For two decades, Romanian universities were at odds with each other two simultaneous hierarchies: scientific and pedagogical. Law on Education No. 1 / 2011 put the scientific hierarchy on steroids in favor of the educational one. Over the years, funding for education has always remained below the statutory level, as has research. However, the new Law on Education does not solve these problems. On the contrary, the pseudo-solution that the Ministry has found for the future of the country is to protect three other hierarchies that have greatly interfered with the Romanian university system: military, political and economic. Basically, we jump from the lake into the well.

The university career in Romania is created according to the Prokustian Lodge of the CNATDCU file merit assessment. Scientific publications and citations are rewarded in themselves, and pedagogical work remains Cinderella. There are no indicators that drive research quality in a balanced way with teaching quality and creating a student experience. The teaching profession officially becomes a burden. Over the last ten years, the superiority of research indicators over academic ones has led to progress in the internationalization of Romanian research. However, it also created negative consequences that the current proposed law exacerbates. First, teachers caught up in the didactic act were effectively punished and urge them to work diligently in the field of ISI. The quality of teaching and the teacher-student relationship certainly suffered from undergraduate to Ph.D. The low quality of PhDs and dissertations also reflects a lack of guidance. Second, there were all forms of professional development and recognition distorted to look like a Ph.D. This masquerade had disastrous consequences in the military and public universities. Moreover, it has also led to the temptation of politicizing universities and university-politicization. Thirdly, he was stimulated creativity cheated the system, through predatory publishing, “quote killers” and other Caragiale-type schemes, globally innovated and locally perfected. The proposed law normalizes the shortcomings of the current law, reducing them to the rank of virtue.

Obsession with research indicators, ignoring the needs and preferences of students, as well as demographic decline have led to recruitment crisis in Romanian universities. The number of undergraduate graduates is decreasing, and many of them are going to other European countries, experiencing a better student experience there. The solution for universities in Romania has been a race to the bottom, lowering standards further and further in order to be able to capture and retain the young people who can still be attracted. Entrance exams are often replaced by written tests and possibly interviews. Graduation exams gradually disappeared. Repeated introductory sessions are organized to fill vacant seats. I will say from my own experience, last year the last introductory session at UPB ended on October 28, a month after the beginning of the academic year. In UPB, entrance exams for doctoral studies have also disappeared, which are now held only with the agreement of the coordinating professor. In the pursuit of quantity, quality suffers. Encouraging teachers to also be mentors, to invest more time and passion in teaching has been and will continue to be, it seems, completely ignored by the Ministry of Education.

The current bill appears to be tailor-made for military and law enforcement universities whose doctoral schools have been decimated by plagiarism allegations. A strict hierarchy does not resonate well, at least for us, with the logic of review and originality inherent in scientific logic. A research doctorate is a poorly adapted form of training for students and staff in these fields. Unfortunately, the professional doctorate was left at the level of the Romanian academic system. Therefore, plagiarism has become endemic in these universities. Emilia Serkan notes that the majority of plagiarism notifications in 2016-2020 (namely 56%) concerned doctoral programs supervised by the University of National Defense “Carol I” (UNAP), the Police Academy and the National Information Academy “Mihai Viteazul”. The National Academy of Information itself reported that more than 50% of its dissertations are suspected of plagiarism. Meanwhile, the Police Academy lost the right to award doctoral degrees due to systematic plagiarism.

A new legislative proposal makes an ostrich decision: instead of tackling plagiarism, it’s better not to look at it anymore. Who do I win?? The cancellation of the CNATDCU is in line with the plagiarism scandal involving Prime Minister Nicolae Chuke. By eliminating CNATDCU, the cat of integrity is thrown into the court of university ethics committees, which may suffer serious conflicts of interest. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The full right to certify one’s own diplomas, granted today to Romanian universities without other remedial schemes, will lead to feudalization their. This move is even more understandable if you take into account the rest of the proposed changes.

Throwing plagiarism under the carpet of universities satisfies both the requirements of the military hierarchy and the requirements of the political hierarchy. In order to further lubricate the mechanism “one hand washes the other, and the university washes both”, the new law proposes to abolish, in fact, term limits for rectors. Universities will set a maximum number of mandates, with one condition… a finite number. The humor is probably unintentional. Nowhere does it say that it must also be a rational number. This would formalize the state of affairs when, due to the malicious changes made to Law 1 / 2011, several rectors removed themselves or took advantage of the breaks to run for more than the two mandates possible in the spirit of the law. The discretionary powers of rectors will thus be fixed, and universities will enter as a currency in the political game. It is clear that the new law does not provide for any measures to depoliticize higher education and ban the accumulation of political and university positions. The level of public trust in the political system is very low. Universities must abandon this corrupt factor if they want to regain the trust of students and their parents.

Where there is political power, there is also financial power that allows you to accumulate publications and citations in the records of fees of the MDPI type. Not being predators in the dictionary sense, they have a huge variability of peer review, from reasonable to non-existent. Thus, the new style of journals legitimizes pseudo-scientific or low-quality publications through valuable articles that also find their place on the platform. The business model is based on attracting a huge number of open access contributions, which are paid directly by the authors. In short, money makes publishing much easier and even has a high impact factor. Instead of strengthening the authority of CNATDCU to propose standards of scientific quality, the new law chooses “everything like that”. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro