Let me make myself clear, I don’t adore Suren Zolyan at all – I like neither the methods of his management, nor his political views, about which Aravot wrote many times, when he held rector’s office. I don’t want to go into his conflict with the Minister of Education and Culture, although I think that if one is a state official, one should abide by certain discipline. (This is the very reason why I have always avoided state service.)
However, I think it is meaningless to discuss a rector’s behavior and features of his tenure after he has been fired. By the way, the news that he confronted Minister of Education and Culture Ashotyan instigated by Robert Kocharyan or Viktor Soghomonyan is not trustworthy to me. Whether right or wrong, Mr. Zolyan, I am convinced, speaks on his own behalf and expresses his own ideas. It is clear that as a manager he offended some people, his workers, made moves, which didn’t correspond to those people’s interests. Now, it is also not important whether it was right or wrong. Today revealing all those offenses and telling what a nightmare raged in the linguistic university for the past 15 years reminds me clearly of the political developments – “former criminal regime,” “years of cold and dark,” “nightmare,” “despotism” and, why not, the 20th congress of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union with its disclosing of Stalin’s “cult of personality.”
On the other hand, I don’t understand the students on a student strike who say that they will not come to classes without Zolyan either. I assume that people come to classes to get knowledge and profession. When I was a student, we loved our rector, Ghazaros Saryan, too, but it would hardly have occurred to anyone to claim that we went to the conservatory for Lazar Martirosovich.
And most importantly, it doesn’t refer to any one person, but all rectors, ministers of Armenia, our country leadership and our society should take it into consideration. In the report The Professoriate. A Global Comparison of Compensation and Contacts, which was mentioned in The New York Times, in particular (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/02/world/europe/02iht-educlede02.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all), it was compared how professors from 30 countries are paid. Top 5 countries are Canada, Italy, South Africa, India and the US. There are middle countries like Nigeria, Malaysia and Turkey. Bottom 5 countries are Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, China, Russia and Armenia. Thus, our country is in the very last place. Are we less developed than Ethiopia, after all?
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
