‘We’re still fighting’: Georgian academics battle drastic reforms

Shorena Sadzaglishvili still cannot quite believe it. The professor of social work at Ilia State University in Tbilisi founded Georgia’s first master’s of social work programme in 2007, built a doctoral programme around it, established a research centre and watched a whole ecosystem of scholars grow up around her work.

But in October last year, the Georgian government announced reforms that would axe her programme entirely. “I devoted all my energy and everything to this programme. We celebrated 20 years recently,” she said. “I created this ecosystem and now one of the major achievements of my professional work has come to an end.”

Sadzaglishvili is among dozens of academics across the country who are facing the prospect of unemployment as a result of the sweeping reforms to Georgia’s higher education system. Ilia State University has emerged as the worst affected institution. 

Dubbed “one city, one faculty”, the controversial measures have drawn widespread criticism from the academic community. Under the changes, each university has been assigned specific fields of study and has been prevented from offering programmes outside that profile. There is also a new quota system dictating how many students each university can admit to each course.

The government has said it is introducing these changes to improve educational quality and align universities with labour market needs but critics say the process has been opaque and will lead to irreversible damage to the Georgian higher education system.

Ilia State, founded in 2006, has been restricted to teaching pedagogy and a narrow band of STEM subjects, a return to what the government considers its Soviet era heritage. About 67 per cent of its programmes have been cut and student enrolment is set to fall from around 4,000 to just 350, according to academics at the university.

Ketevan Gurchiani, professor of anthropology and head of the Research Centre for Anthropology, said collaborations between anthropologists, biologists and environmental scientists built up over nearly two decades were being dismantled as the programmes that sustain them disappear.

“We will most probably not have a job, many of us, from September,” said Gurchiani, who has been teaching at the university for nearly 20 years. She also worries about what will happen to the younger generation of academics. “Ilia State is the youngest university in terms of the age of its professors. If this younger generation leaves academia, it will also be a brain drain.”

Every Tuesday since the reforms were announced, Gurchiani has joined fellow academics from different universities at weekly protests. University staff are also writing letters to the ministry, appearing on television, and debating officials publicly. The Ilia State rector recently debated the prime minister directly on TV. “We are still fighting,” she said. 

Inside the classroom, Gurchiani has noticed an uptick in attendance, which she sees as a quiet act of solidarity. The number of those attending her elective courses has doubled from 15 to 30 because students fear these classes could soon be gone for good.

Even subjects the government said it would protect have been affected, said Keti Tsotniashvili, associate professor of education policy at the university. A five-year integrated programme preparing teachers for the first six years of schooling has been scrapped entirely. “At this point, we do not have in the country a programme that prepares teachers for the first to sixth grades,” she said.

A master’s programme in higher education administration, one of the first of its kind in Georgia, enrolling roughly 30 students a year, has had its intake cut to five, she added. 

Tsotniashvili said that officials have been meeting representatives of universities across the country to explain the reforms but staff from Ilia State have had meeting requests rejected. “They only want to meet the top leadership of the university, which is limited to five people,” Tsotniashvili said. 

Times Higher Education contacted the ministry for comment several times but received no response.