Cartea neagra (3 din 3)
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Student representation is still a dream in Romania
There is a tradition in Romania to have great things on paper and not implement them into reality. This is the case of student participation in the decision-making process. Even though the Law of Education states that 25% of every Faculty Council or University Senate places must be filled by students, they actually are not participating. Using various means (accustomed during the communist period), the faculty leaderships takes care to maintain the representation mechanisms as obscure as possible by making regulations interpretable and restrictive and systematically minimising the role of students in the decision-making process. Sometimes the student places are filled with “convenient” students.
A recent case at the Politechnic University of Bucharest at the Electrical Engineering Faculty, where the local student organisation organised elections for the student places in the Faculty Council. The Council refused to validate the elections although students respected all the regulations and there were no complains from students. Students suspect that the faculty preferred to pass its reform plans without students opposing the lack of flexibility in the new programmes.
This is one of the fortunate situations when the students are informed and have a position. The general situation is that students are not even aware of the planned changes. The same thing happens at the ministry level. The ministry asked a rector to nominate a student to be part of Romania’s official delegation for the Bergen Summit. The main cause is that in Romania the idea that students can and must play a role in the Higher Education design at all levels is not yet accepted and unfortunately the Bologna Process didn’t help. We look forward to the day when students in Romania will not hear from other stakeholders “Leave it to us, we know better”.
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