“Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati represents a pole of academic excellence for the South-East Region of Romania, which concentrates the elite human resource specialized in educating professionals in numerous fields for an entire area with national and international reach. In its more than 70 years of existence, our institution has expanded and modernized, gathering around it, at the same time, an academic community focused on obtaining performance in teaching and research and thus, becoming a European-level university with both a modern and competitive – collaborative process with all students, on fundamental and applied scientific research, as well as on excellent relations, which have been developed with the local and regional business environment and local community structures.
The efficiency of the training process of the specialists – graduates of our university is proven by the fact that they are now part of the teaching staff of the institution. They have become renowned professors and researchers within other academic institutions in the country or abroad, are members of The Romanian Academy, of different prestigious scientific organizations, are active in the top technological and economic environment, public or private, national and international, in administrative structures, education, artistic and sports organizations. “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati proves to be, through its graduates, a scientific nucleus generating professionals whose diplomas - inscribed with the institution's logo - are a guarantee of quality, creativity and competitiveness in relation to the dynamics of the local, national and international labor market.
As rector of the university, I believe that quality management implies a real team effort, which is mandatory for my project for the development of this institution to be applied with good and excellent results. As I stated in the Management Plan on the basis of which I applied for this position, the key terms around which I focused my development program of all academic structures from Dunarea de Jos, are TRANSPARENCY and EFFICIENCY. Under their auspices are found, dynamically gathered, principles and wishes such as didactic and research performance in all fields covered by the 14 faculties of the university, respect for all the elements that define the idea of freedom, academic integrity and university autonomy, transparent decision-making and financial management reducing the bureaucratic pressure and streamlining the administrative activity - support of the basic, didactic and scientific activity - training, which takes place in our university.
I think that “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati must strengthen its prestige and direct influence within the local and regional community, maintain and expand its position as a leading trainer of specialists in education and research in the south-eastern area of Romania and, especially, to continue to compete, from similar positions, with bigger universities in the country and abroad. It is a natura desire, based on an objective analysis of the human and material resources which we have and on the results obtained until now and which form the main argument of my intention to transform our institution in an efficient instrument for applying the educational and competitive, collaborative – participatory training principles in relation to all the factors involved: students, professors and researchers, business environment, local and regional community. The university will become more and more involved in national and international research, development and innovation projects and partnerships, the research activity correlated with top technological dynamics, with performance in all fields covered by our specialists will be oriented and correlated with transferability to the technological and socio-human environment, as well as getting a higher position in international rankings.
The study programmes on the university’s educational offer: undergraduate, masters and PhD, postgraduate training, lifelong learning, training and conversion programmes suggest curricular strategies based on building professional and transversal skills, inter- and transdisciplinary, cultivating creativity, competitiveness, scientific responsibility, opening towards technological innovation and entrepreneurship.
The educational and training activity is, together with research, development and innovation, the main constituent of our institution’s academic activity. The diversity of fields and specializations is beneficial to the university. Each faculty and specialization has its purpose, and in my opinion, capitalizing on their complementarity represents the optimal course of action so that the obtained overall value is higher than all the individual values. From this perspective, promoting the current professors exclusively on academic performance criteria and bringing valuable young people represent decisive factors for ensuring the quality of educating our specialists.
The basic principles regarding the partnership relation with the students are the development of an educational process centered on its beneficiaries and the development of a culture of ethics and academic integrity that ensures the necessary framework for effective collaboration and objectivity in the joint decision-making act. Students from all the university’s programmes are our main partners in the educational and research process and, from this perspective, we will create and develop specific, professional and efficient instruments to develop career plans of undergraduates, master students and young doctoral students. The university provides them with study, merit and social scholarships from funds received from the ministry, as well as from projects or private funds. At the same time, the complex educational act involves encouraging volunteering, internships and all types of extracurricular activities that complement the graduates’ professional experience.
Regarding the research-development-innovation activity, the path on which our university is obviously ascending, thanks to the constant efforts of the academic community members. Maintaining and, above all, increasing it must be directed towards organizing multidisciplinary teams, which should have a bigger number of experts from various fields from the university. There is already, through the projects developed over the last 5 years and in which researchers from all the university’s faculties and from various fields are involved, a solid experience which will be developed with the purpose of implementing of inter- and multidisciplinary research directions and projects. Furthermore, I believe that organizing teams with professors, experienced researchers with a representative portfolio of projects, as well as master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral students is a mandatory condition to achieve high-performance research results simultaneously with the training of young generations of specialists whose experience is optimally correlated with critical thinking and innovative entrepreneurship.
For the ongoing internationalization activity in our university, my priority is to create institutes (Danubius-RI Data Center, REXDAN Research center, etc.) which will be supported by European institutions and which will lead towards higher international visibility of the institution that I run. Moreover, any initiative to develop the current extensions must be encouraged: in the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine and Italy, as well as recruiting foreign students, who come from the European Union and outside of it, at all three levels of study.
Briefly, all these represent our university’s main directions of development on all levels, through honest, involved, assumed, appreciated teamwork at its fair value and rewarded accordingly. My intention is not just for our university to keep its deserved position in the international rankings, but to develop qualitatively in such a way that more and more specializations become at the forefront of these hierarchies. Moreover, I suggest consolidating the cohesion and solidarity of the academic team in the spirit of the higher values we all believe in meritocracy, quality, academic freedom, TRANSPARENCY AND EFFICIENCY.
