More
Than Just Academic
by Cristina Bradatan
21
September 2006
Romania's universities need to bring their grades back
up.
If you look at the numbers, the Romanian higher education system
is booming. From having one of the lowest ratios of university-educated citizens
in Europe in 1990, the country has leaped up the table. Far more jobs are
available to young academics, public universities have grown, and private ones
are thriving.
Yet many Romanians, both within and outside academia, say
the system is rotten.
The problem, some argue, is that Romanian scholars
and scientists haven't learned how to survive in the competitive marketplace of
ideas. Others blame scholars with fresh Western doctorates for manipulating the
discussion for their own benefit. One commentator says the Romanian system is
unique and doesn't play by the same rules as other countries. With so much
arguing over the academic profession, though, one thing has been forgotten:
students.
STATISTICS TO BOAST ABOUT …
Romanians used to be proud
of their universities. Communism might have leveled the gap between rich and
poor, but this did not mean there was no stratification before 1990: education
was seen as an opportunity to better oneself and climb the social ladder. Higher
education was free of charge, but universities limited their enrollments and
entry exams were in general difficult. The universities were just one cog in the
centralized economy, set up to produce only as many graduates as the state's
enterprises needed.
The years since 1990 have seen a tremendous increase
in the number of university students and teachers. In the first full school year
after the fall of the communist government, 193,000 students were enrolled in
higher education. By 2003–2004, the number had more than tripled to 621,000. At
the same time the number of people teaching in higher education more than
doubled. Private colleges and universities are flourishing: in 2003–2004 there
were 67 private institutions, with more than 240 departments serving 144,000
students. If this trend continues, Romania will have one of the most educated
young populations in Europe.
In quantitative terms, at least. Within
academia, a canker of doubt over the health of the system has been gnawing away.
For years, increasingly heated debates over the quality of Romanian higher
education have flourished among informal groups of scholars and writers in
online journals such as Ad-Astra. Governments have taken
little or no notice, but in the past year the debates have moved into the
mainstream press, becoming even more vociferous on the back of a failed attempt
to improve university teaching standards.
… AND MOAN ABOUT
Over
and over, the pessimists hammer on certain points to illustrate the decline in
higher education. They point out that Romania spends only 0.5 percent of its
gross domestic product on research and development, behind the 0.6– 0.7 percent
invested by other Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and
Poland, and far off the European Union average of 1.9 percent. Compared with
Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland, the number of scholarly papers in most fields
published between 1980 and 2000 in international journals by Romanian authors is
low: in the natural sciences, by maintaining the present rate of increase in
published papers, it will take Romania 15 years to catch up with Bulgaria, 30
years with Poland, and 60 with Hungary, argued U.S.-based researchers Liviu
Giosan and Tudor Oprea in 2002. In the social sciences, these hypothetical
catch-up times are three times longer.
Another common argument runs that
the promotion system in Romanian universities puts too little weight on the
quality of a scholar's publications. Adherents of this view claim that many
teachers rose to full professorships on the strength of publications in obscure,
non-peer-reviewed journals or on self-published books. Doctorates are easily
obtained by students lacking minimal scholarly credentials, and many
dissertations have been revealed to be based on plagiarized research. There have
also been several cases of academics accused of using plagiarism to get promoted
(most notoriously, a former health minister).
PUBLISH OR
PERISH?
In a bid to address these issues, in 2005, the new education
minister, Mircea Miclea, himself an academic affiliated with the University of
Cluj, drafted an ambitious scheme to raise standards of scholarly excellence.
The plan would have required young scholars in public universities to meet
stricter standards to move up the academic ladder, such as publishing in
peer-reviewed, international journals and winning competitive grants. The plan
was rebuffed at an early stage by the president and vice president of the state
council for certification of achievement in higher education. If such
"draconian" criteria were enforced, they complained, no Romanian academic would
ever be promoted above the lower ranks of professors. The two even threatened to
resign if Miclea's plan was implemented.
A few months later, the reform
plan was aborted because Miclea resigned his post and the new ministry adopted
more relaxed promotion rules very much in line with the certification council's
proposal. Far from dying out, the debate over the quality of Romanian
universities persisted after his departure and even moved from virtual forums to
mainstream cultural media.
