„Ieri și azi despre Radio. 100 de ani de Radio Public în lume”, la Biblioteca Central Universitară Iași
Cu ocazia Zilei Mondiale a Radioului, aniversată pe data de 13 februarie, Serviciul Relații cu Publicul și Împrumut Interbibliotecar al Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare (BCU) „Mihai Eminescu” Iași organizează, în perioada 10-29 februarie 2020, în spațiul expozițional, expoziția bibliografică „Ieri și azi despre Radio. 100 de ani de Radio Public în lume”. Aceasta cuprinde cele mai reprezentative publicații din colecțiile bibliotecii având ca temă radioul, la care se adaugă câteva CD-uri și albume. Expoziția este întregită de colaje de fotografii și articole însoțite de texte explicative, din diferite domenii de interes radiofonic, precum: istoria radioului, Radio Europa Liberă – Radioul în timpul comunismului, Radio România, Radio Moldova – Radio Iași, teatrul radiofonic. Astăzi, 13 februarie 2020, ora 13:30, la etajul I al sediului central al bibliotecii va avea loc deschiderea oficială a expoziției. Invitat special va fi Claudia Crăcăleanu, manager al Radio Iași.
Publicație: Bună Ziua Iași
Alegeri importante la două mari universități din Iași. Cine sunt noii șefi
Ieri, 12 februarie 2020, atât la Universitatea Națională de Arte „George Enescu” – UNAGE, cât și la cea de Științe Agricole și Medicină Veterinară (USAMV) „Ion Ionescu de la Brad” au avut loc alegeri pentru desemnarea noilor președinți ai Senatelor acestor instituții. Astfel, la Arte a fost un singur candidat. Pe această poziție a candidat prof. univ. dr. Atena Simionescu, rectorul UNAGE timp de două mandate, respectiv în intervalul 2012-2020. Vicepreședinte al acestui for a fost ales profesorul Eugenia Maria Pașca. De reamintit că, după alegerile pentru funcția de rector, la Universitatea de Arte a fost ales prof. univ. dr. Aurelian Bălăiță de la Facultatea de Teatru.
Încep alegerile pentru funcția de rector la USAMV
Tot ieri, noul Senat al Universității de Științe Agricole și Medicină Veterinară „Ion Ionescu de la Brad” Iași l-a validat pe prof. univ. dr. ing. Gerard Jităreanu ca președinte al acestui for academic important. Dincolo de toate acestea, în perioada 14-18 februarie se pot depune dosarele de candidatură la funcția de rector. Aici, neoficial, se pare că va fi un singur candidat. Surse din interiorul USAMV arată că, foarte probabil, prof. univ. dr. ing. Gerard Jităreanu – Facultatea de Agricultură e posibil să candideze, după ce își va da demisia din funcția de Președinte al Senatului. Acesta este actualul președinte al Senatului de la Agronomie și a mai fost rector al USAMV Iași: 2004-2008, 2009-2012, decan al Facultății de Agricultură: 2000-2004, președinte al Comisiei Naționale de Doctorat (CNATDU), domeniul Agricultură – din 2006, președinte al Filialei Iași a Academiei de Științe Agricole și Silvice – din 2006. De precizat faptul că, în baza legislației actuale, rectorul în funcție al unei instituții de învățământ superior este incopatibil cu orice altă poziție decizională din conducerea unei universități. Așadar, cel mai probabil după ce vor avea loc alegererile pentru desemnarea noului rector USAMV Iași, prof. univ. dr. ing. Vasile Vîntu va candida pentru a deveni președintele Senatului.
Publicație: Bună Ziua Iași
Gerard Jităreanu a primit ieri un nou mandat la conducerea Senatului USAMV
Profesorul universitar Gerard Jităreanu a mai câştigat un mandat de preşedinte al Senatului Universităţii de Ştiinţe Agricole şi Medicină Veterinară „Ion Ionescu de la Brad“ din Iaşi (USAMV).
