Since the fall of the communist regime in Central and Eastern Europe the universities had to face the need for autonomy. In some cases, it was an internal need. In others, it was only a principle that came together with the EU constraints or was a very fashionable, discursive issue for political parties.
My paper aims to examine the relationship between State and University, by taken into consideration the specific case of the University of Bucharest, the leading public university in Romania. The focus will be on:
1. How is defined the institutional autonomy in post communist Romania, during the transition period (as a starting point for the analysis) and how this relationship changed (or not) during the various legislative changes in the past few years (the last Law of Education entered into force in 2011).
2. Who decides what in the Romanian HEI’s?
3. How the University of Bucharest reacted in very specific situation of control and infringement of its autonomy, such as procedures for hiring the academics, study programs, the double degrees, evaluation of the universities and of the academics, the importance of research, etc
For the qualitative analysis I am using primary sources (archives of the University of Bucharest, archives of the Chamber of Deputies, and public documents of the University of Bucharest).
The relationship between university and State will be studied both in the pre-accession and post-accession period in order to see the changes related to the institutional autonomy and the State control over the Romanian higher education institutions, underlying the related issues in time of crisis.