It was a dean of the National School of
Political and Administrative Sciences (a dynamic, post-1990 university) who
opened a new line of argument with an article in the cultural journal Revista 22
charging that the dispute over higher education was largely down to freshly
minted Ph.D.s from Western universities, Romanians who left the country to study
and were now returning. Looking to insert themselves into the Romanian academic
system, sometimes with too high an opinion of themselves and looking down on
colleagues not lucky enough to have a foreign degree, dean Mihaela Miroiu said,
they call for Western academic standards because it suits them better and
severely disqualifies those already in the system.
This attempt to make
the whole discussion over academic standards appear to be a struggle for power
or recognition seemed dismissive to many. Several young academics with foreign
diplomas responded bitterly to Miroiu. Like members of a new academic
proletariat, unable to find teaching jobs or, at best, stuck in low-level posts
with miserable pay, they saw themselves as crushed by the system with nothing
left to hope for.
Labeling this group of young academics troublemakers
does not solve the problem of poor-quality research and college teaching, others
replied. The divide is not actually between those who have and those who have
not earned their qualifications abroad. It is between those academics who
perform well and are productive, and those who are poor teachers and generate
low-quality research. The way out of the impasse is to put a merit-based
promotion system in place, ensuring, in time, that only outstanding scholars
rise to be full professors.
But this is the wrong way to look at the
problem, according to University of Bucharest professor, public intellectual,
and commentator Andrei Cornea. He questions the very relevance of a promotion
system based on peer-reviewed articles and international visibility. After all,
he said, many scholarly books of great originality manage to get published in
Romania despite their authors' lack of academic credentials, a situation that
completely defies the rules normally governing the academic world. The promotion
system needs flexibility, not rigid bureaucratic rules, Cornea argues. Although
it is far from clear where this flexibility should stop in a promotion system
that is already too flexible, Cornea’s ideas are shared by many others.
Recently, more than 200 full and associate professors who rose through the ranks
despite not having doctorates loudly denounced a new law requiring a Ph.D. for
holders of those academic positions.
Predictably, other commentators took
aim at Cornea's argument, trashing the idea of "Romanian uniqueness" as a
disguised apology for cultural pathology and a cheap way to avoid serious
reform.
PROVIDERS AND CLIENTS
All this bickering centers around
the work (or lack thereof) done by academics. Clearly, having well-defined
academic standards would put a brake on the advancement of incompetent scholars
and would help Romanian higher education regain some of its lost legitimacy. If
building an academic career is to be based exclusively on networking, the
reputation of the academic community will fall even further, and more young
Romanians will be driven to foreign universities.
From these young
people's point of view, however, other problems might seem more pressing – from
the quality of teaching, to ethical issues in the universities (professors’
absenteeism, cases of plagiarism among professors, sexual harassment), to the
practically nonexistent links between the demands of the job market and the
content of the curricula. Yet these concerns are lost amid the clamor over who
should get tenure. Romanian universities have long seen the student not as a
"client" free to pick and choose what best suits him or her, but,
paternalistically, as a user who has to accept whatever is offered. The whole
notion of looking at the system from the student’s point of view is still
relatively alien.
Things might be about to change, however. In 2008, the
first generation of young people born after 1989 will enter university. More and
more students from middle-class families can afford to turn their backs on the
Romanian system for study abroad. They must be already aware that, as things
stand, it will not be easy for them to return and settle down in Romania. Will
they prefer to never come back? Will enough of them return, form a critical
mass, and put pressure on the system to change and accept them? Or maybe the
system can reform itself, but with more success than the Education Ministry's
stillborn attempt in 2005. We can hardly do more than pose these questions now,
but the fact remains: the quality of academic institutions is plummeting so fast
that unless major change occurs soon, Romania will be left with a higher
education system to be ashamed of.
Cristina Bradatan
is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of
Central Florida. She earned her undergraduate and master's degrees from the
University of Bucharest and her doctorate from Pennsylvania State
University.
Copyright © 2006 Transitions
Online
----------------------------
Vali
An
aristocratic title is not enough to ensure a noble behaviour. A person's
greatness comes from acknowledging the mistakes and agreeing to correct
them.
"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will
know peace." (Jimi Hendrix)
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