Romanian President appoints adviser as minister of education - too little, too late

In an attempt to rescue his flagship project "Educated Romania", President Klaus Iohannis made a vibrant plea for academic integrity and zero-tolerance of plagiarism, appointing his adviser Ligia Deca as the new minister of education.

Deca (40) thus replaces Sorin Cimpeanu, who resigned last week after prolonged protests of the civic society that actually began before his appointment in 2020.

After seven years of undergraduate and graduate studies in the fields of navigation and port management (2001-2008), in 2008 Ligia Deca engaged in a career within the European bureaucracy as a representative of the students in the Bologna Process. Navigating and climbing up through the European bodies, she worked at the same time from 2012 to 2016 on her PhD thesis on the topic of the internationalization of education in Romania and Portugal.

The Romanian Academic Society (SAR) NGO, which actually gave Deca an impetus at the beginning of her career in 2008, required minister Deca to publish her PhD thesis on the ministry's website - which she will probably do to demonstrate academic integrity.

This would have been enough two years ago, but now it is not: journalists learned how to read between the lines of a European CV, and civic society's expectations for the status of a minister of education just leapt up the moment former minister Cimpeanu resigned.

"Can someone who has not taught at least one hour in a classroom be a minister of education? How can a ship engineer handle the education ministry?" - Ziarul Financiar wondered after concluding a couple of days earlier that the President's (and Deca's) Educated Romania strategy is criticized "by everyone who knows what education is all about, from university professors to elementary school teachers."

But not by PM Nicolae Ciuca (himself the holder of a PhD title and suspected of plagiarism).

"Today, at the meeting of the National Political Bureau, I came up with the proposal that Ligia Deca is the Liberals' proposal for the position of Minister of Education. She is a person who worked and participated in the process of elaborating the education laws and is able to continue and observe the debate and approval calendar so that by the end of October it will be sent to the Parliament for debate [and endorsement]", said PM Ciuca.

The nomination was found appropriate by President Iohannis.

(Photo source: Presidency.ro)