După o şedinţă care s-a prelungit până aproape de ora 19, şi în care au fost validate alegerile pentru directorii de departament, şcoala doctorală şi Senat, prof.dr. Gerard Jităreanu a fost singurul candidat, fiind votat în unanimitate pentru un nou mandat la conducerea Senatului USAMV. Vicepreşedinte al Senatului este actualul decan al Facultăţii de Horticultură, prof.dr. Lucia Drăghia. „Vechiul Senat a aprobat raportul rectorului, care a fost unul amplu, complex şi, chiar dacă prezentarea şi cu dezbaterile au durat aproape două ore, toată lumea a urmărit cu atenţie. A fost un bilanţ foarte bine realizat şi foarte frumos prezentat. În rest, conform metodologiei, am validat alegerile noi, şi la funcţia de preşedinte al Senatului am candidat doar eu, fiind votat în unanimitate“, a declarat prof.dr. Gerard Jităreanu.
Alegerile pentru funcţia de rector la USAMV vor avea loc pe 26 februarie, candidaturile urmând a se depune în intervalul 14 - 18 februarie. Au avut loc şi alegerile pentru preşedintele Senatului Universităţii Naţionale de Arte „George Enescu“ din Iaşi, câştigate de prof.dr. Atena Elena Simionescu, fost rector pentru două mandate al UNAGE.
Publicație: Ziarul de Iași
Landmarks in law: the disgraceful legal history of the Profumo affair
Legal experts have sought to reveal how the courts allowed the sex and spying scandal to destroy an innocent man
In 1963, London society osteopath Stephen Ward was found guilty of living off the immoral earnings of aspiring model Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies. Geoffrey Robertson, the veteran human rights barrister and author of Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK, calls it “the most disgraceful legal event in modern British history”. “It involved the destruction of an innocent man to stop him causing enormous damage to the Conservative government by revealing that war minister John Profumo had lied to parliament,” he says.
Almost 60 years on, public interest in the the sex and spying scandal known as the the Profumo affair remains undiminished, as demonstrated by the BBC’s recent drama series The Trial of Christine Keeler. It has also been made into a film and an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.
Ward had introduced the 19-year-old Keeler to Profumo, the married secretary of state for war in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, at Cliveden, the country house owned by Nancy Astor.
The pair had an affair, which rocked the government when it was revealed that Keeler had also slept with the Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, whom Ward had introduced her to.
Profumo lied and made a statement to the House of Commons denying the affair. Ward initially supported Profumo’s denial, but after police tapped his phone and drove away his clients by making their presence felt outside his consulting rooms, he threatened to expose the truth.
Ward then found himself on trial at the Old Bailey. On the evening after the judge’s summing up, he took an overdose and died three days later after being convicted in his absence.
But, Robertson insists, Ward was innocent. Keeler and Rice-Davies were not sex workers, and there was no evidence that he lived off immoral earnings. In fact the women lived off his income, contributing only a small amount occasionally for food and his telephone bill.
Robertson says the trial was “a charade, presided over by a judge committed to a conviction” and accomplished “not only by police fabricating evidence but by manipulation of the trial by the lord chief justice”.
In 2013, Robertson and solicitor Anthony Burton of London law firm Simons Muirhead & Burton asked the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), the body that refers miscarriages of justice to the Court of Appeal, to look at the conviction. According to Burton, there was no evidence that Ward had lived off immoral earnings
Lawyers acting on behalf of Ward’s nephew, Michael, argued that the conviction was unsafe because of the prejudicial effect of the publicity before and during the trial. They also claimed that there had been judicial interference by the Court of Appeal as crucial evidence had been withheld, and that the trial judge, Sir Archie Marshall, had misdirected the jury.
