Romanian Science In Freefall

ananyo writes "In 2011, Romania took a step towards changing its cronyism-ridden research landscape by allocating government grants for science solely on the basis of performance. In 2012, a new government eliminated those rules, then slashed science funding — and since then things have gotten a whole lot worse. The entire National Research Council, Romania's main research-funding agency, has resigned in protest and 900 scientists signed a petition addressed to Prime Minister Victor Ponta, demanding that the research budget and quality control be restored. Ponta himself unfortunately has been accused of academic plagiarism so seems an unlikely figure to address corruption in the scientific establishment. The new science minister, Ecaterina Andronescu, is experienced — she's held the post twice before and is a rector at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. But she's already reversed conflict of interest rules brought in by the previous government that were designed to end cronyism. And no wonder — they would have meant that she couldn't be science minister and run a university at the same time. Oh, she has also been accused of plagiarism."

Speaking as a romanian national ...summary isRight

[Anonymous Coward]

speaking as a romanian national [and still living here]: Summary is right on the dime. Basically the old minister was a young chemist-intellectual that had fled communism at age 18 by himself. He was/is forward thinking and had a lot of personal achievements in his field before coming into politics. His name was Daniel Funeriu. He made a lot of enemies in the system because he made changes that changed the educational/research system. And not changes that dont change anything like we like it here. What happend was that the guy's party lost the elections and the old neo-communists came back to power (under the name of socialists). And Caty Andronescu is *the* archtype of old communist aparatchik that has zero achievement in her actual field of work but huge "achievements" in her party. This means changing something visible that has absolutely no practical result whatsoever and we can all siphon public money undisturbed. Basically young-and-result-oriented vs old-communist-the-party-is-my-wholelife-peon.

Re:any different here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, no different in the USA? I don't think that universities in the USA have a full professor in a physics department who doesn't know what is the direction of a friction force. The Univ. of Bucharest had quite a few such guys, I speak from personal experience having been an undergrad there in the early 90's. All the old communist party activists disguised as professors were still in their positions. And their research meant simply plagiarizing the same articles over and over, safe in the knowledge that nobody will read their articles anyway.