The idea of returning

After the first years of resettlement in Italy, when the worries of daily life had finally begun to settle into a certain order, and when an academic career in Italy had become an illusion, the thought of a professional return to Romania came back to me with increasing insistence. I was not thinking, at that moment, of a definitive biographical return, although perhaps that idea was not entirely foreign to me either. I was thinking above all of the department: of the courses I had left in excellent condition, of the students who had shown me that they knew how to find support in me, and of the feeling that my true identity remained tied to teaching and research.

In those years, Romania was changing rapidly and confusedly. The period of stagnation of the 1980s had suddenly come to an end, and the gates had opened, almost indiscriminately, to everyone. For those who had left, the country had become accessible again, but not transparent. One could return physically, yet one did not know whether there was truly still a place for one in the institutions one had once left behind.

Nevertheless, my thoughts naturally turned toward the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. There I had been formed, there I had taught, there lay the center of my university biography. I therefore saw the years 1993 and 1994 as a possible bridge between my two lives: the one before emigration and the one that had begun, with so many difficulties, in Italy. I had the hope, perhaps naive, that a return to the Polytechnic could restore a continuity that history had brutally broken.

The first failed attempt

Very soon I was to understand that returning never means the pure resumption of the past. People had changed, balances had changed, and I myself was no longer the man who had left. I wrote to the Rector’s Office of the Polytechnic, announcing that I wished to resume my teaching activity, interrupted three years earlier. The answer came relatively quickly: Professor Adelaida Mateescu, the vice-rector, congratulated me on the decision and assured me that my position as senior lecturer was waiting for me. I immediately realized that this was not the path to follow.

During my next visit to Romania, I went to the Polytechnic. I met my former colleagues, among them N.T., my former student, who had become a professor and head of the Department of Computers. He proposed an administrative solution: to assemble a professorial teaching load from available courses, then to open that position for competition. I would apply and, in this way, return to the department as a professor.

Problems appeared from the very beginning. My old courses had been taken over by others: Compilers, Formal Languages, Software Engineering. I did not want to upset anyone and proposed that I teach new courses, which I had in mind after the years spent in Italy. The solution N.T. found was to include in the teaching load an available, not-assigned course, “Advanced Complements in Computer Science,” and another programming course for a faculty of the Polytechnic.

So, the new staffing plans for 1994 included a professorship designed for me. But at the meeting of the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers, the vote on my return was negative. The Council had forty-two members, and approval would have required at least twenty-one votes “in favor.” On that day thirty-three members were present, of whom only eighteen voted in favor. The proposal was rejected, and thus I could no longer return to the Faculty of Automatic Control. The dean, T.D., a former colleague from the department who had been promoted after 1989 as a revolutionary, could have intervened by asking for the vote to be repeated when attendance would have been closer to 100%, as had happened at other universities in similar situations, but he did not do so, a sign that he agreed with the verdict.

The decision took me by surprise; I could hardly believe it, and in a way it amused me. I had not expected my former faculty colleagues to vote against my return. Later, speaking with some colleagues from the Department of Automatic Control, I understood that the opposition had come, well organized, precisely from the Department of Computers, that is, from people whom I all knew and whom I had believed to be friends. If that was indeed how things stood, my retrospective view becomes all the more bitter.

Ovidius University offers me a chance

The door of the Polytechnic had not opened as I had hoped, so I should have resigned myself to it. Life could continue as I had organized it during those four years in Italy. But the turns of life, those that are independent of our will, forced me to look toward another possibility. It came, in a way, still from the consecrated center of my university biography, but from a margin of the country that was to become, for a time important to me, my new center of teaching activity: Ovidius University of Constanța. How did it happen?

When my former students learned of the refusal of the Faculty of Automatic Control to take me back, I received several phone calls. Among them was one from A.A., a former student from the 1981 generation, who for several years had been teaching computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of Ovidius University, a recently established university. Commenting with his colleagues on what had happened to me, the dean of the faculty, S.S., a well-known mathematician specializing in differential equations, expressed interest in the possibility of having me as a professor in the newly established Department of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis.

