A special commemorative ceremony today marked the 65th anniversary of Tirana University, the first temple of Albania’s higher education system.
With “the pride, challenges and accomplishments” logo, honourable professors, distinguished university personalities over the years recalled the excellent work since the foundation of Albania’s main higher education institution in 1957 until nowadays when this University has been accredited with its all degree programs, enhancing every year its collaboration with leading international universities as an additional opportunity for our university students and academic staff to benefit from the exchange experiences. Prime Minister Edi Rama addressed the ceremony that marks a milestone event for Albania’s higher education system:
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Good evening everyone!
I was scheduled to be last to take the floor, since I cut it short and I am renowned for delivering short speeches!
First of all, I would like to extend my best congratulations on this anniversary. Indeed, we live in a strange world, because this is the first Tirana’s university and we mark its 65th anniversary today, but it was just a few days ago when I actually attended the 70th anniversary of the University of Medicine and it is not the only university to mark its 70th anniversary, although for me it turns out to have been established after the ’90s.
Second, what I would really like to say is that professor Ismet actually touched the most sensitive nerve in me vis-à-vis the university, not necessarily the Tirana University, but all the higher education institutions. I am probably the only one in this very room lacking a scientific degree, I haven’t attended a master degree program and I think I am a bachelor degree holder only and a painter certificate, yet I can’t help but say this, because I think and I believe that a large number of universities operate in the country and a high number of students attend higher education consequently. But the challenge is the university quality, the need to improve quality a lot and therefore we should seriously mull delivering a deep comprehensive reform and a fresh synergy with its gravity centre at Tirana University so that we don’t live indifferently or with the apathy of inertia, and the agony of universities in other territories across the country, as a good part of them are currently in a shrinking process, with an ever decreasing number of students, whereas the University of Tirana faces absolutely no problems regarding the number of students.
On the other hand, we should start to seriously think about the international ranking of Tirana University. We need to practically figure out that a series of simple technical requirements and criteria should be met for the university to rank in the international arena. For example, Tirana University can’t be properly ranked because it lacks the faculty of medicine. However, these are not issues to be addressed today, but they are just a reflection about what the professor noted that the university was born through unification of a series of institutes. I am pretty convinced that professor Et’hem agrees with me on the fact that the quality of those institutes that merged back then was actually much higher than today’s universities, although they were considered institutes only.
Third, I very much believe in the university internationalization process and we are already noticing some initial tangible and very encouraging results, since we seriously started to push and promote this process, but also since the universities already swallowed that “incongruous or irreconcilable bit” at the very onset of the higher education reform and have already started to scan their mechanisms. Tirana University has today – if I am not mistaken -around 800 lecturers . Around 400 of them are directly involved in the EU-funded projects, compared to only 50 university lecturers joining such projects prior to this shared endeavour was to start. This data is really significant.
Just like the fact that Tirana University leads three projects being implemented in collaboration with European universities is really significant. It is my ambition that we succeed in convincing the European Union to allow the Albanian universities and other universities in the region to be full-fledged members of the alliance of European universities, as it would open up a completely different horizon in terms of funding capacities, but, above all, in terms of the opportunity to create direct bridges and full unification of the curricula and the degree programs and the diplomas.
The steps being taken in this direction are really encouraging. In the meantime, the EU leaders at the EU-Western Balkans Summit on December 6 committed to launching the Bruges campus of the College of Europe in Tirana. A campus of the College of Europe was opened in Poland in 1991 to support the EU integration process of Poland and other countries that joined the European Union during the first wave of EU enlargement. The second campus will be opened in Tirana.
The University’s Institute of European Studies is a nucleus of respectable quality and sufficient potential to be seen as a point of reference while, as we speak, it has already embarked on an interaction process with the College of Europe.
Most importantly, the monthly salaries for professors, lecturers and other public higher education workers were increased under the university and government funds and you achieved your goal. In the meantime, together with the rectors forum, we are preparing to consider the conclusions of a report on the current situation and the objectives we want to achieve in terms of where we are seeking to take the higher education system until 2030 and we want to deliver on this plan together, not just as a vision, but also as a concrete project, through concrete steps and schedule. One of the elements we in the government are working with is differentiating the salaries in the sense of the government and the state contribution to the salaries of the university lecturers, so that we can better and highly reward quality, so that the ones contributing more feel more appreciated and put an end to the uniformity in financial reward and evaluation of the university staff.
This is very important, according to us, and we are working on that and I think we will be able to provide a concrete example on how to deliver starting next year. This means the government will provide an additional contribution to increase the monthly wages of the university professors, lecturers and employees, but I don’t want the media to speculate on this statement, because this is just the half of the sentence. The other half is that this pay rise won’t be uniform. In the meantime, we will allow primarily the Tirana University, as well as other universities, the University of Medicine for instance, which is a model in this respect, to use more of their fund if they wish to further increase the wages of the lecturers. However, these are plans we expect to materialize next year.
I kept half of my promise, because my speech was as short as you would have wished for, but it was absolutely as long as I would have dreamed about. So, I would like to express my profound gratitude and respect for your patience.
Happy end-of-year holidays!
May you be provided anything you wish for your families and be sure that 2023 will definitely be even a more difficult year, but for this reason will be also a better one.
Thank you very much!
