Ceremonie impresionantă astăzi la Iași. Viitorii medici rostesc jurământul lui Hippocrate
Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie „Gr.T. Popa“ din Iaşi va organiza şi în acest an ceremonia de absolvire pe esplanada din Piaţa Naţiunilor, eveniment aflat la cea de-a şasea ediţie în acest format.
Dimineaţă, de la ora 09.45, va avea loc ceremonia de înmânare a certificatelor de absolvire tuturor absolvenţilor, care va include şi discursurile decanilor şi ale „decanilor de suflet“ ai absolvenţilor.
În partea a doua, de la ora 19.00, când va avea loc ceremonialul drapelelor, rectorul UMF, prof.dr. Viorel Scripcariu, va saluta promoţia 2019, alături de ceilalalţi decani, iar la final va fi rostit jurământul lui Hippocrate.
„Vă invit să sărbătorim împreună, ca în fiecare an, promoţia care încheie studiile universitare. Absolvirea studiilor universitare este un moment deosebit şi merită punctat într-un mod deosebit. Urmând exemplul ceremoniilor de absolvire organizate de universităţi de prestigiu din afară, am transformat această zi într-una care va rămâne un moment deosebit în viaţa absolvenţilor şi a familiilor lor. Studenţii şi absolvenţii noştri trebuie să aibă sentimentul de apartenenţă la o comunitate universitară de elită“, a declarat prof.univ.dr. Viorel Scripcariu.
1.702 absolvenţi vor finaliza anul acesta cursurile la UMF Iaşi, cei mai mulţi dintre aceştia de la Facultatea de Medicină, specializarea Medicină, linia cu predare în limba română, în număr de 516. În total, de la Medicină, inclusiv liniile cu taxă în valută şi predare în limbi străine, vor termina studiile 1.024 de absolvenţi, în timp ce de la Medicină Dentară vor fi 350, Farmacie - 188 şi Bioinginerie - 140.
Absolvenţii promoţiei 2019 sunt din 33 de state ale lumii. Cei mai mulţi din afara României sunt din: Franţa - 112, Israel - 90, Maroc - 74, Tunisia - 72, Grecia - 36, Marea Britanie - 24, Republica Moldova - 11, Germania - 8.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
Un cercetător de la UMF a participat la o vizită de studiu internaţională în Italia
Universitatea de Medicină şi Farmacie „Grigore T. Popa” din Iaşi a fost reprezentată de un tânăr cercetător la vizita organizată pentru tinerii cercetători români cu responsabilităţi în proiecte de cercetare la Joint Research Center din Ispra, Italia, în perioada 17-19 iunie 2019
Din partea UMF a participat bioinginerul dr. Gianina Dodi, cercetător ştiinţific în cadrul Centrului de Cercetare-Dezvoltare în Medicină Experimentală, vizita fiind organizată de Comisia Europeană, prin serviciul ştiinţific intern, în colaborare cu Ministerul Cercetării şi Inovării. „JRC a sprijinit bursele de mobilitate la Ispra pentru 8 tineri cercetători români de la diverse instituţii din ţară. Agenda evenimentului a urmărit corelarea profilului JRC cu activitatea de cercetare din cadrul proiectelor în care cercetătorul este implicat: «Laboratorul de NanoBiotehnologii de la JRC dispune de facilităţi de ultimă generaţie, concepute pentru a promova studiile interdisciplinare». JRC este serviciul de fundamentare ştiinţifică al Comisiei Europene pentru procesul de elaborare a politicilor europene şi de identificare a soluţiilor la provocările societale majore”, au precizat reprezentanţii UMF Iaşi.
Publicație : Ziarul de Iași
Dutch consider breaking university selection ‘taboo’
The country’s increasingly similar universities also need to be forced to specialise, argues government advisory body
The Netherlands is mulling bringing in widespread student selection, breaking a cultural “taboo” and forcing universities to choose more distinct missions, amid fears that they have grown too similar.
If enacted, the controversial changes to admissions would mirror reforms introduced last year in France, where the government has given universities greater power to select their students in order to reduce failure rates.
The proposals have been put forward by the Advisory Council for Science, Technology and Innovation (AWTI), which advises the Dutch government and parliament, and have gained widespread media attention in the Netherlands, with some newspapers reporting on concerns that more selection could make higher education less accessible.
Selection is “apparently a taboo” in the Netherlands, explained Uri Rosenthal, the chairman of the AWTI, who is a political scientist and former foreign minister for the ruling People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy. It runs against a “very deep cultural idea” that “if you have the right [high school] diploma, you should be able to study where you like”, he said.
