Red-hot Science Debate in Armenia

2 Feb. 2006
IWPR
By Arevhat Grigorian in Yerevan

Armenian scientists last week began hotly debating new proposals for a complete overhaul of the country’s scientific academies.Last year, the Armenian government asked the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, to draw up a reform programme for the country’s prestigious but ailing Academy of Sciences.

The completed draft report was submitted to the government on January 19, and is now being dissected by the scientists who will be affected by it.The draft programme would reform the way the academy is funded, drastically reduce its powers and overhaul the system of academic degrees.

The document has already drawn an angry response from Armenian academicians. In a newspaper interview on January 18, Fadei Sarkisian, chairman of the National Academy of Sciences condemned its authors as “enemies of the country”.
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At issue is the future of what used to be a great source of Armenian pride - its tradition of scholarship in the natural sciences. The National Academy of Sciences, NAS, was founded in 1943 during the Second World War, and became a major centre for Soviet scientists. It still encompasses around 50 institutes and other organisations and employs nearly 4,500 people, 2,000 of them researchers.

However, like the rest of the country, the academy has fallen on hard times. In 2005, it received funding worth 9.3 million US dollars, one per cent of the government’s budget expenditure. Once-high salaries have plummeted to the equivalent of 60 dollars a month due to inflation
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Atom Margarian, who heads the group of experts that drew up the report, explained that the state could no longer afford to commission such large amounts of scientific research. “That’s a model for a state striving towards totalitarianism or authoritarianism, and it cannot be justified in the conditions that prevail today,” he told IWPR.
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Under the proposals, the current management of NAS will lose their administrative powers to a new agency whose structure has yet to be defined. “Our proposal is fatal for the academy’s leaders, as they will lose their levers of control,” acknowledged Margarian.
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As well as the UNDP plans, there are two other reform proposals under discussion, one from the Public Council of Scholars of Armenia and another from the presidium of the NAS itself. But another academician, Andrei Nersisian, is dismissive of the latter, saying, “The NAS proposal is like a group of doctors standing by the bedside of a dying sportsman and thinking about new reforms rather than about to revive him.”

Margarian said his proposals would be phased in over several years with a careful monitoring process, so that they would not come as a shock to the academic system.

Spokesmen for the government say it is now carefully studying the findings of the UNDP report.

Arevhat Grigorian is a correspondent with Hetq Online newspaper. Seda Muradian, IWPR’s Armenia editor, contributed to this report.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.