Rectorul şi prorectorul Academiei de Poliţiei, urmăriţi penal de DNA în dosarul ameninţării cu moartea a jurnalistei Emilia Şercan
DNA a demarat urmărirea penală împotriva rectorului şi prorectorului Academiei de Poliţie „Alexandru Ioan Cuza“, în dosarul privind ameninţarea cu moartea a jurnalistei Emilia Şercan.
Rectorul Adrian Iacob şi prorectorul Petrică-Mihai Marcocii au fost plasaţi sub control judiciar pentru 60 de zile şi sunt acuzaţi de instigare la şantaj, după ce ar fi determinat un angajat al instituţiei să-i remită jurnalistei Emilia Şercan mesaje de ameninţare cu moartea pentru a renunţa la investigaţii.
”La sfârşitul lunii martie – începutul lunii aprilie 2019, inculpaţii Iacob Adrian şi Marcoci Petrică-Mihail, rector, respectiv prorector al Academiei de Poliţie „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, l-au determinat pe inculpatul Bărbulescu Gheorghe Adrian să transmită unei persoane, jurnalist de investigaţie – persoană vătămată, mesaje de ameninţare (un mesaj tip text şi cinci mesaje folosind aplicaţia Facebook Messenger) pentru a o constrânge să înceteze investigaţiile jurnalistice care îl vizau pe rectorul Academiei de Poliţie, urmărind astfel eliminarea riscurilor pentru cariera lor profesională. Concomitent, cei doi instigatori i-au promis poliţistului care a trimis efectiv mesajele de ameninţare că îi vor asigura protecţia pentru a nu fi tras la răspundere penală şi, pe parcursul săvârşirii faptelor, chiar i-au adresat încurajări”, a transmis, joi seară, Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie, printr-un comunicat de pres,citat de News.ro.
Sursa citată a precizat că Iacob Adrian şi Marcoci Petrică-Mihail au profitat de ”ascendentul pe care li-l dădeau relaţia de subordonare funcţională, diferenţa de vârstă şi de grad profesional, relaţia personală care se dezvoltase între ei şi recunoştinţa acestuia din urmă pentru oportunitatea de a continua să activeze în mediul universitar” şi l-au determinat să ”transmită mesaje de ameninţare persoanei vătămate pentru a o determina să înceteze investigaţiile jurnalistice care îl vizau pe Iacob Adrian”.
”Solicitările au fost transmise în cadrul mai multor discuţii pe care Bărbulescu Gheorghe Adrian le-a purtat atât separat cu cei doi, cât şi împreună, în sediul Academiei de Poliţie. Aceste demersuri au fost determinate de faptul că, în perioada martie – aprilie 2019, persoana vătămată a publicat mai multe articole care vizau în mod direct activitatea rectorului Academiei de Poliţie, Iacob Adrian, care ar fi putut avea consecinţe semnificative asupra carierelor celor doi ofiţeri superiori, astfel încât pentru aceştia era esenţial ca anchetele jurnalistice să înceteze”, a mai transmis DNA.
Procurorii subliniază că ”trebuie avut în vedere că funcţiile în cadrul învăţământului universitar presupun deţinerea titlului de doctor, iar continuarea publicării articolelor ar fi determinat un interes public crescut în sensul verificării suspiciunilor de plagiat”.
”Interesul lui Marcoci Petrică-Mihail în stoparea anchetelor jurnalistice era determinat de faptul că numirea în funcţia de prorector depinde în mod direct de rectorul instituţiei de învăţământ, astfel încât pierderea funcţiei de către Iacob Adrian ar fi avut consecinţe negative şi asupra acestuia. În acest context, există bănuiala rezonabilă că Marcoci Petrică-Mihail a conceput planul folosit pentru transmiterea mesajelor de ameninţare, astfel încât să fie imposibilă identificarea autorului faptelor. De asemenea, există bănuiala rezonabilă că Iacob Adrian şi Marcoci Petrică-Mihail i-au comunicat lui Bărbulescu Gheorghe Adrian conţinutul mesajelor de ameninţare care urmau să fie transmise persoanei vătămate şi i-au dat asigurări prin promisiunea că îl vor proteja pentru a nu fi tras la răspundere penală”, au mai transmis procurorii DNA.