Dutch universities are already allowed to select for master’s and for some smaller, intensive bachelor’s programmes, he explained. But the AWTI report wants to broaden selection across all bachelor’s courses.
Increased selection can be used to “manage” student numbers in subjects for which the labour market has little demand, making higher education more “efficient”, says Shaking Up the System: Towards a Future-proof Higher Education and Research System.
More freedom to select students would be “very welcome”, a spokesman for the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) said, because “it increases the autonomy of universities and can help to improve study success”.
“However, some universities do not want to select students, and this is also fine; the AWTI does not propose a duty to select,” he explained.
Dutch universities have also become too similar, the report warns.
“What has happened over the past 10 to 15 years is that all the universities have broadened,” explained Sjoukje Heimovaara, a member of the AWTI and chief executive of Royal Van Zanten, a horticultural firm.
Even technical universities had begun offering courses such as business and psychology because funding was based on the proportion of students institutions enrol, forcing them to compete against each other for numbers, she said.
Some courses were now being offered at 10 campuses when five was sufficient, while research subject specialisation at universities had weakened, she warned.
Dutch universities do already make institutional plans, but these are often “vague” and lacking in hard targets, she said.
Instead, the AWTI wants universities to be assessed to see whether they are living up to new, more specialised missions, with between 5 per cent and 30 per cent of their funding on the line if they fail.
They need to set out a “clear profile” in “binding” institutional plans, it recommends, with universities forced to choose whether they want to pursue pure research, dissemination or teaching, according to the report.
Universities object to more regulation, the VSNU spokesman said, arguing that they are already heavily regulated.
The AWTI’s recommendations have now been passed to the minister of education, culture and science, Ingrid van Engelshoven. Whether they are accepted now depends on the reaction of the minister and parliament, said Dr Rosenthal.
Publicație : The Times
Loss-making UEL plans to borrow £103 million against residences
Planned securitisation deal aimed at improving student experience and ‘market share’, says v-c
The University of East London plans to take on more than £100 million of bond borrowing via a securitisation deal on its student residences, two years after it returned a deficit of £11 million.
UEL’s vice-chancellor, Amanda Broderick, said the university was borrowing not to construct new buildings but rather to invest in the student experience and “take market share”.
Concerns have been expressed about the increasing debt levels of UK universities, with a wave of university bonds issued since 2012 as competition to attract students intensifies.
UEL was among a number of institutions, many of them post-92s in London, to suffer in the unrestricted market in recruitment after the government lifted and then abolished student numbers controls. The institution saw its numbers of student acceptances fall from 5,510 in 2011 to 3,250 in 2017 – a 41 per cent decline – before rising to 3,945 in 2018.
The university returned deficits of £6.8 million in 2015-16, £10.9 million in 2016-17 and £600,000 in 2017-18. But it has focused on paying off its debts over that time and now describes itself as “debt free”.
The £103 million planned borrowing would be subject to approval by the English sector regulator, the Office for Students.
The university describes the borrowing as being via a securitisation deal on its student residences. Securitisation is a way of turning future income from an asset into an upfront cash lump sum.
A number of UK universities have issued bonds in recent years, but the only publicly announced previous example of a university doing so via securitisation of student residences was Keele University’s £75 million deal in 2000.
Professor Broderick, who took over at UEL in September 2018 after having served as chief executive of Newcastle University’s London campus, discussed the borrowing at a London Higher event on the capital’s sector.
The university has “secured one of the sector’s most competitive bonds, for £103 million”, Professor Broderick said. “And we’re not doing that to build capacity; we’re not doing that to put up some nice shiny buildings.
“We’re doing that in order to create a much more competitive business model. We’re doing that to invest in our student experience; we’re doing that to be able to support and partner with employers and with the enterprise community.
“So what we’re doing is a proposition to enable us to take market share but also to enable us to scope out new markets, not only through our organic growth but also through horizontal and vertical diversification as well.”
In a statement to Times Higher Education, Professor Broderick said that UEL’s debt-free status “gives us the flexibility to better use our assets”.
“The university is investigating a number of strategic investment opportunities, including the option of a £103 million securitisation on our student residences, to help us deliver our strategic vision. Our normal business operations are already fully funded, and the investment options are subject to contract and approval by the Office of Students,” the statement said.
UEL did not disclose the terms on the borrowing, such as the interest rate it will face.
Publicație : The Times
Paper rejected after plagiarism detector stumped by references
Editors say episode demonstrates need for humans to review work of software
News that robots are coming to steal our jobs may have been underestimated, following an incident which suggests that automation is going a step further in preventing human discoveries being published at all.
