Speaking at a January “thematic” session of the Government without a clearly defined topic, Minister of Education Dejan Vuk Stanković revealed to the public that work is well underway on a set of laws aimed at establishing “clear lines of authority and responsibility” within the education system, in order to prevent “everything that happened to us last year”.
Of course, in the case of universities this does not mean strengthening their autonomy, but rather that the state “must” have greater influence over their governance. This does not mean it is prepared to sit idly by while waiting for a new Law on Universities, even better than the one from 1998 which enabled the expulsion of more than two hundred professors and assistants from faculties. And at least in Belgrade, the largest testing ground for methods of disciplining the academic community has been found in the Faculty of Medicine.
It has proved that simply placing the right person in the right position – or rather two positions – may be enough. Thus, Dr Marko Lens, after recommending himself to the authorities by issuing a statement in which he called on students to first direct their struggle towards “their own household”, namely the dean Tatjana Simić, and to demand that she show them “everything dirty, improper and illegal” taking place under her leadership, was first appointed in June to the Ethics Committee of Serbia. This is a body within the Ministry of Health which had previously mainly dealt with approving clinical trials, and if one looks at the agendas of its last twenty sessions, nothing else was listed except the item “miscellaneous”. With his arrival, the Committee began dealing even with the distant past and within two weeks produced an opinion stating that ethical standards had been violated in the conduct of scientific research begun in 2010, which at the Faculty of Medicine had been led precisely by Professor Simić.
Armed with such a prepared “indictment”, in the next step the Government appointed Lens to the Council of the Faculty of Medicine as its representative. After the then president of the Council resigned, Lens, with the support of other Government representatives and student representatives aligned with it, was elected acting chair of the Council. According to regulations, this is a temporary function tasked with conducting the election of a new chair, but Lens used it, on the basis of the Ethics Committee’s opinion, to propose the dismissal of Dean Simić – for which there were enough votes.
There was no legal basis for such a decision, since only the University’s Committee for Professional Ethics is competent to determine ethical violations by a dean, and it did not rule on this issue. But for the authorities it was evidently enough that Simić had supported the initial student demands, spoken about the harmful consequences of the regulation reducing professors’ salaries, and had not prevented either the student blockade of the faculty or the employees’ strike.
As an additional possible motive for retaliation against the faculty, which did not stop with the dean’s dismissal, professors who spoke to Radar also point to the decision of the Teaching and Scientific Council not to extend the employment of Professor Jelena Drulović after she met the conditions for retirement; she is also the director of the Clinical Centre of Serbia and, in their view, a close associate of Zlatibor Lončar.
The education inspectorate, which was heavily involved in challenging the appointment of Maja Kovačević as dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences, has for six months failed to react to the unlawful appointment of Nataša Milić as acting dean of the Faculty of Medicine. The Faculty Secretary, Marija Radovanović, was dismissed for consistently insisting on compliance with the law, and the procedure for electing a new dean has still not been initiated.
“After the dean was dismissed at the Council in September, another session was scheduled at the end of November, to which we invited the media to prevent them from doing something unlawful again. The Government representatives and the student parliament said they would not appear on camera, after which they got up and left, even though transparency in work must exist. They do not want discussion, they do not want cameras, because many of those involved want to maintain a façade of neutrality and dignity. Since then, only electronic sessions have been held, convened by Marko Lens in the role of chair, even though such a function does not exist in the Faculty statute outside the session at which a new Council chair is elected. This is an illegal takeover of our faculty led by a man who now goes around threatening and defaming professors,” says Associate Professor Milutin Kostić.
In that campaign, the Ethics Committee of Serbia continues to play a role. Professor Olivera Kontić Vučinić received a request from the Committee to respond to an anonymous complaint accusing her of providing false biographical information, including that she completed postdoctoral studies at Yale University in the United States, where she also spent some time as a visiting professor. Apart from the fact that the allegations are false, and that she has already submitted documentation proving this, there are three additional problematic aspects.
One is that the document containing the emotional anonymous complaint (“As ordinary citizens who have spent vast sums on IVF, we wonder how it is possible that…”) was created by Marko Lens, as shown by metadata. While it is possible that he did not write the complaint himself but only created a document concealing the identity of the complainant, it is unusual that this task was not performed by technical staff. After all, Lens does not prepare documents containing meeting agendas. Moreover, the attached “evidence” also bears his digital signature, while the Committee’s letter states that it is being submitted “together with all evidence provided by the complainant”, not evidence obtained by Lens or the Committee in reviewing the complaint.
The second issue is whether the Ethics Committee even has jurisdiction over such matters, since ethical violations by professors fall under faculty ethics committees, while violations by doctors are handled by the Court of Honour of the Medical Chamber. The third problem is that such a letter was sent not only to Olivera Kontić Vučinić but also to the official email address of the Clinic for Gynaecology and Obstetrics where she works, as well as to her director, before she even had the opportunity to refute the allegations, for which she was given just four days.