S.S. contacted me and, together, we agreed on the procedure by which I could be hired as a professor at Ovidius University. The competition for the professorship had a committee made up of mathematics professors specialized in computer science, from the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Bucharest. The Ministry approved the appointment and, as a full professor, I began my courses in Constanța in February 1995. My collaboration with Ovidius University began very well.

Pages of history

Few people know that, in the place where in those 1990s the headquarters of Ovidius University stood, at 124 Mamaia Boulevard, formerly Lenin Boulevard, there had first been a general school, later becoming a Pedagogical Institute. The initial purpose of the institute was to train teachers for the lower secondary schools. The institution then followed a winding path, with successive technical sections, until the establishment of the University of Constanța after the Revolution, in March 1990.

Within this still young institutional framework, my chance to take part in the consolidation of computer science in Constanța was also to appear. It was not a university with old traditions, but precisely this youthfulness created a space for initiative.

The problems of the beginning

My entry into the collective of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science took place only a few years after the university had been founded. The organization and structures were new, the professors had known one another for a relatively short time, and everything was still precarious. S.S. was making efforts to bring the group together and, above all, to strengthen it with valuable professors.

Besides me, he managed to convince Cristian Calude, an exceptional graduate of the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Bucharest and professor of theoretical computer science at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, to come and teach in Constanța. Horia Georgescu then joined us, a professor of my generation, specialized in theoretical computer science and concurrent processes. All three of us had a special arrangement: it was enough for us to teach our classes, permanent presence in the department not being mandatory.

The mixture of mathematics and computer science almost always produces tensions in a university context. It had happened at the University of Bucharest and it was to happen in Constanța as well. I maintained correct relations with all my colleagues, but it was clear that there were reservations, envy, and pride. I realized that young teaching staff were needed, with a vocation for teaching and a desire to learn. Thus I noticed, in the fourth year where I was teaching my first courses, Aurelian N. and Crenguța Bogdan, the top two in their year of study. After his master’s degree, Aurelian decided to continue his studies in Israel. Later he returned to Ovidius, with a doctorate from England, and has had a fine career as a professor in theoretical computer science. But the real revelation was Crenguța, who proved to be a more than a fortunate choice of me.

Courses, Students, and the Attempt to Build Something Lasting

At Ovidius University I taught, depending on the curriculum of the moment, courses closely related to my training and experience: programming, formal languages, compiler construction, system design and implementation, and later subjects connected to modern software engineering and object-oriented programming. I did not come to Constanța only with the material I had taught before leaving the country, but also with what I had learned in Italy through contact with real projects and software companies.

For the students at Ovidius, computer science was still a field in the process of defining itself. Many came from a solid mathematical background, but lacked the engineering reflexes required for software design. I had to adapt the courses constantly. It was not enough to present formal notions, algorithms, grammars, or abstract models. I also had to show how all these elements connect to the actual construction of programs, system architecture, and the discipline of software design.

This was one of my genuine satisfactions in Constanța. I was working in an environment that was still being built. Precisely this precariousness also offered a freedom that perhaps I would no longer have had in Bucharest. I could influence the direction of certain courses, propose topics, insist on certain standards, and identify among the students those who possessed not only intelligence, but also a vocation for an academic career.

An important support for me was Crenguța. Coming from mathematics, with a rigorous background and a special sensitivity for conceptual modeling, she was one of those people who justified my effort to travel periodically to Constanța in order to teach.

During my years at Ovidius, another strong incentive came from the enthusiasm of Mircea Dorin Popovici, let call him Mircea in the followings. Mircea had not been my student; he was a graduate in mathematics from the University of Bucharest and, at the time of my arrival at Ovidius, he was already an assistant professor at the university, increasingly attracted to computer programming in Pascal and C, computer graphics, and virtual reality.

