Treatise on Priorities

I could also have called this text a discussion about championships –– prvenstva in Croatian –– but the current social priorities of such a more Croatian title would have immediately categorised it in the anthropology of sport. My idea was to write in a general way about the priorities of our profession, and not about sports contests. Priority is precedence, but also a right to that very priority, a priority in a temporal sequence. The priority of the profession is what the profession primarily engages in at a given moment or planned period, at least temporarily abandoning, neglecting or setting aside the remaining components of its own subject-matter. And questions immediately present themselves. Who is it who establishes the priorities of the profession? Is that the privilege of the profession or is it decided upon outside the profession? I am intentionally utilising the broad term profession since use of the value-contaminated term science (or even listing of the names of the individual scholarly disciplines) would greatly complicate understanding of the issue. In other words, freedom of scholarship has its place amongst the proclaimed committed values of civic democracy, such as artistic freedom, freedom of confession or university autonomy. Freedom of scholarship is linked with freedom of speech and is experienced as the right to the truth. If we replace the term profession with some less privileged vocation, it will be easier to answer.