Comments on the draft Law on Higher Education

On March 2, 2011, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities had a working session with the National Assembly's survey delegation to collect opinions for the 2nd Draft of the Law on Higher Education.The survey team was led by Associate Professor, Dr. Le Van Hoc - Vice Chairman of the Committee for Culture, Education, Youth, Adolescents and Children - and the team members included: Ms. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Nga - Deputy Head of the Department of Culture, Education, Youth, Adolescents and Children, Mr. Nguyen Van Tuyet - Standing Member of the Committee for Culture, Education, Youth and Children, Mr. Hoang Van Loi - Expert of the Department of Culture, Education, Youth and Children, Ms. Dang Thu Hang - Expert of the Department of Culture, Education, Youth and Children. Associate Professor, Dr. Vu Duc Nghieu - Vice Principal of the University - and representatives of the leaders of the faculties and functional departments directly exchanged and discussed with the team. Synthesizing the comments on the content of the Draft, the majority of comments said that regardless of the development model, the autonomy of each university must be the first priority. All opinions unanimously affirmed that the higher the autonomy and self-responsibility, the more inertia is eliminated, increasing the dynamism of the school's leadership. Along with that, the structure and organization of the University Council in public and private higher education institutions must follow general regulations but must also have a certain independence. Prof. Dr. Tran Tri Doi (Faculty of Linguistics) said that the draft law still lacks regulations to regulate the behavior of the subjects that need to be regulated. He especially noted that the issue of language use in higher education needs to have clear regulations on the use of Vietnamese. Prof. Dr. Do Quang Hung (Department of Political Science) emphasized a number of points such as: Chapter II of the draft law when introducing the subject - higher education institutions still lacks political - social organization. And the most important issue of autonomy for a university is the structure of the program, financial autonomy, and human resources autonomy. According to Prof. Do Quang Hung, the issue of international cooperation also needs to have clear regulations. In addition, Prof. Dr. Dang Xuan Khang - Head of the Department of Organization and Personnel - suggested that the Draft should unify the ranks of civil servants and adjust the salary scales to be more reasonable. In addition, there were many other specific suggestions on words, terms, and concepts in the Draft; issues on quality assessment, diplomas, certificates, finance, assets, etc. were also presented in detail at the meeting. 30/450 universities and colleges will directly give comments on the draft Law on Higher Education, the University of Social Sciences and Humanities is one of two units under VNU giving comments on this draft law. Next July, the National Assembly will give its first comments on the Draft Law on Higher Education.