When this is combined with a request sent to the head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine of the Faculty of Medicine, seeking documentation on all healthcare services performed by Professor Oliver Stojković at the Institute since 13 October 2024, as well as documentation on the basis of which he was engaged and his employment contract, it creates the impression that the primary aim of such communications with superiors is to shame or place someone in an uncomfortable position.
“Personally, I feel very bad. This is work I have been doing for the past twenty years at this institute and which helps patients of the Clinical Centre. Ultimately, the type of analyses I established is not performed by anyone else in Serbia, neither before nor now. If a frightened dean or head of my institute were to forbid me from carrying out these analyses, I would not be personally affected since I would receive the same salary, but patients would be left without them, as they are not performed anywhere else in the country. They want to claim that someone who is a professor of genetics and by training a molecular biologist, and not a member of the Medical Chamber, cannot work with patients. That is not true; molecular genetic analyses in all healthcare institutions are carried out by molecular biologists. It is also confusing that referrals arriving at the Institute from the Haematology Clinic are addressed to ‘Prof. Oliver Stojković’, while the director of that clinic is Darko Antić, who is also the president of the Ethics Committee. I continue to receive new samples even though the Committee’s letter disputes my right to work on them. This gives me the impression that he does not know what is actually being sent using his name and signature, and if he does know, then the situation is highly unusual,” says Stojković.
Suspicions about authorship are reinforced by the fact that a request for access to information of public importance sent directly to the Ethics Committee of Serbia, asking whether there was a decision to send such a letter and at which session it was adopted or discussed, did not receive a reply from Antić but from Zlatibor Lončar himself. Acting as a kind of lawyer, he explained that no such decision had been made, but that “at this stage the president acts in the interest of efficiency and the collection of relevant data in order to avoid unnecessarily convening the entire committee for cases that may lack grounds for further action”. It is also unhelpful that even some documents officially signed by Antić bear the digital imprint of Marko Lens.
While such processes should not result in legal consequences and fit more into a general atmosphere of pressure, for example, Lens managing to delay an inaugural lecture for associate professors at the Institute of Mental Health because the Institute is not registered in the cadastre as faculty property, they cannot be dismissed as harmless.
“When the Ethics Committee requested from the Institute of Mental Health all research since 2020, at a time when the State Audit Institution was already present, we said we did not have the capacity and asked them to wait. It is an enormous task. There were also technical issues with their request which we pointed out. In response, we received a threatening letter saying we had to do it within three days, which was impossible, so it was not done. Then at the end of August the Ministry of Health issued a ban on conducting research at the Institute, signed by Zlatibor Lončar, at the request of the Ethics Committee. Six and a half months later, there is no end in sight. All documentation has been submitted, no violations have been found, nothing improper was done, we simply did not submit five years of documentation within the requested timeframe because the request was technically inadequate and because a full audit by the State Audit Institution was taking place simultaneously,” says Kostić.
The Faculty Council has so far not addressed the fact that the Misdemeanour Court cleared Tatjana Simić of responsibility in proceedings initiated by the Ministry of Health in parallel with the Ethics Committee case. Meanwhile, further unfounded decisions have been made, such as the removal of Milica Pejović Milovančević as head of the Department of Psychiatry on the grounds that, as a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry, she could not lead the department, even though there are no separate departments for child and adult psychiatry.
All of this is beginning to call into question the very future of the Faculty of Medicine. Although Radar’s interlocutors cannot imagine it simply being shut down, they point out that an application has been submitted to the National Accreditation Body for a new medical faculty in Pančevo which could potentially replace it.
“What we see is that many people have resigned from the Faculty and are moving to Euromedik. To have a Faculty of Medicine you must have a so-called teaching base, a healthcare institution where professors work. In the case of Belgrade, that is the Clinical Centre, all clinical hospital centres and several institutes. It is possible that this private medical faculty would use Euromedik, but we also fear that the University Clinical Centre might say it will cooperate not with the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade but with the new private one. If the director of the Clinical Centre, Jelena Drulović, were to terminate the contract with the Faculty, the Zvezdara Clinical Hospital Centre would likely follow, and even if it did not happen in a chain reaction, without the Clinical Centre some subjects would have no alternative. If we lose our teaching base, we could simply cease to exist. The only thing I do not know is what would happen to forensic medicine, since autopsies cannot be performed in private practice,” says Stojković.
Although regulations could always be changed to remove such an obstacle. And it is not as if all autopsy results are favourable to the authorities.
(Radar, 18.03.2026)
https://radar.nova.rs/drustvo/medicinski-fakultet-gubitak-autonomije/