Ruben Topchyan, the director of the National Center for Quality Assurance (“NCQA”), spoke about university autonomy and quality assurance during the education seminar today. He said that the universities wish to be autonomous.
The NCQA Director said that, to become such, a university should be able to develop a specific strategy, which in his opinion not all the universities currently have. A university would like autonomy in spending its funds within a planned budget. It would like to have curriculum freedom, and academic and other freedoms in line with the requirements of the market. It would want to have a quality control and improvement system. Moreover, the government requires a university to follow the national policy, to appreciate the currency, and to carry out effective governance and administration. The NCQA Director said that they also have the “recipe”: “We offer to the universities to carry out self-review to see how effective they are and to what extent they meet the state’s requirements. A university should analyze the professional and academic programs, services, faculty, resources, public accountability, outreach, and the like. If we give a university autonomy, there must be a mechanism for controlling it all. The mechanism underlying our work is self-review… On all these points, a university should say what the institution tries to do, how, and how the institution finds out that it is achieving its goals. And the other thing is how will the institution change and improve.” Ruben Topchyan is convinced that Armenian universities are more used to reporting than review. Aravot.am cited the Open Society Foundations Armenia report called “Higher Education in Armenia Today,” according to which the NCQA cannot serve its purpose, because the chairman of its board is the Prime Minister of Armenia, who is concurrently the board chairman of one of the universities (the Pedagogic University), and asked Mr. Topchyan to comment. “I have even told the director of that organization. Would the issue be solved if the Prime Minister were not the Board Chairman? … The Prime Minister has never asked me about how the Pedagogical is doing or what we can do for the Pedagogical.” He then went on to say: “The European organizations that have assessed our performance, too, have recommended that, if the country so requires, that the Prime Minister be the NCQA Board Chairman, then he has to be elected. In Sweden and Bulgaria, too, by the way, senior officials are board chairmen.” Mr. Topchyan, however, did not preclude the potential for conflict of interest under such circumstances.
Gohar HAKOBYAN
