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The intellectual and academic legitimacy of Comparative Education has been a critical issue in the international debate for a long time now. The fragility of the field is well known and understood. Despite frictions and misunderstandings, there are academic and professional structures robust enough to sustain the identity of the field in numerous countries on all continents. In Romania, there are no systematic concerns related to Comparative Education as an epistemologically autonomous field. Moreover, we cannot even argue for the existence of enough academic infrastructures to support Comparative Education as a research direction. But as countries in the world cannot afford to ignore global trends in terms of economy, technology, culture, Romania cannot disregard developments of educational policies and practices in Europe and throughout the world. Globalization and interconnections between contemporary societies raise common challenges for education systems in the world, and these are eventually reflected in national academic discourses. The major objectives of the present chapter are the following: (1) proposing an inventory of causes that led to the delay in establishing Comparative Education as an autonomous research field in Romania and (2) identifying progresses and accumulations that could lead to establishing Comparative Education as an explicit rather than tangential research field in Romania.

Academic dishonesty is a global challenge, with organizational and economic repercussions of the most undesirable kind. Worldwide, efforts are made to establish external and internal factors that contribute to the spread of unethical behavior, so that based on empirical evidence the most useful approaches to mitigating the phenomenon can be found. The present chapter has two major objectives. A first objective is to explore the steps taken by higher education institutions in Romania regarding the construction of an ethical infrastructure, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses. The author will refer to civil society initiatives and universities’ efforts, including legislative efforts. The second objective is to identify a set of lessons from international research that will support the intervention in the direction of building an academic ethical culture in Romania. Given the level of academic fraud demonstrated through research, the process of building university integrity is extremely difficult in Romania. The intervention of the political factors at the university level contributes to a great instability, sabotaging the process of implementing ethical standards. Ethics infrastructures from Romanian universities are incomplete, focusing on two formal components, namely the ethical code and the ethics commissions. There is no coherent chain of ethical decision, ethical management does not actually work. In conclusion, in Romanian universities, ethical principles are not a top priority, as they clash with organizational and governance practices.