Croatia Students Continue Resisting Faculty Merger

Members of Zagreb University's Faculty of Humanities and Social Studies, FFZG, still strongly oppose the faculty's plan to merge studies with the Catholic Theology Faculty, KBF.

Zrinka Breglec, a student at FFZG and a member of Plenum, the body gathering students and faculty staff, told BIRN that the faculty management "isn't giving up the deal".

"Although Plenum decided last week to oppose any deal like the one mentioned, the management still wants to sign the contract," she said.

Breglec added that Plenum has no idea how the management can claim that 14 out of 20 FFZG departments voted for the agreement, since it was only a draft contract.

Plans to merge studies between the FFZG and KBF came to the fore in February, when the Dean of the FFZG, Vlatko Previsic, put a revised agreement on the table.

Tomislav Pletenac, a professor at FFZG's department of ethnology and cultural anthropology, said they were given little time to see the agreement.

"They presented us with the draft contract and then we started to debate - and I and a few of my colleagues made some amendments," he said.

"But then, they said, 'Now you have to vote for or against the draft', without even having the possibility to take into account our contribution. I voted 'against' since I can't be for a contract made like that," he said.

Pletenac said the contract would be discriminatory for FFZG students who wish to take a course at KBF because they would have to have a baptism certificate and the recommendation of the local priest, according to KBF's rules.

He added that despite Previsic's promises that FFZG's students would not in fact need this, "this was nowhere mentioned in the draft of the contract, and therefore can't a basis for a legal...