Student assessment of professors emerged in the context of university democratization and increasing involvement of students in the management of the higher education institutions. It was institutionalized mainly as an instrument to gradually improve the quality of teaching, and only rarely used as an element determining the hiring and firing of the academic staff. In Romania, it came to the forefront only in the context of the Revolution of December 1989, when students started to question the competence of their professors and asked for the removal of those whom they considered unfit. The article focuses on the concrete case of the “black list” issued by the history students in the University of Bucharest, and on the way this revolutionary challenge shaped the institutional governance and the further development of the Faculty of History. The analysis refutes attempts to consider this episode as a politically-motivated purge and to integrate it in the master-narrative of post-communist lustration. While highlighting the particularities of this case, which allowed to professionally-motivated students to initiate a major reshuffle in the functioning of a higher education institution, the authors argue that such a synthetical evaluation pattern may in fact be one of the not so uncommon ‘revolutionary’ paths towards establishing a regulated system of student assessment of professors.

"The Evolution of the Faculty of History at University of Bucharest (1970-1989). Case Study: A look into the professionalization of history graduates through the analysis of study programmes. In this article I will analyse the evolution of the Faculty of History within the University of Bucharest from 1970-1989, from the perspective of the admission process, the changes that have occurred among the study programs, the number of students and the provision of the skills necessary for graduates to become good professionals in the domain. Keywords: history, history-philosophy, students, education, Romanian Communist Party "

In this article I analyze how Scînteia, the official newspaper of the Romanian Communist Party, was transformed in just one day into Scînteia Poporului. The analysis will be based on interviews with journalists and the collection of the two publications. The first issue appeared in the early morning hours of December 22, the second in the evening of the same day.

In the Romanian education system, the 1980s were a time of big constraints. The most severe decline in the number of places in the higher education system occurred in the preparation of the academic year 1982/1983. This trend continued during the following years, albeit it was less drastic. In this paper I try to answer the following questions: Which was the overall significance of the cuts? How were the cuts distributed among forms of higher education – daytime courses, evening courses and extramural courses? Which were the reasons behind these cuts? Were the cuts motivated by the employers’ demand of graduates?

ABSTRACT:One of the measures which had a major impact in achieving a free press was the liberalization of the media market, and thus foreign trusts were able to enter the market. These trusts promoted a politics free from any political interests, and also being passed over in the property of certain persons or national groups. In the first years after 1989, foreign press trusts attempted to develop a powerful media network in the respective countries, aiming at making huge profits, since the "hunger for press" was so high that profit was guaranteed. After December 1989 in Romania, the state monopoly gradually vanished due to the appearance of some new press enterprises, even though, at an early stage, setting up a publication did not have the required legal framework. In 1990, it may be noticed that press was regrouped into two large categories: one consisted of headlines which belonged to the state and were later to undergo privatization, and the second one consisted of headlines created by private enterprises, individually or grouped. During the privatization process, various methods were used, according to case. As compared with the other countries in the region, Romania did not benefit from the contribution of foreign capital dedicated to the development of the mass-media system. Despite this lack of foreign capital into the mass-media market, Romanian undertakings were courageous enough to invest in this field, in which gains had become a certainty.