited, mono-profiled employability-capacities of the students. They imbue them with the feeling and the conviction that there is no choice and nothing depends on me. The message of these open and hidden curricula is: All you have to do is to adhere to what you are told to do and to execute what you are prescribed to do by the older and the empowered ones. It was more than obvious why it has been so in the previous social environment, but why it is so now?

Needless to say, this type of curricula-composition prevents our state universities from the implementation of: a) any credit system(s); b) liberal education; c) from a real international co-operation and the enhancing of professors’ and students’ exchange programmes. There are only several oases, like the Geological and Geographical Faculty in the Sofia University, which have introduced credit system almost ten years ago, in the same period when the two most important private universities – the New Bulgarian University in Sofia and the American University in Blagoevgrad – have done so.

In order to describe the hidden curriculum of the specialties in the state universities, two traces will be sufficient, I believe.

The first one: There is no such thing as catalogue, published annually and containing the curricula and the syllabuses of all proposed disciplines in any state university in Bulgaria. Why should they publish such catalogues? It is pointless. The same professors and dozents deliver the same lectures year after year, decade after decade in the same syllabus and in the same curriculum. Why should then the students receive a catalogue? They are informed what they have to attend by a poster, exhibited on the wall by the Dean’s office! Happily, there are many exceptions. There are great Bulgarian scholars and scientists, professors, junior and senior faculty, who change every year their specialized courses, but they are doing this despite ‘the System’, which demands in general the annual repetition of the general obligatory courses.

The second one: There is no effective quality control and assurance in any state Bulgarian university. In the private ones there are students pools, regularly made after the end of the given course and before the exam. In the state universities the mere idea of asking the students about their opinion on the teaching performance and the qualities of the academic persons, still sounds scandalous. In our university, for example, in the beginning of the 80-ies has been established a Laboratory for the investigation of the students’ opinions. However, this Laboratory conducts the students’ pools only if a certain Faculty asks for this procedure, when it happens to occur to some of the Deans that these pools are useful. Furthermore: the results of these students’ pools on the quality of the teaching remain kept in secret. They are not given even confidentially and individually to the academic staff. They are the top secret university information.

In this connection I am very curious how will react Guy Neave, if he could read some of the reports of our National Agency for Evaluation and Accreditation. In one of the reports^xxiv concerning the quality of the teaching in the oldest and the biggest Bulgarian state university, it is written that there aren’t any direct mechanisms for assuring of the quality, but – attention! – the quality in this university is the highest, because it has the highest reputation among the public opinion. Guy Neave is sarcastic when mentioning the negligible imperfections of some syllogisms, deeply underlying some of the implications and some of the ramifications of the Bologna-process’ related documents. I wonder what would he say, if he could read some of the texts, issued by a national accreditation agency, in which the gravest logical fallacy – petitio principii – is reigning. What has to be proved is taken for granted as already proved. The NAEA declares that the quality in the university A is bad, because the public opinion rumours like that, and the quality in the university B is high, because the public opinion is convinced in this fact. Instead of forming the public opinion with the results of many complex criteria-and-pools-surveys, the NAEA assigns to the universities marks for the quality of teaching in them, prescribed by the public opinion.

Instead of conclusion: a personal confession and a skeptical conjecture

At the end of this writing I dare to confess that earlier I have been a blind and naпve Euro-enthusiast and Euro-fanatic. I’ve believed to certain political figures in Bulgaria, who used to raise encouraging Euro-integration and the like slogans. I’ve seen rectors and deans, who used to promise immediate implementation of credit system and drastic reform of the curricula in their pre-election campaigns. It is known, that Bulgaria was among the first countries-signatories that supported the Bologna initiative in June 1999. Despite that, till the present year the curricula reform and the implementation of the credit system were on the level, on which they have been in 1993. Lately, some efforts are seen, but it is still early to say what will be the result of them.

The past three years convinced me that behind the hollow Euro-rhetoric and the solemn Euro-slogans of the majority of the political and the eminent academic figures here there is nothing. As Voldemar Tomusk has written for the CEE countries (as a red thin line) in his book, whenever we look at the academic and the political elite, we see inevitably two things: incompetence and corruption.

So, shall I mourn like Stefan Zweig, who in a letter, written in 1934 and addressed to Frans Masereel, deplores his earlier dreams? “For all of us, who did believe with an inexplicable optimism in some progress and unification, what happened after 1914, turned into a prove that we had been wrong. Maybe the half of our efforts or even the entirety of all our efforts had been in vain.^xxv”

I wish I shouldn’t and I wish I could have the spiritual courage and the sober wisdom of Edmund Husserl. That’s why as an exercise in sober reasoning, let me re-phrase the title of our disputation in Prague “Bologna initiative in Eastern Europe: Political opportunism or the last chance for a reform?” Instead of the conjunction “or” I’ll put the conjunction “and”. Undeniably, there is opportunism and incompetence in the pretentious efforts of the academic and political elite to imitate something like implementation of the Bologna ideas in Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the true university opportunists should not resign. Maybe this is really the last chance for a reform. We shouldn’t miss it.