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It is with sadness that we note that today's announcement by the Rector of the CUT moves along exactly the same lines as the unacceptable statements made by the Vice-Rector before the Parliamentary Committee on Education on 24.1.2024. The problem of flimsiness is, therefore, serious and systemic. On this statement we note the following. 3.10.2023 to the Minister of Education, Sports and Youth, we stated that the University of Cyprus (Disciplinary Control of Academic and Other Teaching Staff) Regulations, which are also applied by the CUT, are inadequate as possible disciplinary offences of academics are examined by their own colleagues. We recommended that the investigation and subsequent disciplinary hearing be conducted by persons independent of the University in which the complainants are employed, by analogy with the procedures followed in the Civil Service as amended in 2022 following our own similar recommendations.
(b) A complaint was filed against the "triplet" professor in 2015 alleging that he was simultaneously employed on a full-time basis as an Associate Professor at a University in Greece, providing false medical certificates from private doctors in Greece to justify his absences, in the winter of 2017, he was not registered at all as a teaching professor in the programme he was in charge of at CUT and did not reside in Cyprus, while he falsely declared other professors' addresses as his home address. Instead of being subject to disciplinary and/or criminal control, the professor in question was given permission to work additionally at the Open University of Cyprus. And while in June 2019 the then President of the Council informed our Service that the case "is before the Disciplinary Control Committee for Academic Staff (CDC), which at this stage is in the process of examining and cross-examining the prosecution witnesses", he was eventually allowed to leave the University without any repercussions, not even a complaint to the Police for possible criminal offences.
(c) As for the cases before the EOC, those that were filed and not heard are 40 while the Rector refers to only five. In a letter dated. 7.9.2022 the former Chairman of the Council confirmed to us that "the EAC had received a large volume of complaints, about 40 in number". Even in the case of substantiated cases, the Rector claims that these should be "covered up" because the complainant decides to follow the law of silence in a logical omerta. For example, complaints of rigged electoral colleges have never been considered by the EEP.
2. With regard to the email from the Academic Guild of the TEPAK Academic Guild dated. 25.1.2024 and the report that incorrect figures were presented for the operation of the Department of Marketing and Communication, we note that the amount of €1.3 million mentioned by the representative of our Office, as the total cost of the Department for the five-year period 2016 - 2020, was given to us in an official correspondence by the former President of the Council dated. 12.10.2020. This amount was spent while the Department had not accepted a single student up to that time.
3. What is apparent is that the educational community of the CTCC is opposing and fighting the Director of Administration and Finance, the Audit Office and anyone else who opposed their recent scandalous payment decisions, monthly allowances to teaching staff (faculty/faculty members) in the School of Tourism, Hospitality and Entrepreneurship (DITUFE), which will be based in Paphos, regardless of whether or not they have teaching duties in Paphos. We have informed the Independent Authority against Corruption of these abusive decisions since November 2023.
4. In the recent meeting of the Parliamentary Committee on Education we called on the Ministry of Education, Sports and Youth to examine the models of administration of state universities of other European countries and to ensure the adoption of such an optimal model also in Cyprus, since it is obvious that, under the pretext of the universally accepted need for academic autonomy, phenomena of administrative and financial arbitrariness appear with taxpayers' money.
(ΕΠ/ΝΖ)
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