By Ishmael Kardryni
In July 2026, Albanian academics appealed (https://www.diaspora-akademike.org) to the EU Commissioner for Enlargement for rule of law, transparent institutions, academic integrity, and a new social contract that places knowledge and human capital at the center of national development. They called for serious reform of higher education and research, stronger protection against plagiarism and academic fraud, and a more effective framework for diaspora engagement and return.
To the ears of policymakers in Albania, much of what they ask for is already being addressed, namely by foreign-state programs and civil-society initiatives that connect diaspora scholars with Albanian universities through collaborative research, PhD supervision, co-teaching, and capacity building.
These actors, such as the Albanian American Enterprise Fund, already fund scholarships, mobility, mentoring, research collaboration, and reintegration pathways. They often do so more efficiently than the domestic system, unlike the Excellence Scholarship Program, which has been plagued by corruption and a patronage system. Foreign-state programs and civil-society funds work outside the local academic hierarchy, bypassing captured or dysfunctional institutions and introducing new standards. Thus, the demand appears to repeat what external partners are already providing, only under a different institutional label.
That said, although the Albanian government has delegated much to these external actors, externalization cannot substitute for the national government or for the academic community itself. Regardless of whether they seek to capture the system for their own interests, they serve different purposes: foreign and civil-society programs can support, connect, and finance, but they cannot replace the state’s responsibility to govern higher education, enforce standards, or create public legitimacy. Nor can they replace the role of academic peers in judging merit, safeguarding autonomy, and maintaining disciplinary standards; only a domestic academic community can do that in a durable and credible way. Moreover, they remain external, selective, project-based, and unsustainable. While foreign-state programs serve the foreign policies of the respective countries, initiatives such as the Albanian-American Development Foundation (AADF) serve economic purposes that similarly lack public scrutiny and accountability. Projects like Research Expertise from the Academic Diaspora (READ) cannot replace the state’s responsibility to regulate higher education or the duty of academic peers to validate standards, evaluate scholarship, and enforce academic integrity. If universities are already struggling to police their own standards, then an externally funded fellowship may improve a few projects but cannot, on its own, reform hiring, accreditation, promotion, or anti-plagiarism enforcement. Those functions require state authority and peer-based institutional legitimacy.
As the petition implies, the problem is structural rather than financial. External programs cannot solve the underlying problems of political capture, weak institutional trust, and academic malfeasance. Governing universities, protecting merit, and creating credible academic institutions are adjacent to funding. Public institutions, universities, civil society, the private sector, and the diaspora should share a long-term framework and commitment to keep academic autonomy and integrity at the center, governed by transparent, peer-review-like procedures. Only state-led and peer-governed system make those external contributions effective.
© 2026 Argumentum
