1.4. Bilingual street signs

Despite the fact that Hungarian-speaking pupils don’t have a linguistic basis in Romanian, they are expected to understand and interpret texts in Romanian that are beyond their linguistic knowledge, therefore this practice makes it very hard for Hungarian children to learn Romanian, a fact that puts them into disadvantage later on

Furthermore, regarding Romanian homeworks and assignments in general, the activity definitions and descriptions are worded entirely in Romanian. Pupils hardly understand what their task is, because there is no Hungarian explication even for pupils at the elementary level. Many children complain, according to their teachers, that they do not understand what they have to do in their homework assignments.

Observations and recommendations: According to the recommendations of this year’s European Regional Forum on Minority Issues “states should revise their constitutions in order to facilitate regional language immersion teaching as part of the national education framework.” The methodology of teaching Romanian to minorities is still not effective, even after a number of changes regarding the new national curriculum and the Romanian language and literature textbooks. Any measure should be pupil-centered, ensuring that minority children acquire proper language skills in the state language. Furthermore, Hungarian pupils again suffered the consequences of the ill-working educational system, Romanian language and literature textbooks for 9th graders have still not arrived at the time this report was compiled.

2.1.2. The University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely

The case of the University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș/ Marosvásárhely remains unsolved and the situation is getting worse, with no prospect of a reassuring future.

Hungarian higher education in the field of medicine is highly important and concerning, which can also be related to the right of the Hungarian community in Transylvania to be attended by a doctor who speaks their mother tongue. The community perceives the merge of the University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș/ Marosvásárhely and of the Petru Maior University as another attack, because any steps taken backwards, any regress, in terms of the achievements in the domain of education and higher education can have irreversible cultural consequences for the Hungarian minority in the long run. This is why the case of the Hungarian line of study at the University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science and Technology of Târgu Mureș/ Marosvásárhely is an inevitable pivotal point of the Hungarian politics in Transylvania, given that jeopardizing the Hungarian-language based higher education can have unforeseeable consequences. Taking into consideration all these, we will present the unsolved and increasingly problematic situation of the University.

The University of Medicine in Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely is presently the only higher education facility in Romania that provides medical training in Hungarian. Despite the fact that the Hungarian community has been asking for a Hungarian department for years, instead of moving towards an acceptable solution, the situation seems to be deteriorating. In the following we will summarize the absurd ongoing situation of the University by drawing a timeline of events that lead to the current situation of the University.

News surfaced in April of 2018 that the leadership of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy and those of the Petru Maior University, which is a purely Romanian university, have agreed to merge the two institutions. The objections of the Hungarian professors within the senate of the University of Medicine were not enough to impede the decision, as they made up merely a third of the vote. They expressed concern over the fact that the Hungarian leadership received no concrete assurances as to how the university would keep its multicultural character in case of a merge.

Despite the outrage of students, professors, prominent political leaders and the entire Hungarian community of Romania in general, the merge of the University of Medicine and Pharmacy of Târgu Mureș/Marosvásárhely and the Petru Maior University was finalised in September 2018, and consequently the already unstable and never quite fully materialised multicultural aspect of the university is in more peril than ever before, as the percentage of Hungarian students and professors dropped significantly.

In early 2019 the senate of the university decided to establish an English faculty, after resisting for years the idea of creating a Hungarian department, as required by the 2011 Law on Education, on the grounds that it would violate the autonomy of the university. Regarding the issue, Hunor Kelemen, the president of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR/RMDSZ), declared that “the creation of a Hungarian department is a legitimate expectation of students and professors”, adding that “it is difficult to find an argument against it – especially now that [the university] can accommodate an English faculty”.

There has also been significant setback regarding the ongoing problem expressed by Hungarian professors and students, namely that practical courses are taught exclusively in Romanian, even