Pe timpul cât se află sub control judiciar, cei doi inculpaţi trebuie să respecte următoarele obligaţii:
- a) să se prezinte la organul de urmărire penală ori de câte ori este chemat;
- b) să informeze de îndată organul de urmărire penală cu privire la schimbarea locuinţei;
- c) să se prezinte la organul de poliţie, conform programului de supraveghere întocmit, sau ori de câte ori este chemat.
- d) să nu depăşească teritoriul României decât cu încuviinţarea prealabilă a procurorului competent;
- e) să nu se apropie de persoanele menţionate în ordonanţă şi să nu comunice cu aceştia direct sau indirect, pe nicio cale;
- f) să comunice periodic, conform programului de supraveghere, informaţii relevante despre mijloacele sale de existenţă;
- g) să nu exercite funcţia de rector, respectiv prorector şi să nu îşi mai desfăşoare activitatea în cadrul Academiei de Poliţie „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Bucureşti;
- h) să nu deţină, să nu folosească şi să nu poarte arme;
”Inculpaţilor Iacob Adrian şi Marcoci Petrică-Mihail li se atrage atenţia că, în caz de încălcare cu rea-credinţă a obligaţiilor care îi revin, măsura controlului judiciar se poate înlocui cu măsura arestului la domiciliu sau măsura arestării preventive. În cauză, procurorii au beneficiat de sprijinul lucrătorilor din cadrul Inspectoratului General al Poliţiei Române”, a mai transmis DNA.
Percheziţii la domiciliul şefilor Academiei de Poliţiei
Procurorii DNA au efectuat percheziţii joi, la domiciliul rectorului şi al prorectorului Academiei de Poliţie din Bucureşti, în dosarul privind ameninţarea jurnalistei Emilia Şercan. De asemenea, au fost percheziţii şi la locuinţele mai multor ofiţeri.
Emilia Şercan şi autorul ameninţărilor cu moartea, Gheorghe Adrian Bărbulescu
Dosarul în care jurnalista Emilia Şercan a fost ameninţată cu moartea a fost preluat de DNA, după ce iniţial dosarul fusese deschis de procurorii de la Parchetul de pe lângă Judecătoria Sectorului 4, care viza infracţiunea de ameninţare. Emilia Şercan a primit mesaje de la un absolvent al Acdemiei de Poliţiei, care îi cerea să renunţe la investigaţiile jurnalistice privind suspiciunile de plagiat privind lucrările ştiinţifice ale conducerii Academiei.
În vârstă de 23 de ani, ofiţerul suspectat că a ameninţat-o cu moartea pe jurnalista Emilia Şercan a fost audiat şi a fost plasat sub control judiciar pentru 60 de zile, din 25 aprilie..
Anterior într-o postare pe Facebook, Emilia Şercan şi-a arătat consternarea vizavi de identitatea autorului. ”A fost identificată persoana care m-a ameninţat cu moartea. Este un ofiţer de poliţie, angajat al Academiei de Poliţie. Sunt într-o evidentă stare de consternare. Un ofiţer de poliţie, pus să apere legea, ameninţă cu moarte un ziarist de investigaţie. Este inimaginabil aşa ceva! Sper că de data asta va exista puţină onoare prin structurile de conducere ale Academiei de Poliţie”, a scris Emilia Şercan, anunţând că va reveni cu informaţii.
Tânărul se numeşte Gheorghe Adrian Bărbulescu. A absolvit Academia de Poliţie „Alexandru Ioan Cuza”, Facultatea de Poliţie, Programul de studii universitare de licenţă „Ordine şi Siguranţă Publică”, anul trecut, când a şi luat examenul de licenţă, în sesiunea din iulie, cu nota 8,80, în specialitatea Poliţie rutieră. Ofiţerul pare decis să meargă mai departe cu studiile pentru că, în luna septembrie a anului trecut, a fost admis, cu nota 8,20, la examenul pentru studiile Master în specialitatea „Comunicarea socială proactivă a poliţiei”.
Publicație : Adevărul
Could an American liberal arts approach improve the British higher education system?
The flexible and intersectional education format would better prepare 21st-century students than a single course of study, argues William G. Durden
As an American, I have been immersed in the liberal arts all my life, so I’m always surprised when I am asked by colleagues in the UK about its benefits, and how it could improve British higher education.
The breadth of a US liberal arts education is truly remarkable. Generally, a four-year programme for undergraduates, it encompasses studies in the humanities, arts and sciences and increasingly emphasises the interaction of disciplines to prepare students for ever-changing life and work.
The UK understanding of liberal arts is arguably restricted to the humanities and does not include the sciences, thus limiting the flexibility of thought that comes from mixing academic disciplines often thought mutually exclusive.
