Alexander Dybin
As Novye Izvestiya previously reported, the author of the popular Science and Universities channel, the ex-director of the Institute of Economics and Business of Ulyanovsk State University, Yevgeny Bely, left his post after a conversation with the rector. The management put the professor before a choice: close the channel for 20,000 subscribers, stop writing about the Ministry of Education in it, or quit. The 67-year-old scientist chose the third option, as he valued his media. He spoke about the situation in his own TG channel, the post became viral and has already gained more than 100 thousand views.
Two State Duma deputies reacted to the scandal. Chairman of the Committee on Labor, Social Policy and Veterans Affairs Yaroslav Nilov announced in his telegram channel that he would apply to the ministry with a request to conduct an audit. Another deputy, deputy chairman of the committee on economic policy, Artyom Kiryanov, intends to apply to the Prosecutor General's Office.
“It turns out that you can take and fire a 67-year-old respected professor who has trained thousands of specialists for our country, simply because the Ulyanovsk rector did not like some posts in the channel. I get the impression that the rector has lost touch with reality. It is necessary to remind him that it is not customary to scatter valuable personnel in our country, and the state university is not a private shop, - Kiryanov said, - Rector Boris Kostishko has a lot of questions. Firstly, he publicly admitted that Professor Bely no longer works at the university precisely because of his educational Telegram channel. Secondly, the rector actually stated in plain text that censorship works in the system of higher education. You saw what he said: “You can’t write such things while inside our system”. Thirdly, Kostishko for some reason indicated that it was not he who sought the “debriefing”, but the Ministry of Higher Education and Science, while the ministry claims that they have no complaints against the scientist. It seems to me that the time has come to sort out the situation and finally stop this booth”.
Earlier, Kommersant published a commentary by USU rector Boris Kostishko, from which it follows that Yevgeny Bely fell into disgrace because of the post on the dismissal of Deputy Minister of Education and Science Elena Druzhinina, where he referred to another channel, which, according to the rector, was called "fake-throwing" in the ministry".
“He (Evgeny Bely - ed.) began to turn into a blogger, and bloggers get subscribers on scandals,” Boris Kostishko quotes the publication. “When he created this channel, the channel became more important for him than the university. He told me so himself, he makes good money there, the sums are quite decent... [The ministry] showed this post with fake links to a channel where frank nastiness... The post itself is nothing if it weren’t for a link to one fake channel. And if you link it all together, you get a hint of some kind of corruption scheme. He questioned the honor and dignity of the head of our institution”.
At the same time, the rector noted that no one forced Bely to resign, moreover, the management of the university could not have fired the professor, since he took the post as a result of a competition for a period until 2024.
Note that the story is somewhat reminiscent of the conflict in St. Petersburg, where an employee was fired from the school, who, during additional classes, read poems by Kharms and Vvedensky to children. According to the fired woman, the school principal called Kharms "an accomplice of the Nazis", although Kharms is included in the school curriculum. The school said that sanctions were applied to the employee not because of Kharms, but because of an unauthorized change in the topic of the lesson. The scandal was widely discussed in the media, and the city authorities said that the employee did not have the right to work at the school at all, since she had a criminal record. As the media found out - for causing bodily harm in an attempted violence. After that, they began to check the school where the woman worked. But no legal consequences for the employee or for the school management were reported.