Universitatea Creștină Dimitrie Cantemir | |
Established | 2002 |
---|---|
Location | Bucharest , Romania 44°24′53″N 26°06′55″E / 44.414613°N 26.115257°E |
Website | www |
Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University (Romanian: Universitatea Creștină "Dimitrie Cantemir") is a private university in Bucharest. The university was founded in 1990 by Momcilo Luburici and Corina-Adriana Dumitrescu as the Dimitrie Cantemir Independent University, which has since developed 17 faculties in Bucharest, Brașov, Cluj-Napoca, Constanța and Timișoara.[1]
The Romanian newspaper Gândul reported that Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University started 34 Master's degree curricula for which it had no legal right of teaching.[3][4][5] According to the university's rector, Corina Dumitrescu, the relevant law has a loophole, since it uses a present continuous tense, which is uncharacteristic for the Romanian language.[3][4] She says that institutional evaluation (accreditation as required by law) may also happen after the curricula have been taught. The actual wording in Romanian is universitate acreditată supusă periodic evaluării instituţionale ("accredited university subject to periodical institutional evaluation"), and Dumitrescu argues that care se supun ("which are subject to") means that an accredited institution can be evaluated "today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow" (and presumably, any time), not that its curricula would need to have been evaluated (i.e. accredited) in the past.[3][4] For the study year 2010–2011, 16 Master's curricula from nine of its faculties are accredited in Order no. 4630/2010 of the Department of Education.[6]
After proper educational assessment, the Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ARACIS) issued a Degree of High Trust (Romanian: Grad de încredere ridicată to the university, the highest qualification awarded in Romania to a higher education institution.[7] In 2011, the university was inspected by The European University Association as an "education-centered university",[8] meaning that it focuses more on teaching than on research. In Romania, this "education-centered university" category is the third and lowest grade that Romanian universities can get.[8] Following this, "education-centered universities" in Romania were no longer allowed to offer postgraduate degree programmes.[8]