Browsing by Author "Miroiu, Adrian"

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Calitatea învăţământului superior din România : o analiză instituţională a tendinţelor actuale
(Polirom, 2011) Păunescu, Mihai; Vlăsceanu, Lazăr; Miroiu, Adrian; Florian, Bogdan; Voicu, Bogdan; Tufiș, Claudiu
The volume synthesizes the main results and trends in Romanian higher education, based on information collected over three years of sociological surveys, analysis of social documents, observations of various quality assurance processes. The obtained data are analyzed from an institutionalist perspective, detecting the expected consequences, but also the unexpected ones, often adverse effects, of policies, norms or practices of assessment, funding and accreditation in higher education. The validity of the analysis is ensured by triangulating data obtained from multiple sources, both objective and subjective perceptions and representations. The results constitute the foundation for the formulation of public policies based on comprehensive knowledge of Romanian higher education.
Collective choice in Aristotle
(Springer, 2019) Miroiu, Adrian; Partenie, Cătălin
In his Politics VI 3, 1318a–b, Aristotle discusses constitutional procedures for achieving justice in a society where its classes have different views on it. He ana- lyzes the case of a society consisting in two groups, the poor and the rich, each hold- ing a specific understanding of justice (democratic or oligarchic). In this paper we give, first, a non-formal summary of this section of Politics. Then we approach it in the framework of social choice theory and argue that a social rule for selecting between alternatives may be extracted from it. As Aristotle argued, this rule is con- sistent with the views on justice and equality of the supporters of both democracy and oligarchy. Finally, we study its properties, as well as some extensions of it when multiple classes are allowed or more than two alternatives are present.
Intelligence and intelligence operations in Romanian anti-partisan warfare, 1944-1958
(Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis LTD, 2015-05) Miroiu, Adrian
The Romanian anti-communist partisans constituted a small, scattered, diffused, and leaderless movement united only by nationalism and by the belief that armed struggle would contribute to the downfall of an illegitimate regime supported by a foreign power. This article provides an analysis of intelligence and intelligence operations used by the government to defeat these guerrillas, in a conflict that lasted a decade and a half. The sources for this study are mainly the collections of documents of Romanian secret police recently declassified and published.
Ranking Romanian academic departments in three fields of study using the g-index
(Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group, 2015) Miroiu, Adrian; Păunescu, Mihai; Vîiu, Gabriel Alexandru
The scientific performance of 64 political science, sociology and marketing departments in Romania is investigated with the aid of the g-index. The assessment of departments based on the g-index shows, within each of the three types of departments that make up the population of the study, a strong polarisation between top performers (very few) and weak performers (much more numerous). This alternative assessment is also found to be largely consistent with an official ranking of departments carried out in 2011 by the Ministry of Education. To conduct the evaluation of departments the individual scientific output of 1385 staff members working in the fields of political science, sociology and marketing is first determined with the aid of the ‘Publish or Perish’ software based on the Google Scholar database. Distinct department rankings are then created within each field using a successive (second-order) g-index.
Research-driven classification and ranking in higher education : an empirical appraisal of a Romanian policy experience
(Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2016) Vîiu, Gabriel Alexandru; Păunescu, Mihai; Miroiu, Adrian
In this paper we investigate the problem of university classification and its relation to ranking practices in the policy context of an official evaluation of Romanian higher education institutions and their study programs. We first discuss the importance of research in the government-endorsed assessment process and analyze the evaluation methodology and the results it produced. Based on official documents and data we show that the Romanian classification of universities was implicitly hierarchical in its conception and therefore also produced hierarchical results due to its close association with the ranking of study programs and its heavy reliance on research outputs. Then, using a distinct dataset on the research performance of 1385 faculty members working in the fields of political science, sociology and marketing we further explore the differences between university categories. We find that our alternative assessment of research productivity-measured with the aid of Hirsch's (Proc Natl Acad Sci 102(46): 16569-16572, 2005) h-index and with Egghe's (Scientometrics 69(1): 131-152, 2006) g-index-only provides empirical support for a dichotomous classification of Romanian institutions.
The "Black-Box" of institutional scores : analyzing the distribution of the values of the H and G Indexes in medicine schools in Romania
(University of Oradea Publishing House (Editura Universitatii din Oradea), 2015) Proteasa, Viorel; Păunescu, Mihai; Miroiu, Adrian
Measuring the university research performance has been an important focus of the higher education policies in past decade in Romania. In the present study we considered alternative methodologies for evaluating quality of research in the faculties of medicine. We set to compare the perspectives of past official evaluations with alternatives based on h and g indexes of the academics within these faculties and subsequent successive indexes and averages. We analyzed the distribution of the values of the individual h and g indexes and we rejected the universality claim hypothesis, according to which all university h- and g-index distributions follow a single functional form, proportional with the size of the universities. However, using the Characteristic Scores and Scales approach, we show that the shape of distributions is quite similar across universities revealing the skewness of scientific productivity. Given the high skewness of all distributions, we conclude that all three collective aggregation rules considered, averages, h- and g-successive indexes fail to provide an accurate measure of the differences between the individual academics within the six medical schools, and fail to provide scientific achievement incentives for the wide majority of the academic staff within the analysed faculties.
Universitatea românească azi
(Tritonic, 2015) Miroiu, Adrian; Florian, Bogdan
The volume provides a comprehensive overview of essential features of higher education in Romania, such as : the quality of university programs, the quality of scientific research, university funding or equitable access to higher education. At the same time, it includes applied analysis of public education policies implemented in Romania in the last two decades. Combining an academic approach with the presentation of the authors' personal experiences in the process of formulating and implementing these public policies, the volume is addressed not only to specialists, but to all those interested in the way Romanian universities have evolved over the last decades, as well as in the role of politics and politicians in this process.