Editorial

The old University of Malta has provided this country with graduates in the traditional professions for well over two centuries and since the late 1980s it has been meeting Malta's needs for graduates and diplomates in an increasingly wide range of fields. Geographically, however, this university, like a good many other Maltese institutions, has suffered from the fact that it is the only institution of its type that we have. This means it does not belong to a national network, thus lacking the possibilities of cooperation that such networks offer.

Undergraduate and graduate students, as well as their teachers, until fairly recent times have had to rely on special relationships with foreign universities to be able to pursue some of their studies, teaching or research abroad. This meant that the number of persons benefiting from such wealthy experiences was often very small.

Nowadays, however, European Union programmes such as Erasmus are making it possible for hundreds of students and staff to spend time in other European universities while at the same time bringing over staff and students from abroad to teach or study at Tal-Qroqq.

For our students, the possibility of spending a semester in, say, a French or an Austrian university is at the least useful and at the best valuable. There they find themselves exposed to methods, styles and trends of thought with which they may be utterly unfamiliar in their home university. Sometimes they also find themselves able to use resources, such as libraries and laboratories, much better endowed than those in Malta. Interaction with unfamiliar staff and classmates often adds a new dimension to their learning and the very venue where they may be studying can itself enrich their study of a whole range of humanistic studies.

Some students find the culture-shock overwhelming but the best and the most highly-motivated students generally have nothing but praise for their foreign studies.

For teaching staff spending some time giving classes to foreign students in a foreign university can be even more rewarding. This is because although most of them have to teach some of the ever-increasing number of foreign students registered at Tal-Qroqq, the experience of doing so in an institution where the intellectual environment may be different, from that of their home university will put them on their mettle and is likelier to make them aware of their academic limitations than if they had never taught outside Malta.

The University of Malta has good reason to be proud of a good many of its teaching staff and it is well-known that most of them do very well indeed as visiting lecturers abroad. The various faculties should do their best to encourage their members to spend their sabbaticals teaching and doing research abroad.

On the other hand, the hundreds of foreign students now studying at our university for just a semester or for the duration of a degree course should be making its administration keenly aware of the need to refurbish teaching methods and to take even more careful stock of its resources. Fortunately, the university's budget for this year is satisfactorily superior to the miserable level of the previous years and it is clear that units like the Library have been taking important steps to upgrade their services. Only by keeping this up can the university pursue its aim of becoming the most significant international university in the Mediterranean.