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Governor Says Uni Will Open

By Galina Stolyarova

Staff Writer

Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Monday that St. Petersburg’s European University will reopen in the near future after a flap involving fire regulations and heated accusations that it was closed for political reasons.

“The city’s fire inspectorate was satisfied with the most recent series of corrections to the violations of fire safety regulations,” Matviyenko said in a telephone conversation with the university’s rector, Nikolai Vakhtin, adding she would make sure the conflict gets resolved as soon as possible.

A summary of the conversation between Matviyenko and Vakhtin was posted on the university’s website Monday.

Promises aside however, Matviyenko stopped short of taking any practical steps.

City Hall’s Science and Higher Education Committee has not yet licensed a temporary venue in which the European University could hold lectures.

The university has submitted several proposals for possible temporary locations where classes could be held.

Lectures at the European University in St. Petersburg have been suspended since the city’s fire inspectorate found 52 violations of the fire code at its buildings earlier this year.

The Dzerzhinsky district court twice ruled against granting the university permission to hold classes while correcting the violations.

Critics of the decision to close the university are suspicious that although the fire inspectors’ complaints were directed against the building that houses the university, the court’s ruling stopped the University from teaching altogether.

The judgment orders a “temporary suspension of activities,” which makes it impossible for the university’s management to rent out other premises until the argument over the historic premises gets resolved.

The list of violations has not changed and is not even being revised.

Because it is located in a historic building protected by the state, any changes to either its exterior or interior would require lengthy coordination with a number of state organizations. For example, the university was asked to remove a narrow spiral staircase dating from 1881. To do that, the school’s management would need the approval of City Hall’s Committee for the Preservation and Protection of Historical Monuments.

The university’s management found itself at a loss over such complaints because the staircase has always been there and did not present a problem on any previous annual fire inspection.

Over the course of the last two months, the European University has been subjected to two other inspections investigating the legitimacy of its registration and operations, and even the content of its courses.

While its fate is being decided by bureaucrats, students of the European University have been busy staging protest events aimed at drawing public attention to the plight of the University.

The Internet has been buzzing with blogs and forums where bewildered students exchange information and consolidate their efforts.

Students have already organized a series of theatrical and satirical protests against the closure.

A conference held on Sunday in the library of the Jewish Culture House was called “Fire Practices and Conspiracies in the Slavic and Judeo Cultural Tradition.”

On Wednesday, a soccer match between students and journalists against the staff of a local firefighting academy will be held.

However, Alexander Viktorov, head of City Hall’s Science and Higher Education Committee accused the University of creating what he sees as unnecessary tension over the matter.

Viktorov has asked the students to refrain from holding meetings, staging protest events and engaging in street politics.

“We live in a state ruled by the law and if we allow street politics to become a tool to solve our problems, it will be a road to nowhere,” Viktorov said. “Everything with the European University is going to be just fine if all of us join forces and correct the violations — without exerting pressure on the firefighters.”

Boris Firsov, the University’s honorary rector, described the conflict between the academics and the fire inspectorate as a triumph of bureaucracy over common sense.

Human rights advocates across Russia have said the phrasing used in the verdict of the Dzerzhinsky court suggests that political pressure is being applied to the University, which until January ran a project on the study of independent election monitoring funded by the European Union.

The project drew criticism from a United Russia member of the State Duma, who called for an inquiry into the university’s activities and for the project to be closed.

On Jan. 30 — after the University failed the first fire inspection but before the Dzerzhinsky court’s first ruling — the university’s Scientific Council voted to shut down the project on the grounds that “part of the activities involved in the project does not correspond to the school’s license.”

At that time Vakhtin declined to be more specific when confronted with requests from reporters to give a more detailed explanation behind the decision.

After the court twice prevented the University from functioning despite its attempts to resolve the fire code violations, Vakhtin then made a careful but powerful statement, pointing out that the University was founded by the late St. Petersburg mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a man revered by President Vladimir Putin and his successor Dmitry Medvedev.

Vakhtin took matters further by stressing that the campaign against the university clashed dramatically with Medvedev’s praise of the university as innovative — the European University was the first academic institution in the country to implement an endowment scheme for its funding — as well as the politician’s calls to cut down on red tape in education.

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