Robertson explains that the lord chief justice, Lord Parker, and a Court of Appeal bench that included his successor, Lord Widgery, sent a misleading letter to the trial judge. It informed him of the outcome of a case involving Keller but without disclosing that she had committed perjury and was therefore an unreliable witness. Following Ward’s trial Keeler was convicted of perjury.
The “reprehensible” manipulation of the trial by the Court of Appeal, he says, destroyed a key plank of Ward’s defence.
Burton, meanwhile, says that in the judge’s “hugely biased” summing up he wrongly told the jury that they could infer Ward’s guilt from the fact that none of his society friends and patients had come forward to support him. But they were all members of the establishment and had been too afraid to risk their reputations by coming forward.
Among those who failed to speak up in his defence was MI5. Contrary to insinuations at the time, Ward was not working with the Soviets but had in fact been helping the British secret service, and a word from them could have made a significant difference.
Burton and Robertson also argued that the trial was an abuse of the court’s process, because it had been politically motivated in an attempt to silence Ward and stop him from making embarrassing revelations. The trial, says Burton, was an “establishment stitch-up”.
In 2017 the CCRC accepted that the verdict would not stand today because of the massively prejudicial publicity, the misbehaviour of the appeal judges and of the trial judge. But it decided that due to the passage of time and death of Ward, there was no point troubling the Court of Appeal unless there was evidence showing political interference, which they said had not been produced.
However, the story does not end there. Broadcaster Tom Mangold, who knew Ward, made a BBC documentary which included evidence of a note from Sir Timothy Bligh, the prime minister’s principal private secretary, which supported the claim that the prosecution was politically motivated.
After Ward had telephoned to say that he would no longer support Profumo’s lie, Bligh wrote: “I reported this to the PM when he left the chamber about 5.15pm. There was some discussion with the PM and the chief whip.”
The note continues: “I subsequently consulted the commissioner of police … An arrest possible in a week or so but the case against him not at present very strong.”
Robertson says: “The Bligh memorandum is a smoking gun that provides clear evidence of interference by the prime minister, after the police were told in effect to ‘get Ward’ by the home secretary.”
He believes that the note must have been disclosed to Lord Denning, the former master of the rolls, who wrote the official report on the scandal, but failed to mention it.
The lawyers are thinking about taking the case back to the CCRC. But the whole truth may not be revealed until 2046, when secret files housed at the National Archive – including the trial transcript and inquiries made by Lord Denning – will be opened. They were ordered to remain secret, explains Robertson, until a century after the birth of the youngest witness, Rice-Davies.
Such a trial could still happen today, says Burton, where “moral panic” is whipped up, although safeguards including the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 make it “less likely”.
Publicație: The Guardian
Student in wheelchair forced to listen to lecture from top of stairs
Hull university launches investigation after zoology student raised issue on Twitter
The University of Hull has launched an investigation after a disabled student shared a photo on Twitter showing how its lecture theatres are inaccessible for wheelchair users.
The photo shows Sarah-Marie Da Silva, a zoology student, sitting in the doorway of a lecture theatre which has no accessible ramp allowing her proper access to the room. She added in another Tweet: “As a wheelchair user, I don’t have any option ... most days I don’t even have a desk.”
Da Silva told the Tab that the university has repeatedly failed to accommodate her disability.
The incident occurred last Friday, when she ended up stuck in the corner of the stairwell after realising there was no means for her to get down into the room.
“I turned and saw the stairs and panicked, I stopped,” she told the Tab. “The next 10 minutes was people arriving, them looking at me and then sometimes asking what was going on. I just told them I can’t get down and to just go past me.”
The first-year student said the problems started with her first lecture in September, in a lecture theatre where access to the room was at floor level.
“Everyone walked up the stairs to take their seats and I was left with nowhere to go – no desk, no seats next to me for other students and I’m right next to the lecturer. I was made to feel like an ‘other’,” she said.
Da Silva told the Tab she had raised the issue “countless times”. But the student added that, while the university had made room changes for some of her lectures, she still repeatedly found they were held in inaccessible spaces.
