The elections for the rectory of the University of Algarve will take place on November 27 and there are three candidates for the position, all of them professors at the house: Adelino Canário, António Branco and Efigénio Rebelo.
O Sul Informação and Rádio Universitária do Algarve RUA FM interviewed the three candidates, in conversations that are an anticipation of the public hearings taking place on 26 November. Our newspaper released one piece per interview, this being the last one, with Efigénio Rebelo.
The article with the proposals of Efigénio Rebelo follows on from the ideas presented by Adelino Canary quality Antonio Branco, already published. The pieces were released in the order chosen for the public hearing.
Efigénio Rebelo: UAlg has to do “homework” in creating his own recipes
The University of Algarve will have to "do its homework" and "create much more of its own income" in order to have arguments when negotiating direct transfers from the State to the institution. Efigénio Rebelo wants a more productive university, where there is an increasing supply of subjects taught in English, he wants to create the Faculty of Biomedicine and bring established companies to university campuses, including multinationals.
These are some of the proposals that the candidate for Rector presents in his action plan, which focuses on four strategic objectives: internationalization; greater focus on employability of those who graduate from UAlg; strengthening the link between education and research, innovation and knowledge transfer in collaboration with companies; and the governance of UAlg.
This last axis, which advocates “a UAlg financially sustainable and supported by accreditation processes”, touches on a key point for the strategy of the coming years: the financial health of the institution.
"Universities have to do their homework, even to have legitimacy and credibility to be able to ask the Government for a greater contribution from the public purse, at a time when there are so many financial difficulties", he considered.
This does not mean abandoning “the discourse that the Government cannot assume responsibility, that it must finance institutions, because teaching and research are what will sustain our future”. “But if we don't have high performance indicators, how are we going to justify that we deserve greater support?” he asked.
The candidate for the rectory believes that it is possible to increase funding in this way, not least because in 2009, the university obtained «its own revenue almost equal to transfers from the State Budget».
«Now, we are very far from that, we have come down there. Okay, this has to do with the difficulties, but I don't know if the other universities came down like us. And this is the problem. We do not want and cannot afford to be proudly alone,” he said.
Internationalizing pedagogical offer is objective
“I want a university as well-known and internationalized as the region. I want to internationalize education in order to have access in the 2014/15 academic year to foreign 1st cycle students who apply for courses that we, however, are going to internationalize,” said Efigénio Rebelo.
Being able to offer courses to students from other countries implies structuring courses with subjects in English, in addition to Portuguese. This offer “is not exclusive to students coming from abroad” and supports another strategic objective, that of improving the employability of students. And the goal is for them to have more opportunities “in the regional, national and international market”.
With regard to research, science and technology transfer, Efigenio Rebelo believes that there must be “an UAlg that qualifies the region and for the country”. “I think UAlg was created to develop the region, and the fact that it has an international mission cannot serve as an excuse to forget about the Algarve”, he considered.
"I want to create two business centers within the institution, one in Penha, the other in Gambelas," he said. The campus located in the city of Faro it would be aimed "at regional companies", while Gambelas' one would be focused on "national and international companies", he said. A way of seeing “possibilities of research projects that we wouldn't see if they were outside”.
In the fourth strategic axis, in addition to the financial issue, there is the accreditation processes. “We have to be able to accredit our quality management and control system. There are only two universities in the country that have achieved this, Évora and Minho. We are a little behind in this process», he said.
Streamlining the training offer can free teachers for other tasks
Efigénio Rebelo also advocates a rationalization and reformulation of the training offer, in order to improve the quality of teaching. “I think we should go from 48 courses to 35 or 36”, he considered.
The oversupply, he says, "leads teachers to workloads that are too intense, which does not free them for other missions, such as creating wealth." Efigénio Rebelo's action program foresees, moreover, a reallocation of teachers, in the sense of putting them to do the tasks for which they are most interested, be it research, teaching or services.
Also in the pedagogical aspect, there is a proposal for the creation of four colleges to structure the offer of the 2nd cycle, the masters, which bring together units of the university and polytechnic subsystems, two by two, in four major areas: Education and Communication; Economy and Management; Technology and Engineering; and Health Sciences (in this case counting on a future Faculty of Biomedicine).
The idea of these colleges will be to fix the offer “so that there is no cannibalism between courses offered by the two subsystems”. The “same logic” will be applied to a Doctoral School to be created, which will have research centers “around it”.
The UAlg full professor, with a long career at the institution, where he has held several management positions and was a representative of his peers in different bodies, also says that his candidacy "is natural".
“I apply because I've been here for a long time, I have a great deal of experience in the area of management and because the institution's financial situation is dramatic,” he said. His profile, he considers, is ideal to face the challenges of UAlg.
Note: The interview with Efigénio Rebelo was originally aired on RUA FM at 18:30 pm this Friday, at the same time as the Sul Informação releases this article, while those with the other two candidates, Adelino Canary e Antonio Branco, originally aired on Wednesday and Thursday at the same time (just follow the links to hear them in full). Conversations can be heard again in full on Saturday from noon on 102.7 FM or on RUA FM website. The interviews were conducted by Hugo Rodrigues and Pedro Duarte, director of RUA.
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