Not only that, but the focus in UK universities upon a single course of study for the majority of degree programmes excludes exposure to various areas of knowledge and ways of thinking that could advance innovative and creative thinking.
Additionally, the out-of-class experiences – including experiential, community service and team (cooperative) learning – are thought invaluable to a liberal arts education and are, therefore, structured to complement formal academic instruction. They intentionally introduce intangible learning objectives – such as asking questions of diverse audiences, listening well and teamwork – that are indispensable in life and work.
And while it is mistakenly thought that a liberal arts education is impractical – even in the US the question “What do literature, philosophy, etc., have to do with a job?” comes up – it was interpreted after the American War of Independence to be eminently practical for providing the knowledge and skills that at the time would contribute to building a new nation and arguably today, prepare a life that can navigate longevity and an ever-changing job market.
Flexibility is a big plus factor for a US liberal arts approach. A British international relations BA student at Richmond, The American International University in London told me, “A liberal arts degree allowed me the freedom to fine-tune my degree to what I wanted to get out of it rather than be set on a course that I wasn’t 100 per cent sure of.
“During my studies, I was able to take courses that otherwise would have been unavailable to me yet still managed to build upon my degree and expand my understanding of the international system and its history.”
In the best of circumstances, an American liberal arts education, regardless of profession and life path, focuses on how to ask the right questions; how to gather information from various sources for a purpose; how to make informed decisions; how to see connections among disparate areas of knowledge; and how to see what others never see because of their narrower perspective.
It also teaches students how to learn quickly the basics of a profession or life situation; where to go for more information; how to discern valid information from that which is false or misleading; and how to apply past knowledge to understanding and sometimes solve contemporary challenges.
In their provocative 2016 book, The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, London Business School professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott argue that some people believe the inevitability of a 100-year lifespan and the related necessity of a flexible, multi-stage life plan to replace the rigidly linear, three-stage concept of a life – education, work, retirement – associated with a shorter lifespan, will render “an updated form of liberal arts…surprisingly valuable”.
They associate the liberal arts with “the importance of human and emphatic skills and the focus on creativity and innovation” – all essential for a life of constant re-creation.
And while the UK might benefit by adopting a US liberal arts approach to education, the US might well profit by adapting the ways in which UK institutions explore the depths and dimensions of various courses of study so as not to offer superficial instruction when so many subject areas are covered in an undergraduate education, as in the US.
In fact, comparison of the two systems of education to yield a better overall education for future students is a superb example of a liberal education at its best – bringing together disparate practice and understanding to yield something new and relevant.
Publicație : The Times
UK ‘failed to protect’ innocent students in cheating scandal
Watchdog’s report finds evidence of widespread cheating but also says some falsely accused international students may have been removed
The UK’s Home Office should have done more to protect the rights of innocent students caught up in an English language testing scandal, the National Audit Office says.
A report by the watchdog says that the Home Office had cancelled international students’ visas without properly checking whether they had actually cheated, meaning that some people may have been wrongly accused and in some cases, unfairly removed from the UK.
The Home Office action was launched in 2014, after a BBC Panorama investigation exposed widespread fraud at English language test centres conducting exams for the Education Testing Service (ETS). Reporters found students at certain testing centres had paid others to take their spoken and written exams, and an invigilator had read out the answers to multiple-choice questions.
Since the scandal, 2,468 people have been forced to leave and 391 were refused re-entry to the UK, the NAO says. In total, at least 11,356 people who took the language tests have left the country.
So far, 31 defendants from six organised crime groups have stood trial and 25 have been convicted. Twenty-one have received prison sentences totalling 70 years, and four more await sentencing.
Ninety-six colleges had their licences to sponsor visas suspended, while only eight have been reinstated since.
Sir Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, said that the Home Office “acted vigorously” to exclude individuals and deal with colleges involved in the scandal.
However, he said that the NAO believed the department should have taken “an equally vigorous approach to protecting those who did not cheat but who were still caught up in the process, however small a proportion they might be. This did not happen.”
To work out the scale of the fraud, ETS had used voice recognition software to determine which tests had been cheated on, marking them as invalid, questionable or cleared of suspicion.
However, according to the NAO report, “for two years the department revoked the visas of anyone with an invalid test, without expert assurance of the validity of voice recognition evidence”.
ETS originally identified virtually every test in the UK as suspicious. After employing two human listeners to verify the results, it identified 58 per cent as invalid, 39 per cent questionable and cleared the rest.
