Exploring the strange, new world of bipartisanship has been a school of hard knocks for Georgia and, so, perhaps it is only fitting that the country's power-share struggles have now entered the classroom.
An agriculture university, of all places, has suddenly become the main battlefield in the tug-of-war between Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili and President Mikheil Saakashvili. The government on March 12 stripped the university of its accreditation, sparking a maelstrom of protest and near-national debate.
Ivanishvili’s education officials explained the decision by citing allegedly deficient quality standards at the school, the brainchild and money pit of President Saakashvili’s former economy minister, the rich, rotund libertarian Kakha Bendukidze.
Bendukidze, chair of the university's supervisory board, scoffed at the government’s claims of glitches and described the school's loss of accreditation as the Ivanishvili government's personal vendetta.
“This university has one big, 187-kilo defect, and that’s me,” the economics guru declared. He sent the nitpicking education officials to hell, and called on the students to fight for their right to education.
The students, who have found their studies hanging up in the air just before midterms, did not have to be asked twice. Agriculture University students and sympathizers from other schools took to Tbilisi's streets, while debates rage on TV and online.
Georgia's standardized university admissions tests could be in trouble after the controversial sacking of the national point-woman for the exams, a decision that prompted much of her staff to resign in protest. As with most big news here in Georgia these days, a connection to billionaire/opposition leader Bidzina Ivanishvili was immediately made.
The surprise May 28 firing of Maia Miminoshvili, the head of the National Exams Center, came at a very inauspicious time – on the eve of university admissions tests and the morning after a large anti-government rally hosted by Ivanishvili in downtown Tbilisi. Saakashvili skeptics quickly linked her dismissal to the fact that her son and daughter-in-law had attended the rally, which marked the kickoff of preparations by Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition for this October's parliamentary vote.
A terse statement on the website of the Ministry of Science and Education indicated that Miminoshvili's dismissal was motivated by her policy disagreements with Minister of Science and Education Dimitri Shashkin.
Mininoshvili has been the face of Georgia’s progress away from the age of notoriously corrupt, university-specific exams, when a call to a professor friend and offerings of cash, cakes and roasted pigs opened the doors to higher education. The introduction of tightly monitored standardized national tests helped do away with that tradition, but some of the school reforms have not been very popular.
