Former Yugoslavia

International efforts aimed at convincing Serbian professors and students to return to the University of Pristina in Kosovo have not been very successful. The Serbs are far from convinced that K-FOR, the international peacekeeping force currently stationed in Kosovo, would provide them with adequate protection. They have chosen instead to conduct their university activities in Serbia and in northern Kosovo.

Ethnic Albanian academics and students were expelled from the university in 1991 during the Serb takeover, but returned to campus in time for the new fall 1999 term, which started in October. The university rectorate — currently guarded by UN police — is open to Serbs two days a week.

But despite the re-commencement of classes, there are still many faculty members and students who are unaccounted for since the war. Some landed jobs as interpreters with international agencies, where salaries are more lucrative than the DM200 ($106) a month that lecturers earn. Others fled the country when the war broke out and are still living abroad while many were killed during the fighting.

— The Times Higher Education Supplement
Oct. 15, 1999

Romania

Hundreds of Romanian school children protested the inclusion of math as a compulsory subject by walking out of classes two days in a row shortly after the start of the new academic year last September. A banner held by an angry student, demonstrating outside government headquarters, proclaimed: “We want justice, not math exams!”

Most of the protesters were high school seniors specializing in chemistry, physics and biology who argue that their workload is too demanding to include math requirements. Under an education law passed earlier this year aimed at modeling post-communist education after Western school systems, science students must pass a math exam along with other subjects to earn their baccalaureat.

School officials said they had no intention of caving in to student demands by changing the curriculum.

— Reuters News Online
Sept. 22, 1999