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Does Belarusian minister of education know where Harvard University is situated?

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Does Belarusian minister of education know where Harvard University is situated?

The Ministry of education of Belarus made a painful mistake.

Salidarnasts website tried to figure out why the education minister mentioned Harvard when speaking about the Bologna Process.

Minister of education Mikhail Zhuraukou made a slip of the tongue in an interview with BelTA about Belarus' joining the Bologna Process. The official noted, trying to allay fears that the event may provoke an outflow of students and specialists from the country:

“If someone thinks he can be enrolled at BSU, for example, and then to go and graduate from Harvard, it is a mistake. The European practice is as follows: a student graduates from the university he or she was enrolled at and began to study.”

It's hard to believe that the minister of education does not know that Harvard University, which is the biggest university in the United States, bears no relation to the Bologna Process that works in Europe.

The education minister, perhaps, meant Oxford instead of Harvard. Or does the mistake of Mikhail Zhuraukou bear no relation to slips of the tongue or ignorance? For the decades of Lukashenka's rule, Belarusian officials have developed an ability to follow any orders from above even if they are wrong.

The reference to Harvard in the context of a conversation about the accession to the Bologna Process may have been caused by an old remark of Lukashenka about the famous American university.

During the opening ceremony of Palessye University in 2006, Lukashenka put forward an idea of setting up a research and production education facility on the basis of the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics (BSUIR). The head of state called the future facility a “Belarusian Harvard”.

If Lukashenka was speaking about BSUIR, it would be more appropriate to draw a parallel with Stanford, the alma mater of many professionals in Silicon Valley. Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radioelectronics performs a similar role for the Belarusian High Technologies Park.

A word spoke is past recalling, and the remark about the “Belarusian Harvard”, picked up by the media, stuck in the mind of Belarusian officials.

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