Associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Niš, Dr. Dragan Milić, who is also the director of the Clinic for Cardiac Surgery, announced today that he was fired after the faculty's Report Writing Committee determined that he "does not meet the requirements for the title of full professor."
Dr. Milić lost his job because the fixed-term employment relationship he established as an associate professor expired.
He recently formed a group of citizens that bears his name and submitted lists for the local elections in Niš, after months of publicly criticizing the current city government and the health care situation.
Dr. Milić and Niš Cardiosurgery became known to the general public when they abolished waiting lists by working for free on weekends.
"I will never be absent from my ideals, I will not withdraw from the electoral race for a better, fairer and richer Nis, and I am ready to pay a personal price, no matter what it is, so that our children can live in a city they will be proud of and not ashamed of." As always, the Cardiac Surgery Clinic will know how to defend its interests and the interests of our patients," said Dr. Milić.
He added that the consequences of such a decision could be extremely serious because the cardiac surgeons he mentored for the defense of their doctoral dissertations will not be able to get their doctorates and "the Clinic for Cardiac Surgery will lose the status of a clinic because there are no cardiac surgery teachers in its ranks."
The commission that rejected Milić was made up of five professors from the narrow scientific field of surgery, three of them from Niš and one each from Novi Sad and Belgrade medical faculties, and the president was Dr. Goran Stanojević. On May 8, they concluded, based on the analysis of the submitted application materials, that Dr. Milić "does not meet the requirements for the position of full professor for the narrower scientific field of Surgery - the teaching base of the University Clinical Center, Clinic for Cardiac Surgery."
The signed report states that one paper that Dr. Milić mentioned in the application, which was published in a prominent international journal, does not belong to the narrow scientific field of surgery, that one paper from an international journal consists of abstracts from international meetings without any indication that the paper has already been presented, that one publication presented as a monograph does not meet the requirements for it, and two publications do not meet the requirements for evaluation because they were published before his election to the position of assistant professor.
Commission member Dr. Nenad Ilijevski, from the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade, expressed his opinion and refused to sign the report on Milić's candidacy, which he explained as follows:
"Unfortunately, for the first time in my career, I come across a case in which a candidate who was clearly defined as a 'plagiarist' 20 years ago reached the position of associate professor and director of the Clinic for Cardiac Surgery in Niš!!?? Since in the meantime, politics entered the whole story, in which I am most bothered by the alleged involvement of 'Belgrade' in preventing the development of cardiac surgery in Niš, and beyond, I am disgusted by such qualifications!!!! For these reasons, I refuse to sign the report on this candidate," said Dr. Ilijevski.
He suggested the Faculty of Medicine in Niš, and especially the Department of Surgery, to "solve the problem in its own house, which causes immeasurable damage to the entire faculty."
During the procedure for the election of Dr. Milić to the position of full professor, complaints against plagiarism were filed by the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, the Rector of the University and the University Committee for Professional Ethics, the former Dean of the Faculty of Medicine Dr. Milan Višnjić and a group of unsigned "teachers and associates" of the higher education institution.
They referred to the fact that in 2012, the scientific journal "Serbian Archive for Complete Medicine" withdrew from print a paper from 2004 in which Dr. Milić participated in writing, with the assessment that it was "pure plagiarism."
In January of this year, the University Committee for Professional Ethics suspended the proceedings against Dr. Milić initiated on this occasion.
