The Emergence of a Diversified System: The State/Private Predicament in Transforming Higher Education in Romania

Abstract

The experience of Romanian higher education under communist rule, particularly during the years of the Ceausescu regime, was that of an extreme case of unaccountable political voluntarism and direct interventionism in all crucial aspects of its functioning. A particularly despotic regime, in replication of the Stalinist model of communism based on a triptych of 'one nation, one party, one leader', limited the role of intellectuals and artists to nothing but the glorification of the regime or the production of 'scholarly' justification for its policies. The design of this regime was to reduce institutions of higher education to mere centres for training a limited number of highly qualified workers. In social sciences, teaching was often diminished to indoctrination, and research to political or intellectual servility. This vision of higher education also virtually ruled out any possibility of it responding to individual demand. It should be pointed out that in all communist countries there was a high individual demand for higher education because the communist socioeconomic system, more than any other, did not allow for the accumulation of extensive private wealth or the inheritance of political power or privilege-even though there were attempts to circumvent these restrictions. In principle, every generation had to make its own way and, under such circumstances, a higher education diploma was a vehicle for upward social and/or economic mobility. Indeed, a university degree was often the only valuable 'good' which parents could offer their children. A side effect of this situation was that the system of admission became a tempting ground for individual political influences and corruption. As a consequence of the communist view of higher education as well as Romania's particularly dogmatic adherence to student numbers for manpower planning, the country had at the time a very elitist system of higher education, with one of the smallest numbers of students in Europe in relation to the size of the traditional higher education age cohort as well as the percentage of the total population. Evidently, one of the areas in which reform was earnestly sought in postcom-