I’ve been in Romania this past week working with the World Bank and the Ministry of Education on an interesting strategy project. Just a few stories I thought I would pass on:

Shared Governance: In what I think was an attempt to curry favour among faculty members, the previous Romanian government brought in a bill in 2011 which created what I think is quite a unique “bicephalous” system of university government.  Under this system, the University Rector (who, as in many European countries and bits of Quebec, is elected by the university community) must share power with the President of Senate (a current faculty member).  Yay!  Faculty power!  Except the result seems to be that in a number of universities, business has ground to a halt as the two keep vetoing each others’ measures.  Not good.

Corruption in Education.  One of the alleged success stories in Romanian secondary school system over the past decade was the great increase in the number of students completing obtaining their Baccalaureate (as in France, getting one’s Bacc in Romania is a test-based affair separate from the act of finishing secondary school).   Back in 2009, over 85% of people who took the Bacc passed it.  Then they started installing webcams in test rooms to crack down on cheating.  The 2011 pass rate?  A mind-boggling 43%, suggesting that roughly half of all previous Baccs were the result of some form of fraud or cheating.  It’s obviously not a happy situation, but kudos to the government for facing up to the problem.  Confronting mass cheating on that scale takes political guts; that’s a lot of parents whose kids just lost part of their future.  The problem, of course, is that combined with a huge demographic shift (we’re now 20 years from the legalization of contraception and abortion in Romania, both of which were banned under Ceaușescu), universities just lost over half their potential intake.

Recovering from Scientific Socialism.  This is one of my favourite conversations ever about academia.

Me: (to a senior administrator at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies) So, after 1989, you must have had many faculty members who knew scientific socialism but didn’t know anything useful about the new market economy.  How did you adapt as an institution?

Senior Admin: Well, about a third of us actually did understand market economics – the ones who negotiated all the trade deals with the west.  We ended up running the place.  Another third left the university.  And another third retrained themselves and began teaching in other fields.

Me: Really?  So in what field of study does an economist who only knows Marxist slogans re-train?  Where do they teach now?

Senior Admin: Mostly in marketing.

La revedere și au un bun week-end