The natural science disaster CATRIN destroyed Moravian higher education
More or less everyone, even in the mainstream, has come across the information that the political power (or top representatives of parties and movements) is connected with lobbying interests and the interests of oligarchs in cases that point to the looting of public budgets in favor of a narrow oligarchist or political group. Only a few people have never heard of cases like Dosimeter, IKEM, DPP, kampelička and others and others. However, there is another ecosystem that is not well known to the public because it is hidden behind the academic freedom and independent self-governance guaranteed by their legal status. The possibility of hiding something is also made possible by the fact that universities are not subject to the control of the SAO, although they manage considerable taxpayer funds. But are they really that respectable and independent?
The main income of public universities is taxpayers' money. They go to universities mainly through contributions and subsidies from the Ministry of Education and Culture, and then as projects through grant agencies, either Czech or European. The third part of the income consists of income from cooperation with the commercial sector. And don't think it's small money. These are multi-billion dollar financial flows. And where there is big money, there is also corruption, so various "creative" projects are created that can divert very large funds into selected pockets.
In the following series, I want to introduce readers and the public more closely to how such a university octopus of academic and political interests can really pump up the funding system.
University Institute CATRIN at UPOL: Birth of the Octopus
An exemplary example of a pathological structure in relation to the economic management of public funds from taxpayers' pockets is the university institute at Palacký University in Olomouc (UPOL) called the Czech Institute of Research and Advanced Technologies. Considering the extent of the damage, its English acronym CATRIN, recalling the most destructive hurricane in US history, is completely symptomatic in this case.
The primary mission of universities is to educate students. The Higher Education Act describes the rules for the functioning of higher education institutions in relatively detail, including the functioning of their faculties and academic bodies. Only two relatively short and vague paragraphs in the law act as a wormhole, which allow universities to establish, in addition to faculties, university institutes focused solely on research. From the point of view of the taxpayer, what is the purpose of an institute in a university that is not devoted to the education of students is not very clear, especially in a country where, in addition to universities, we also have an extensive network of institutions oriented only to research, namely the institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
A closer look then shows one essential difference between the institute and the faculties. The faculties have a democratic academic self-government, which means that the academic community elects its dean through its senators, while the performance of his function, including management, is also under the permanent control of the academic senate. In contrast, there is no self-governance at a university institute, the director is simply appointed by the rector, and no academic senate oversees the director's actions. If the chancellor keeps a protective hand over the director, it is an ideal box to allow the tunneling of taxpayers' funds.
The CATRIN Institute was formally established in 2020 from parts of three (until then separate) scientific centers of the university - the Regional Center for Advanced Technologies and Materials (RCPTM), the Haná Region Center for Biotechnology and Agricultural Research (CRH), which were originally established within the Faculty of Science of UPOL, and the Institute of Molecular and Translational Medicine (ÚMTM), which was established under the Faculty of Medicine of UPOL, on in which this action took place relatively conflict-free, as the faculty did not list any laboratories or movable property under the new institute, and it was rewarded with 15 million crowns for formally transferring three regular workers to the newly established institute.
Violent act and brutal attacks against opponents
However, in the case of the UPOL Faculty of Science, it was a completely different story. In essence, it was a violent act, accompanied by brutal, liquidating personal attacks against all opponents. Everything is described in detailhereahere. Despite the explicit disapproval of the faculty authorities, hundreds of millions of grant funds were taken from it, and CATRIN still occupies several thousand square meters of laboratory space and equipment with a purchase value exceeding 500 million crowns, which are on the property cards of the faculty, in violation of the current legislation. Therefore, it has not been able to function normally for several years and is significantly limited in its research activities and in providing teaching in accredited study programs, while it has not yet received adequate compensation. The situation has not been resolved to this day, and the university is unnecessarily devastation of its largest faculty, which provides education for more than 4,000 students and whose staff generates more than half of UPOL's scientific output.
However, a few people profit from it - and for the rectors of Olomouc, this is apparently more than the public service that the activities of the UPOL Faculty of Science provide to society. How much of an attractive magnet the CATRIN box can be, they can approximate the numbers from the annual reports. The latest publicly known dates are for 2024, and from that we can tell thatthe entire UPOL managedwith total revenues of CZK 5.236 billion, whileCATRIN returnsamounted to CZK 314 million. And that's an interesting package, and it's not the only one. Cancer is spreading, and key CATRIN workers can already be found at the Mining University in Ostrava, through whichthey draw another hundred million sumsfrom public funds. And millions more flow directly into private pockets outside of university accounts using university infrastructure. This is a typical scheme of transferring costs and risks to public institutions and privatizing revenues. We'll take a closer look at how this works next time.
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