The presentation I am submitting to your attention focuses on how the University of Bucharest operated during the 1980’s, a very difficult period for Romania.  As to be expected,  the University of Bucharest, like the entire Romanian education system, took the full blow of communist experimental policies, reflecting quite accurately the general developments of the political system in Romania in the 1980s. The structure of Bucharest University, the curriculum, acceptance of the students via admission exams as well as the process of assignment of graduates from University of Bucharest to production units in the 1980’s, are aspects of university life which were all affected by profound changes during the period subject to the research, leading to a   genuine phenomenon in the Romanian society. The way these changes were reflected in the cultural mindset and the traumas generated by them are all points of interest addressed in my presentation.

According to the official communist rhetoric, the assignment of higher education graduates to socialist enterprises and/or institutions was ‘an action with profound social-political meanings, which aims to ensure the production units and other areas which the specialists they need’. The closure of the top most populated 14 cities starting with 1981 combined with the economic crisis of the 1980s and with various measures of the regime perceived as absurd, and made the system more restrictive than ever before. This study focuses on the changes of the job supply for graduates of the University of Bucharest during the 1980s, and on the process of assigning graduates to their work-place.