Kaha Bendukidze: “My universities!”

Georgy Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza

Tbilisi sees heavy protests of students from the Agricultural University and the Free University which belong to the well-known businessman Kakha Bendukidze. Young people are protesting against the decision of the certification commission under the Ministry of Education to deprive the Agricultural University of certification, which takes sixth place among 70 Georgian universities in populariaty among young people. There are threats that the Free University might lose certification as well, even though it is fairly thought to be the best university of Georgia.

A month ago the certification commission demanded from the Agricultural University to change the charter and include an item on impossibility of dismissing a student for non-payment. According to the current laws of Georgia, if a student cannot pay for tuition (it can cost $3-4 thousand per year in Bendukidze’s universities), his status can be frozen, but his place in university will remain for 5 years, in case of he would find money for education.

“Why doesn’t Kakha Bendukidze want to make the amendment to the charter of his university? It is so easy! The certification will return immediately, and students won’t have to protest,” the minister of education and science Georgy Margvelashvili wondered. But Bendukidze refused to harmonize his charter with the law. He did it, according to his principles, while social discussion led to a confrontation of two views.

Kakha Avtandilovich Bendukidze is not a simple businessman or a former minister on structural reforms. He is an informal leader of Georgian libertarians. Bendukidze differs from other Georgian millionaires who earned a big capital in Russia in the 1990s. He earned a capital not in the banking sphere or the oil and gas sphere, but due to restructuring and rehabilitation of industrial enterprises. He has his own concept of economic policy which is based on liberalism and restriction of the state’s interference into economy. Bendukidze is an intellectual person. It is interesting to hear and read him. Since his return to the motherland, he has promoted the ideology of libertarianism, individualism, and social Darwinism as the only way of development and the progress of society. His ideal is Singapore where strikes are forbidden and the state is the main guarantor of maintaining order of life in capitalist “jungles.” “A strong, talented, and hard-working person should devour a weak, untalented, miserable looser,” that is how Bendukidze’s opponents interprets his philosophy. And there are a lot of them in Georgia.

To fulfill his concept in reality and prove the opponents that this model of development of successful and promising, Bendukidze invested huge resources into universities. He equipped them with the best modern computers, laboratories, hired the best tutors, dismissing without excuses all previous professors. Young people liked him so much, but the owner established strict rules: “We give you the best education in the country. But if you don’t pay, you will say goodbye to the university of dream.”

To make an amendment to his strict rule would mean rejection of his principles. Bendukidze built the universities from the zero level not for his material benefits, but for fulfillment of his project on raising a free, independent, strong, and proud new human.

Bendukidze criticizes modern Europe and calls it “socialistic.” He says that the main reason for the current financial crisis is “compassionate interference” of the state into social and economic life, i.e. refusal from “the law of jungles”: social benefits, unemployment compensation, restriction of an employer’s rights in favor of an employee, and so on.

Opponents of Georgian libertarians point at inhumanity of such views. Therefore, there will be a lot of discussions because human society is not jungles where the strong (even though he is talented and hard-working) is obliged to devour the weak with his “human” sins. Even if the leader of libertarians is right in everything else, “social humanism” and mercy is the second skill (after shame) which differs a human from an animal.