Study Programs in English in Non-Anglophone Countries: Looking at Impacts and Challenges from a Romanian Perspective

Developing new study programs required by the dynamically changing educational market is a matter of both university governance and faculty management. There has been lately a new and increasing trend to develop English language study programs as an answer to some university development issues. The background to this trend is the rapid pace of economic development that requires new language skills constantly. However, this language competence development involves on the one hand, very intimate processes that transcend the individual and belong to the capacity of societies to develop intelligently and, on the other, to the capacity of the educational system to be agile on the educational markets. This chapter will explore the tensions between offering study programs in English, which decrease in an unexpected way the language diversity of students, and the need for multilingual and multicultural graduates from our universities as the policies and jargon of the European Union suggest. The present study will also look at the complex competences needed in order to put together such study programs by university administrators and how to rally the important stakeholders into approving them. The issues are connected both with specific university structures and also with the larger educational system which, in Romania, seems unable to cater for interdisciplinarity other than in discourse. This chapter will explore some of the impacts and challenges that the author perceives as critical for the awareness of decision-makers in the educational field.