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Karl Schembri
He had all the deans’ backing and the sympathy of academics outraged by government’s heavy-handed manoeuvring, but university Rector Roger Ellul Micallef has decided to leave his seat in deafening silence, allowing Melita Cable CEO Juanito Camilleri to stand as the uncontested candidate for the rectorship.
The process for nominations closed Wednesday amid expectations that the incumbent rector would submit his nomination at the eleventh hour, but the call made by all the 10 faculty deans to sit for re-election went unheeded.
Prof. Ellul Micallef has steered away from the media since Prof. Camilleri’s nomination was made public.
Equally silent was the supposedly outraged academic body, which protested not much against Prof. Camilleri but against government’s blatant manoeuvring to appoint its choice.
The university academics’ union, UMASA, expressed its concern that government was influencing the choice of rector through its representatives on the university council after all 13 members appointed by the prime minister and the education minister nominated Prof. Camilleri.
The students’ council, KSU, is said to have made an internal U-turn about Ellul Micallef’s candidature. At first, student representatives on the council were believed to be on his side, but on Wednesday they were reported on The Times as saying that if Ellul Micallef had to contest the election, “he must convince the students’ body he could bring about this change” in “direction and management style”.
Shirking away from any initiative in the process, KSU president Anthony Camilleri said it was up to the university council to nominate other candidates, ignoring the fact that two of the council members were students’ representatives.
Anothony Camilleri’s vision is really Mintoffian in essence but sugared with fashionable rhetoric.
“The most pressing change required was to make courses better suited to the job market,” he said, explaining his visionary direction. “A number of courses did not provide students with work experience, while others were not targeted at the right market niche.”
Everything else on the supposedly free-thinking campus is said off the record.
They complain of Mintoffian imposition, of a return to rigid utilitarian views on degrees and of lack of democratic processes on the university’s highest bodies. Of the 10 deans, only two sit on the university council that elects the rector, and it is only the deans who are directly elected from their peers in faculty elections.
Writing today in a letter to this newspaper, Prof. Kenneth Wain, who submitted his nomination for rector in 1996 against Ellul Micallef’s, the philosopher speaks of the goings-on in rectorship elections.
“I was naive enough … and I did absolutely no canvassing on my own behalf before the election,” he writes about his experience. “At the time I was Dean of the Faculty of Education and I had not canvassed for that position either. … I believe one should be chosen, if at all, on one's merits. The interview with Council, many of whom did not know me, did not materialise. Instead I was told to make myself available to the Council members individually on the morning of the election. From my meetings with the few members who turned up to meet me that morning, some of them clearly embarrassed, I quickly deduced that I stood no chance of winning. One of the Government selected members even spelled it out to me, told me that there was a block vote in my rival's favour, and pressed me hard, even aggressively, to withdraw my nomination. … That experience taught me that competing with a serving pro-Rector who clearly enjoys the incumbent Rector’s support, is a waste of time. It is also nearly impossible to change a Rector who decides to stay on indefinitely without the unfortunate kind of manoeuvring the Government has resorted to in the present case. In short, the present system of selecting the University Rector is quite simply bad. It is bad in principle for the University for Rectors, whatever their merits, to stay on indefinitely and it is bad that Rectors are appointed by the Government.”
The new rector will take over in June, just as government will be making the final touches to its new financing plans for university courses, which are set to change things on campus radically along the imperatives of functionality and cost-effectiveness.
Prof. Camilleri, contested the 1998 general election with the PN is clearly on the government’s side. Only last month, Education Minister Louis Galea appointed him on the newly set up National Commission on Higher Education, which will regulate the finance tap for university and all other post-secondary and tertiary institutions. An IT specialist and associate professor, he headed the state-owned mobile telephony Go Mobile since its inception, steering it to a 50 per cent market share in competition with Vodafone, until he moved to Melita Cable as chief executive.
“It would be very over simplistic to say that the only contribution I can give to university is in IT,” Camilleri told MaltaToday last week in reaction to reports explaining government’s backing for him ahead of the Smart City project launch. “University also needs to boost the humanities, because it is through them that we can make Malta more culturally sophisticated and that would also benefit tourism. I can understand academia because I was a researcher and a lecturer for around eight years, and I can use my experience in industry to build a good bridge between the academic and the real world.”
www.maltatoday.com.mt/2006/03/05/t2.html
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