Finance Minister Clyde Caruana didn’t put much resistance to extravagant claims for additional remuneration by the lecturers of the University of Malta – and it is not in his interest to do so. The Finance Minister himself also lectures at the University of Malta and like many other politicians will benefit from the revolving door of the University of Malta as soon as he leaves politics.
Now, university professors have had their salaries increased to up to €110,000 per year, but the figure actually rises to €140,000 when benefits and resources are included. All the previous concerns about the University of Malta mismanaging its finances have gone out of the window. The government is neither interested in introducing accountability at the University, despite its abysmal Third World standards. Now, as Labour has consolidated its control over the university with its own stooge, the University’s political fate is sealed, and so too is the future intellectual course of the Islands.
As Labour prepares society for a dictatorship with its attempted wholesale takeover of the judiciary, Labour is contributing to the rapid deterioration of the political discourse, the widespread dumbing down of political content on all media, and the government’s total control vie the dependency of public funding of the mainstream press.
By consolidating control over the University, the Labour government is also consolidating a new intellectual divide in Malta, which demarcates intellectuals who are dependent on public institutions from those who are not. Labour is choosing who has the right to present and conduct research, uplifting and supporting some students at the expense of others, and discriminating against its intellectual critics by excluding them from public resources in order to silence their voices. There are those who can present their research and secure employment while completing their PhDs, while others are denied this opportunity and compelled to pursue their PhDs abroad. While some books are heavily and regularly promoted, presenting the work of others would cause offence to Labour-leaning deans. These selection processes are clearly conducted on the basis of political connections and political allegiances and not academic merit.
This subject is taboo in Malta because many academics and intellectuals mostly prefer to play the government’s unassuming game rather than to speak openly about these matters. Only an exceptional number of academics are actively opposing the government. Others will sign letters to the press and pitiful statements no one reads (or takes seriously for that matter) as a token of intellectual critique. As Malta moves towards a dictatorship, the last collective and very public statement made by academics was a condemnation against one of Malta’s biggest symbols of government Opposition: Roberta Metsola, and the statement was on Gaza – an issue she is only indirectly and remotely related to as the President of the European Parliament.
Recently, an academic gave some comments – anonymously ( why would they take some risk?) – to an online media outlet and said that the University of Malta serves as an intellectual ecosystem for Malta’s intellectuals. This can’t be further away from the truth. The University is supposed to provide an intellectual ecosystem by publishing research and fostering a culture of research and intellectual discussion. It does the opposite by serving as a space against dissent as it conditions the public intellectual discourse. Some academics are even pushing in this direction very blatantly and opportunistically, by using public resources to compete with other private intellectuals in the independent press by literally becoming “social media journalists”.
This is more like vampirism and unbridled opportunism rather than an intellectual ecosystem.
The reality is much less intellectually nuanced than one would hope for. There are intellectuals who have the privilege of being paid with public funds to do their research while other intellectuals have to find ways to subsist and survive before finding the time to do their own research. The intellectual nuance in this structural and classist divide in Malta is that the actual intellectual development in Malta is being killed by partisan politics and an atmosphere of censorship at the University that has lived for decades on end – ever since clerics ruled the curriculum. The public intellectuals have the privilege of failing as many times as they like, while failure for the private researcher would mean self-destruction.
Many decades of valuable research have been lost to the University’s stagnant and corrupt state of mind. Many decades of work lost and many books burnt before they were actually written. Many researchers left and never came back and there will be more of the same just on a much wider scale.
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