“A lot of the time there are no desks for me. If there are, they’re moveable desks, but the wheels are always locked and I can’t bend down that far to unlock them, so everyone in the theatre looks on at me whilst I struggle to get a desk,” she told the Tab.
Dr Anji Gardner, Hull’s Director of Student Services, said: “We’re very sorry that this has happened, clearly it is not acceptable. We take these matters very seriously and are looking into what has happened.
“We are committed to working with our students to put in place any additional support or adjustments where needed. Unfortunately, it is clear this hasn’t happened in this case. We will immediately look into this and ensure that we take necessary steps to make sure this does not happen again.”
Piers Wilkinson, disabled students’ officer, for the National Union of Students, said: “Universities across the sector are still consistently failing to provide basic access for disabled students. Disabled students deserve inclusive access to the entire university experience, and that starts with being able to get into our lectures.”
Publicație: The Guardian
'Naked intimidation': how universities silence academics on social media
Academics are warning that universities restrict their freedom by surveilling social media posts
When Cardiff University PhD student Grace Krause began getting headaches and back pain after staring at a computer screen for days on end, she decided to speak out online. “Staff are marking hundreds of essays in an impossibly short time. It is exhausting. Everyone is in crisis mode. Stressed, moody, morose, everyone feels like they’re drowning,” she wrote on Twitter.
The tweet came after a colleague had killed himself on campus and the inquest cited workload as a factor. Within days, all PhD students received an email referring to the tweet and asking for online comments about students and their work to be deleted. “It was such an emotional and painful thing for a lot of people,” she says. “They could have reached out to fix the problem. Instead, they shut it down.”
Krause is one of a growing number of academics convinced her social media accounts are being monitored by her employer. With universities worried about negative press and the impact it might have on student recruitment, management are said to be closing down discussions on workload, classism and sexual harassment on campus.
“There are issues of surveillance,” says Steven Jones, researcher in higher education at Manchester Institute of Education. “With universities now so terrified of reputational damage, you can see why this is happening.”
Others agree. “There are huge tensions,” says Mark Carrigan, a sociologist in the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge. “On the one hand unis are pushing their staff to be active online, on the other they are assessing their use of social media. We’re going to see ever-more problems.”
Universities increasingly recognise the value in academics having a social media presence – it helps recruit students, disseminate research and increase brand awareness. They also, generally, recognise that you don’t achieve this by tightly controlling what academics say – they need to find their own voice. “But when that individual voice is in conflict with the official brand it creates a tension,” says Martin Weller, professor of educational technology at the Open University.
The recent strikes over pay and pensions brought these tensions into focus. Universities were accused of using ‘intimidatory’ tactics to silence debate and the strikes radicalised people. John Hills*, a lecturer at a London university, got called into a 45-minute meeting after criticising senior management on Twitter. “HR was simply trawling the accounts of employees involved and looking for things to object to. It is naked intimidation,” he says. “They’re constantly watching and trying to drive conversations out of sight.” With another round of strikes on the horizon, academics worry this heavy-handed approach might be replicated.
Universities face a difficult task of upholding a powerful right to academic freedom and taking robust action when an individual goes too far, particularly if they indulge in personal attacks. Many are introducing social media guidelines to prevent unacceptable forms of behaviour. But this opens up channels for monitoring. At Exeter University, for instance, the guidelines reserve the right to monitor personal platforms and can include accounts used outside of work hours. At the University of Liverpool, the definition of social media is broad and includes Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. The University of Strathclyde’s policy leaves open the use of social media monitoring for recruitment in certain cases.
Even personal accounts that do not include real names, photos or identify an employer are being treated as an extension of the workplace. “I’m casual staff; I only work here a couple of hours a week and yet they still feel entitled to decide what I can post,” says Hills.