Jean-François Bonnefon, a research director at Toulouse School of Economics, told peers of his surprise in learning that a paper he submitted to an unnamed journal had been “rejected by a robot”.
According to Dr Bonnefon, “the bot detected ‘a high level of textual overlap with previous literature’. In other words, plagiarism.” On closer inspection, however, the behavioural scientist saw that the parts that had been flagged included little more than “affiliations, standard protocol descriptions [and] references” – namely, names and titles of papers that had been cited by others.
“It would have taken two [minutes] for a human to realise the bot was acting up,” he wrote on Twitter. “But there is obviously no human in the loop here. We’re letting bots make autonomous decisions to reject scientific papers.”
Reaction to the post by Dr Bonnefon, who is currently a visiting scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggested that his experience was far from unique. “Your field is catching up,” said Sarah Horst, professor of planetary science at Johns Hopkins University, “this happened to me for the first time in 2013.”
Sally Howells, managing editor of the Journal of Physiology and Experimental Physiology, said that her publications and most others used Turnitin’s iThenticate to detect potential plagiarism.
“However, this is the first time that I have seen a ‘desk rejection’ based solely on the score,” she said.
Ms Howells said that most editors would ask the system to exclude references from a plagiarism scan. “The software is incredibly useful, but must always be checked by a human,” she said. “Thankfully there are still a few of them left.”
Kim Barrett, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Physiology and distinguished professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, agreed that anti-plagiarism tools “need to be used appropriately, and they should never be the basis for an automatic rejection”.
Mark Patterson, executive director of the online megajournal eLife, said that his platform did not use software to screen for plagiarism but did conduct “a number of quality control checks…in addition to the scrutiny by the editors”.
“Where computational methods are used at other publishers, staff need to then interpret the findings to avoid situations like the one highlighted,” he said. “In the future, of course, these techniques are likely to get much better.”
Publicație : The Times
Mexican universities are part of the solution, not the problem
Corruption, poverty and inequality can’t be tackled by weakening the state and driving academics abroad, says Mark Aspinwall
I first set eyes on Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or Amlo, as he is known), several years before he took office. It was at a rally in Mexico City’s central square. I was a long way away, but even from a distance, his charisma and the adoration of his followers were obvious.
He retains that admiration among vast sections of the population, and the full-scale campaign against waste in government that has characterised his first seven months in office is widely supported. But less so among those of us who work in the research institutes and universities that have been caught up in the austerity net.
Even before Amlo took office, the Congress (with his approval) passed legislation to reduce benefits to public sector workers; we lost health benefits, contributions to pension plans and seniority pay. The new law also forbids pay from non-salary sources. This will affect our compensation, given the productivity-based incentives in areas such as publications that to some extent compensate for our low salaries. Basic pay has not increased even nominally since 2009 and, in real terms, is now 60 per cent of what it was in 2006 (about £1,500 per month after taxes).
The Centre for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), where I work, is one of 26 centres run by CONACYT, Mexico’s national science foundation. Despite having only 125 full-time academics and less than a thousand students, we are nevertheless enormously influential in Mexico, contributing to world-class academic research, policy debates, media activity and lifelong learning. Our graduates go on to occupy top positions in public life. Yet, like other CONACYT centres and public institutions, we have taken a huge hit financially during this emerging period of austerity. Our budget for 2019 is likely to be about 30 per cent lower than it was in 2016.
We have voiced our concern repeatedly to various government bodies, including CONACYT, but have met with a mixed reception. Amlo himself is famous for not having much truck with experts like us. He prefers “popular thinktanks”: sometimes a referendum, sometimes a show of hands at a rally. He associates the “neoliberal” regime with Mexico’s corruption problem, and blames scientists and intellectuals for defending the former.
Cuts have also been made to already low library budgets, research assistantships, student scholarships and other scholarly resources. We have scrambled to create a lecturer’s union to try to defend our rights – somewhat late in the day, but better than nothing. Nevertheless, some colleagues have left and others are openly looking for work outside Mexico.
For a time, we thought we may not see them again at international conferences. One of Amlo’s most drastic proposals was to freeze international travel for all public sector workers. To leave the country for academic activities, we would have had to ask permission from the president himself. This has now been amended, fortunately, but equally alarming is that the new CONACYT director, María Elena Álvarez-Buylla Roces, told members of Congress that the administration is seeking “scientific sovereignty”. This is very much in accord with Amlo’s well-known disdain for all things international: in his first seven months in office he has not left Mexico and will not attend this week’s G20 meeting in Osaka. Álvarez-Buylla may not intend to adopt the exclusionist and nationalistic measures that her words conjure, but at the very least she fails to recognise that successful academia requires openness and collaboration.
