University students during lab time. Photo baodautu.vn

HÀ NỘI — The Việt Nam Association of Universities (VNAU) is calling for the State to increase budget for autonomous universities.

“The State should not cut the budget of self-financing autonomous universities but on the contrary, it should increase budget support for schools that successfully implement the policy of university autonomy.”

That is one of recommendations in a report to the Government that the association has researched since 2014 on university autonomy.

Accordingly, VNAU recommended that university autonomy should not be implemented at the same time across all public universities, but there needs to be an appropriate roadmap.

In addition, the State needs to have different levels of autonomy for higher education institutions.

Legally, there are currently only 23 public universities that have the right to pilot university autonomy, the remaining universities are still operating under the governing mechanism.

Therefore, before broadly implementing university autonomy, the Government should periodically evaluate the pilot innovation of the operating mechanism of 23 public higher education institutions according to Resolution 77 on Pilot Innovation for New Operating Mechanism for Public Higher Education Institutions in the period 2014-2017.

"However, in the past few years, the Law No 34/2018/QH14 amending and supplementing a number of articles of the Law on Higher Education and Decree 99/2019 detailing and guiding the implementation the amendment and supplements of the Law on Higher Education as well as directions from some management agencies have made universities and the whole society mistakenly believe that all higher education institutions are given the right of full autonomy," VNAU’s report states.

Recent surveys showed that many universities, including many major ones, that have piloted autonomy, are not yet ready to voluntarily switch to an autonomy mechanism.

Therefore, in the near future, the Government needs to divide public universities into three groups of fully-autonomous, semi-autonomous and non-autonomous universities.

Autonomy can only be given to a collective leadership (i.e the school councils), not to individual principals. Otherwise, the principals can easily become dictators.

Therefore, only autonomous public universities really need school councils.

Notably, the report states: "It is completely unreasonable for the Ministry of Education and Training to have, in recent years, directed the mass establishment of school councils in universities that have not yet been converted to autonomous mechanisms or in universities where the governing agency has not voluntarily given up its direct management role over the institutions."

The association believed that eliminating the governing body or the governing body mechanism will stop the ‘asking and giving’ mechanism  and help the school councils have real power, but cannot deny their leadership role of State management agencies and Party committees.

"It should not equate autonomy with self-sufficiency in resources as currently thought.”

“The State should not cut the budget of autonomous universities, but on the contrary, it should increase budget support for schools that successfully implement the university autonomy policy, considering them as places worthy of the State's focused investment to quickly improve the quality of these schools, helping them soon become national key schools," the report said.

Meanwhile, for private universities, the association said that under Law 34/2018/QH14 and Decree 99/2019/NĐ-CP, there is a drawback that investors are given too much power, even being able to easily neutralise the school councils.

Therefore, it is necessary to study adjustments and supplements to complete the regulations for private universities. — VNS