Top Slovak Faculty in staff crisis

Most of the original academic staff and two thirds of all professors and associate professors are leaving the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies of the Slovak University of Technology, along with several guarantors of study programs. The 25 departing academics write that in order to maintain their moral integrity, they could no longer function under current conditions. Disputes at FIIT STU have been going on for a year now. They escalated after former dean Maria Bielikova was fired on January 9. Another problem was that the dean Ivan Kotuliak had hired a large number of new employees before elections were held for the academic senate of the faculty, thus increasing the number of eligible voters who were to decide on members of the senate. Slovak University of Technology Chancellor Martin Fikar and the chairman of the STU's Academic Senate, Marian Peciar, have declared that they're seeking ways to prevent the "disintegration" of the Faculty.