At a news conference before the start of the academic year, Sofia University director Ivan Ilchev announced the university would install surveillance cameras and introduce a magnetic card access control system.

According to a report by student organisation Призив за образование (Priziv za obrazovanie - Call for Education), the decision to introduce the camera surveillance system had been taken because of three armed incidents in the past 18 months.

The surveillance system was said to cost the university, who had just seen its budget for the year cut by the new government, about 250 000 leva.

The card-based access system, which would bar access to the university buildings for anyone not a student or a staff member, was said to be put in place to ensure teachers performed their duties.

If it was not so frighteningly sad, it would be fascinating to see old East-European pre-89 thinking meets contemporary West-European fear of an abstraction called crime.
The Bulgarian education system has any number of problems, one of which concerns elderly, underpaid and completely unmotivated, not to say disillusioned, teachers and professors. Out of 700 professors in the country, only three or four are younger than 40.

It is hard to see how making these professors clock in and out with a magnetic version of punch-cards, is going to improve their motivation.

The introduction of surveillance cameras is based on the theory that crime will evaporate when there is full control. The recipe is simple: as long as there is crime, add more control and surveillance. If you then still have crime, add more control and surveillance.

It would not be the first time that a student would fall victim to violence, after he or she had been carefully monitored and studied, by someone who had been hired to operate the surveillance system that was put in place to provide the students with safety.

It is cynical that in a country like Bulgaria, which is still struggling to come to terms with the consequences of the abuse of systems of control implemented by the socialist regime, that the delusion that more control means greater safety could even find fertile ground.

In conversations with Bulgarians, the question is never whether such systems of control would be abused, but by whom and for what. And concurrent with this is the certainty that those who do abuse these systems will go unpunished.

At the same news conference, Ilchev said he sincerely hoped the state would change the way in which universities were funded, from a system based on number of students to one based on quality of education. Before these changes happen, the clearest way for Bulgarian students to show their disapproval of the introduction of surveillance cameras, would be to use their feet to vote.

If the limited number of students who could be bothered to take part in the protest on September 12 is any indication, however, that is unlikely to happen.

The way these things tend to go, the cameras will be installed, along with the magnetic card system. And local media will dutifully report on abuses related to the system, probably starting with procurement irregularities.