Cristina Nicolescu

2005-06 International Policy Fellow
Developing Socially Responsible Elites and the Challenge of Higher Education Reform working group

Abstract:
This study argues that although society in post-communist Romania has made huge strides towards embracing democratic values, one of the main challenges remaining is how political culture views the individual's responsibility to society.

The author examines how the education system can provide the means to produce such change, and evaluates how capable Romanian universities are of doing so. Believing the teaching of social responsibility to be one way of tackling proposed changes in business and economics higher education, the author presents the main findings of an inquiry into Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) teaching in Romania based on an analysis of universities' business and economics faculties' curricula, and complements this with a student survey focusing on CSR knowledge.

Finally, policy options are offered aimed at bringing CSR into universities' curricula, in order that the higher education system will be able to generate and support the needed changes in the level of individual social responsibility within Romania.

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