Although public, CIDE is autonomous in terms of its research and opinions. This is incredibly important given the legacy of authoritarianism in Mexico. Indeed, many of CIDE’s leading lights through the years were refugees from authoritarian regimes in South America. There is no sign that this independence will be challenged, but the self-moderating influence is notable nonetheless; most of us are being careful about the tone we set in public discourse.
To be fair, Amlo is no Hugo Chávez, as he is sometimes accused of being. The funding cutbacks began three years ago, under the last president, and, despite them, several very strong young colleagues are set to fill some of our vacancies at CIDE. Moreover, if the present challenges prompt a simplification and clarification of the academic salary and compensation system then they will have done us a service.
But while Amlo’s priorities of addressing corruption, poverty and inequality would be at the top of anyone’s list, even a cursory glance around the world makes it obvious that the way to tackle these problems is not to weaken the state. Quite the reverse. Institutions of transparency, monitoring, accountability and justice – not to mention effective social programmes – need good people and adequate budgets to do their work.
We in academia can help – and we have been helping for quite some time through our research on governance and social policy, our work with civil society and our policy activities. But we also need adequate resources, as well as the ability to connect with ideas, scholars, practitioners, funding agencies and other global networks. If the government really wants to strengthen science and technology, improve higher education, upgrade knowledge, and jump-start development, it would do well to pay attention to these concerns.
Publicație : The Times
Fin des épreuves écrites, quota de boursiers : Sciences Po Paris chamboule sa sélection
Sciences Po Paris va supprimer ses épreuves écrites d’entrée en première année, au profit d’une sélection sur dossier, notes du bac et entretien.
C’est une secousse dans le monde de l’enseignement supérieur : la fin du concours symbolique d’une grande école, et son entrée dans une nouvelle ère de la sélection, plus individualisée, où l’oral prend désormais la place de la sacro-sainte dissertation.
Sciences Po Paris a annoncé, mardi 25 juin, une refonte de sa procédure d’entrée en première année, à partir de 2021. Finies les épreuves communes d’admission, emblématiques du « concours à la française ». Terminées la dissertation d’histoire, l’épreuve en sciences économiques ou en philosophie et l’épreuve de langue vivante, trio sur lequel ont planché en 2019 plus de 5 000 lycéens.
Désormais, comme dans les universités anglo-saxonnes, la sélection s’effectuera essentiellement sur dossier : notes obtenues pendant le lycée, rédaction d’un « essai » personnel, résultats du bac. A ce tiercé s’ajoutera un oral, auquel seront soumis tous les candidats présélectionnés, et qui mêlera un entretien de motivation et une discussion autour d’un document.
La procédure sera identique pour tous, y compris pour les lycéens issus d’établissements étrangers (qui disposent aujourd’hui d’une procédure parallèle), ainsi que pour les jeunes des 106 établissements défavorisés avec lesquels Sciences Po a signé des « conventions éducation prioritaire » (CEP). Ce concours spécifique, créé en 2001 et basé sur des oraux, a permis à 160 jeunes d’intégrer Sciences Po en 2018 (environ 10 % de la promotion).
« Nous faisons face à une crise globale de la légitimité des élites, qui nous amène à remettre sur le métier toute notre procédure, explique Frédéric Mion, le directeur de l’établissement. Nous voulons plus de diversité des parcours et des origines, et nous voulons aussi prendre en compte divers critères d’excellence, pas seulement académiques : l’ouverture d’esprit, la persévérance, la capacité d’invention ou de résilience d’un candidat. » Il inscrit aussi cette réforme dans le contexte des réflexions en cours pour amener plus de diversité dans la très haute fonction publique, pour laquelle Sciences Po constitue le principal sas d’entrée.
CSP+ en majorité
La fin du concours d’entrée en première année n’est finalement que la dernière marche d’une stratégie engagée il y a vingt ans par Richard Descoings, alors directeur de Sciences Po, pour assouplir un système qui avait tendance à sélectionner des étudiants aux profils trop homogènes. Outre les CEP, lancées en 2001, Sciences Po a supprimé, en 2013, l’épreuve de culture générale de son concours, considérée comme la plus discriminante socialement. Puis, en 2017, l’école a éliminé les épreuves écrites pour l’entrée en master au profit d’une sélection sur dossier.
Publicație : Le Monde
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