Civil Society and Control of Corruption: Assessing Governance of Romanian Public Universities

Abstract

This article investigates the public perception of corruption in Romanian higher education. It reviews the governance practices of public universities in Romania through a survey of governance practices organized by the Romanian Coalition for Clean Universities (CCU), an alliance of NGOs, professional associations and student and teacher unions. CCU systematically monitored and investigated 42 Romanian state universities during the academic years 2007-2009. The goal of the survey was to assess the Romanian public universities’ governance, checking for the integrity, fairness and ability to control corruption of their procedures. The methodology of the project will be explained in detail in the second part of this paper. In the first, we shall review the meanings, causes and consequences of corruption and bad governance in the field of education and the particular context of postcommunist Europe. In the third (and last) section the results of the survey and some lessons learned will be presented.

Keywords: Academic Integrity, Corruption, Civil Society, Higher Education, Eastern Europe, Romania Survey