According to Imogen Reseigh, an employment lawyer at Trowers & Hamlins, this is not out of step with other industries. She says over the past few years employers in various sectors have been introducing social media policies and there has been a whole host of employment tribunals on the issue.
But universities aren’t like other companies. “They’re meant to be bastions of free speech, you’d expect them to be against silencing people,” says a humanities lecturer from a modern university, who did not want to give her name. “It’s down to the corporatisation of higher education. We sit there in our staff meetings talking about degrees as products and students as consumers. Most academics intensely dislike it.”
Others agree. “It’s all about brand protection. These institutions are powerful and they close discussions down because they don’t want student numbers dropping,” says Lisa Mckenzie, associate professor at Durham University, who is outspoken online about the hostility towards working-class people in university spaces. “We’re forced to speak out because they ignore us.”
Universities, however, say they are doing the opposite and there needs to be professionalism online. According to a spokesperson from Cardiff University, inappropriate public commentary on undergraduate work can “provoke anxiety and demoralisation” if read by the students affected. They say they are in no way silencing critical views or feedback, but there are other ways of raising problems. “Using official university channels – instead of social media – to report concerns means we can deal with any issues promptly.”
Both claim to care about students, so why is it going so wrong? In the past, academics were advised not to blog or use social media. It was seen as poor, sloppy content, and a distraction from legitimate academic work. The US Chronicle of Higher Education even published a piece titled ‘Bloggers need not apply’.
But things have changed: academics now benefit from social media visibility through paid talks, new connections and TV appearances. It even feeds into how research is evaluated in the UK. New measures like altmetrics have emerged, which assess the influence of research based on Facebook and Twitter engagement. “[Social media] can be consequential for academics’ careers. Increased hits and downloads of your research is one aspect of this,” says Manuel Souto-Otero, professor in social sciences at Cardiff University.
Some say it is causing academics to behave more like celebrities. “It’s certainly not impossible for people to build a large online following while retaining their scholarly integrity. But it is difficult because platforms are engineered to reward statements which generate a reaction, positive or negative, something nuance and caveat will tend to get in the way of,” says Carrigan.
While academics can benefit society by bringing expertise outside academic journals and into the public through social media, they need to be careful. As Carrigan says: “In many ways, social media isn’t particularly well suited to the in-depth expertise which academics bring.”
Publicație: The Guardian
Choisir son orientation : participez aux conférences O21 du « Monde » à Marseille
Comprendre le monde de demain pour faire les bons choix aujourd’hui : tel est l’objectif des conférences « O21, s’orienter au XXIe siècle » organisées par « Le Monde ». Prochaine édition à Marseille le 3 mars.
Lycéens, étudiants, jeunes diplômés, parents… Afin de mieux comprendre le monde d’aujourd’hui, faire les bons choix d’orientation ou de reconversion, Le Monde a créé les conférences « O21, s’orienter au 21e siècle ».
Prochaine étape le mardi 3 mars 2020 à Marseille, au Cepac Silo. Toute la journée, vous pourrez échanger avec des dizaines de personnalités venues du monde de l’enseignement supérieur, de l’entreprise, du secteur culturel ou associatif. Objectif : apprendre à se connaître, bien s’orienter, trouver sa voie.
Pour cette quatrième saison d’O21, chaque étape est parrainée par une personnalité avec qui le public pourra discuter. A Marseille, vous pourrez échanger avec Houda Benyamina, la réalisatrice du film Divines.
Participez à O21 Marseille : renseignements et inscriptions ici
Entre deux tables rondes, vous aurez la possibilité de rencontrer les intervenants autour d’un café, et de participer en petit comité à des ateliers consacrés à la connaissance de soi et des métiers.
L’entrée est gratuite, l’inscription recommandée. Chacun est libre d’assister à une ou plusieurs conférences et ateliers.
D’autres conférences O21 auront ensuite lieu à Paris, Toulouse et Nancy.
Publicație: Le Monde
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