Editorial

The university has worked hard over the past 10 years or more to attract overseas students to study on its Tal-Qroqq campus. In addition, a sizeable number of undergraduate Maltese students have been enabled to carry out at least part of their studies in European or North American universities, while graduate students and academics have gone in increasing numbers to do research or teach for a while in foreign universities.

This movement has now become strong enough for the university to announce its aim for the new academic year as being 'Towards internationalisation'. As the rector, Prof. R. Ellul-Micallef, said in his speech at the inauguration of the academic year, in this era of globalisation our university needs to strive harder to internationalise its mission and activities.

By teaming up with other universities, whether in groupings like the Compostella or Santander groups, or individual universities, or utilising Socrates and other EU programmes, it is not only inserting itself ever more effectively and successfully in the great web of international study and research but also attracting more of the income needed to run an institution of this size.

Never in the long history of our university has it been so exciting and academically rewarding to study in it. The large number of Faculties, institutes and programmes run by it is impressively large, many members of the academic staff (who number around 650) have doctorates, and of the 8,100 students this year over 600 are foreign students from some 78 countries who will doubtless, as in the past few years, give the campus the international flavour it lacked so greatly in the past.

In addition, a sizeable number of the university's students will be spending at least part of the academic year studying abroad, around 250 of whom will be at European universities under the Socrates programme.

Marketing the university's many courses and services abroad costs money, and to maintain a campus likely not just to attract, but also win the respect of, foreign students costs even more.

Tal-Qroqq is an attractive campus that is still being developed and in most academic departments the staff-student ratio is satisfactory, but the university's finances, which still depend heavily on government funding, are not allowing its spending on areas like research and the provision of laboratory and library services to meet its constantly increasing needs.

Government cannot go on insisting on ever-increasing student numbers - over 4,000 new students this year - and graduates in a wide range of disciplines unless it looks seriously at the university's budgetary proposals.

At present its financing is equivalent to 0.72 per cent of Malta's GDP as against the EU average of 1.5 per cent. Cyprus puts us to shame with its 1.8 per cent. It is true that the government also spends millions on the stipends scheme but that is no reason why the university itself should be undernourished.

Under-investment in our university will not only hamper its progress towards internationalisation but also hinder its efforts to provide the country with the high-grade graduates and research it so desperately needs.