ETS had not used the voice recognition software before. A National Union of Students-commissioned expert review said that voice recognition software could have made errors in up to 20 per cent of cases and human listeners could have made errors in up to 30 per cent of cases. However, a Home Office commissioned expert said that the margin of error was 1 per cent.
The NAO said that it is difficult to identify how many students were wrongly identified, but had found “anomalies” that the Home Office had not looked into, including thousands of people who were suspected of cheating based on voice recognition checks but had low scores in multiple-choice tests.
Many students have appealed against the decisions to revoke their visas. By March 2019, 12,500 appeals had been heard and 3,700 had been won. However, the Home Office has not tracked the reasons why.
The report also said that students at the colleges that had their licences revoked were affected irrespective of whether they been involved in the scandal.
Meg Hillier, the chair of the Public Accounts Committee, said that the Home Office had responded to the testing scandal with a “no-holds barred approach”.
“The Home Office made no effort to identify innocent people, and may have removed some from the UK who were not guilty of cheating,” the MP said. “The Home Office must take urgent steps to check whether its response to cheating has been fair and proportionate for all those involved.”
The Home Office said: “As the National Audit Office has highlighted, the Tier 4 [visa] system was subject to widespread abuse in 2014 and almost all those involved in the cheating were linked to private colleges which the Home Office already had significant concerns about.
“The report is clear on the scale and organised nature of the abuse, which is demonstrated by the fact that 25 people who facilitated this fraud have received criminal convictions.”
Publicație : The Times
Retention challenges leave ‘debt-free’ promises sounding hollow
Impact of massive gifts may be limited if high dropout rates among disadvantaged students cannot be reined in
Major donations by Robert Smith to Morehouse College and by Michael Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University both promised debt-free education to graduates. Across two substantially different institutions, however, both are seen as falling well short.
At Johns Hopkins, one of the wealthiest US universities, the $1.8 billion (£1.4 billion) donation back in November included pledges of increasing minority enrolment and helping inexperienced students navigate college, yet without details of how extensively that would happen.
At Morehouse, a historically black college, Mr Smith’s commencement surprise this month – an estimated $40 million to cover the entire student debt of the graduating class – sidestepped the fact that about half of its entering freshmen don’t last long enough to toss their mortar boards.
The cases reflect a pattern, several experts said, of US universities and their allies making impressive efforts to get more low-income students on to campuses, then lacking the resources to help guide them through to completion.
“This explains why the past decade has seen such a switch in emphasis amongst policymakers and intermediary organisations and foundations on college completion,” said William Casey Boland, an assistant professor of public and international affairs at City University of New York Bernard M. Baruch College.
“Despite this attention, completion rates haven’t increased by much.”
Counselling to help students with little family experience in higher education “doesn’t really exist out there – it’s the missing link”, said Anthony Carnevale, a research professor and director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
“Dollar-for-dollar,” Professor Carnevale said, “an increase in access is less effective than an increase in academic and career counselling.”
Johns Hopkins has a $4 billion endowment, and Mr Bloomberg’s additional $1.8 billion is enough to generate some $80 million in student aid annually. The university has spoken of using some of that money to boost minority enrolment and counselling of high-need students. But despite six months of promises that Hopkins would clarify how much of the gift actually will be used for those purposes, it has not done so.
And, two months after accepting its latest freshman class, the university has not said whether the gift produced any significant reduction in the overwhelming majority of Hopkins students coming from the nation’s wealthiest families.
As such, the gift does not currently appear especially transformative, said Robert Shireman, director of higher education policy at The Century Foundation. “There is no indication that it will change the elite college dynamics,” Mr Shireman said.
As a historically black college, Morehouse appears to do much better than most US universities in guiding students from disadvantaged backgrounds, Dr Boland said. “Extra attention to the student’s background and an embrace of their community” – common features of minority-serving institutions – are shown by research to boost completion rates, he said.
Still, Morehouse has graduation rates of about 38 per cent within four years and 56 per cent within six years. Those figures are far better than the averages for black men nationwide, but still demonstrate the challenges facing even a benevolent billionaire such as Mr Smith.
“Both the Hopkins and Morehouse gifts are generous,” said Jessica Thompson, director of policy and planning at the Institute for College Access and Success. “But both underscore the need for policy solutions at scale, not philanthropy, as the most effective and equitable way to address college costs and debt.”
Publicație : The Times
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