Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski, in response to a journalist's question, said that the new Law on Higher Education is supported by all universities and their rectors, while all political "speculators" who do not support the law due to concerns about the violation of autonomy, according to him, "improvise and manipulate", reports Portalb.mk.
“They are basically afraid of the new criteria for selecting titles. So far, we have been working according to the law since 2018, a period when our oldest university, “St. Cyril and Methodius” (UKM), fell 1000 places lower in the Shanghai list, and now I don’t even know if it is ranked. They want to work one day a week, receive a salary of 120,000 denars and not write a single paper a year. What job do they have then!? It’s the same as if I, the Prime Minister, came to work only one day a week, but demanded a tenfold higher salary and did not bear any responsibility for anything in the country.”, Mickoski said.
Regarding professors' salaries, Mickoski said:and the Government had doubled them in accordance with the collective agreement, but they did not show sufficient commitment.
"I know there will be criticism, even though I am also a full-time professor. But the bottom line is this, professors don't want to work, they want to have six hours a week and finish them in one day, not write any scientific papers and get a salary of 130 to 150 thousand," Mickoski said.
In his statement, Mickoski said that this practice will no longer continue and recalled that the work of professors and assistants in higher education is based on three pillars: teaching, science and applied.
“This is what I am looking for. Some faculties were worried about the Web of Science database, so we expanded the database with Scopus. The government has provided them with free access to these databases, so I don’t know what else we should do. They have to work if they want to have a future as a country,” Mickoski said.
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