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ROMANIA |
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ROMANIA |
INTRODUCTION
Public administration education was neither well understood nor popular prior to 1989, but because of the profound changes in Romania, it became a necessity. Despite this, the pure “newness” of the field generated difficulties in building public administration programmes. In part this was due to a lack of experience and customs that influenced the way in which PA education was perceived. The Romanian administrative and educational systems were, for a long period of time, influenced by the legal tradition. Only in recent years, under the influence of Western European and American models, has this influence lessened and interdisciplinary programmes begun to appear. There are three forms of degree programmes in the field of public administration:
- four-year undergraduate programmes offered by universities;
- three-year undergraduate programmes offered by colleges;
- half-year master’s degree programmes.
Two-year courses for postgraduate training and one-year specialisation courses for graduates of the faculties of public administration are also offered.
These programmes are evaluated annually by the National Council for Accreditation and Academic Evaluation (NCAA). After an institution has three generations of graduates and has successfully passed three annual reviews, they receive full accreditation from the same committee. In 1995, as a result of a meeting of representatives of public administration schools and the Ministry of Education, a framework for a national public administration curriculum was developed. Initially, this plan consisted overwhelmingly of law or law-oriented courses, which caused individual universities to propose significant modifications. Many universities considered the implications of a single national curriculum harmful, especially at a time when university autonomy was growing and a “free market” capable of discerning between competitive programmes was evolving. Another controversial decision was that the structure of this national curriculum was to be adhered to until the year 2000. This was not generally perceived as a positive regulation given the rapid changes that the field of public administration is experiencing in general and in Central and Eastern Europe in particular. Moreover, the policy of modernising and “Europeanising” higher education, a reform initiated by the minister of education, demonstrated the need for a flexible system of education in the field of public administration and not one based on unilateral perceptions.
Increasing numbers of universities support an interdisciplinary approach and believe that there is no need for one centralised programme for the whole country. Many Romanian academics are carefully researching and designing better ways to organise programmes based on the models and experiences of similar programmes in Western Europe and the United States. In addition, some Romanian universities have designed their programmes in collaboration with Western universities.
In May 1999, at the request of several universities, the Ministry of Education held a second meeting on public administration curricula. The results were highly significant, especially considering the 1995 meeting: the idea of a curriculum of mainly law and law-related courses was abandoned. The representatives of various PA programmes agreed upon several important points:
- the necessity of making PA programmes interdisciplinary and compatible with modern and European values;
- the curricula of the PA schools will be built on four domains: administrative sciences, law, economics and social and political sciences;
- based on these four dimensions, each programme will build its own curricula and syllabi according to its own internal requirements and those of the job market;
- the need to adapt training programmes to the market and reform demands.
In addition, the idea of transferable credits was adopted, and the participants agreed to try to establish a system in order to facilitate a more integrated PA education system. This represented an essential transformation in the way PA higher education was perceived in Romanian universities and constituted the basis for future changes.
Recently, the efforts of Romanian universities to create a professional community of those involved in higher education in the field of public administration have intensified. The International Public Administration Conference, for example, was held in Cluj-Napoca in 1998 and developed various proposals to form a national and multinational community interested and capable of discussing the problems of public administration education. This type of approach is in its infancy in Romania, and there is still a general lack of communication between the actors in the field. This state of affairs created difficulties in collating this report, mainly because of the lack of personal and professional networks and the relatively slow flow of information. Nonetheless, it is a necessary enterprise, and one of the few attempts to create a broad and more interdisciplinary approach to the field of public administration among educators in Romania.
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