Already the author of several programming books written together with his father — a well-known mathematics professor in Constanța at the “Mircea cel Bătrân” Naval Academy — Mircea possessed remarkable practical dexterity in working with computers. He chose to pursue his PhD under my supervision in Computer Science, thus becoming my first doctoral student.

Together we chose a difficult topic for his doctoral thesis, one that also interested me deeply, situated at the boundary between conceptual modeling, virtual spaces, multi-agent systems, and applications in culture and education: the modeling of space in virtual universes.

My defining concern at Ovidius became the connection between theory and practice: from foundations to construction, from ideas to products, from the classroom to the profession itself. I came from theoretical computer science, from compilers, formal languages, and abstract models, but I had lived long enough in the world of software projects to know that a graduate cannot remain confined solely to the realm of formalisms.

Life as a professor at Ovidius

A particular problem was my acclimatization to Constanța during the periods when I went there to teach. It was not only a matter of distance, but of the rhythm of a double life that I had to lead between Italy and Romania. Twice a semester I came to Constanța for almost two weeks, taking leave from my duties in Italy. This time had to be divided carefully: weekends in Bucharest with my mother, then the rest of the days in Constanța, where a compressed and intense life awaited me.

My schedule was organized modularly, in compact blocks. Instead of teaching week by week, as would have been normal for a professor permanently present in the faculty, I concentrated my courses in the periods when I arrived in Constanța. A schedule preserved from the first semester of the 2002–2003 academic year shows this situation very clearly: in two successive weeks I taught courses in Programare OO I, OOP Languages I, and Internet Programming, sometimes from morning until evening, with classes stretching until 8:00 p.m. and even with students called to the faculty on Saturdays.

It was an exhausting regime, almost like a military campaign. In a few days I had to do what others did over months. I entered the faculty in the morning and left late in the evening, after successive classes, discussions with students, questions, explanations, small administrative improvisations, and the inevitable physical wear that such concentration brings.

In this organization, Crenguța played an essential role. I had managed to involve her in the seminar sessions of my courses while she was still a master’s student, then, after she was hired as an assistant in the department, she became my most constant support in Constanța. She organized my arrivals, made sure there was a teaching room available for the duration of my stay, kept in touch with the students, and attended my courses out of a desire to learn as much as possible.

In the evening I would arrive at the university residence-hotel, located in a place of unexpected beauty, between Constanța and Mamaia, on a natural promontory. The building was new and splendidly positioned above the sea. After the compact and exhausting days at the faculty, returning there had something soothing about it. I came loaded with the hours of the day, my voice tired and my mind still full of courses, but the view of the place helped me gradually detach myself from the tension of the program.

Then came the morning, with the sunrise from the sea, one of the privileges of the Romanian coast. Through the glass wall that bordered the hall of the residence on each floor, the reddish light of the sun sometimes gathered us on the armchairs in the hall, our gaze lost before the glittering sea.

Distractions were rare. During the periods when I came to Constanța, there was no time for the beach. There were nevertheless one or two occasions, I think in May or June, when I had come for exams and caught beautiful weather, with warm sun. Then I yielded to the temptation of a swim with Mircea Popovici, who was also a good swimmer.

We would get into the “Red Rocket,” an old Dacia 1300 about which it was a wonder that it was still running, and go to the northern part of the Mamaia resort, beyond Mamaia-Sat, where the beach was deserted, there were no lifeguards, and the water was extremely clean. We would undress and venture offshore, swimming vigorously. I think I outswam Mircea, but that was only natural: I was his doctoral supervisor and, after all, he was not allowed to overtake me.

Mircea Popovici and the working evenings at the residence

In the last years spent at Ovidius, an important part of my time there was connected with Mircea Dorin Popovici and his doctoral thesis.

The idea interested me because it came close to an older concern of mine: the passage from the real to the virtual and then the return from the virtual to the real, which in other contexts I was to formulate through the R2V2R scheme. In virtual reality, this passage meant modeling an object, an actor, or a user as a virtual entity; then, through perceptions, decisions, and actions, this entity could again influence the behavior of the environment and, indirectly, the experience of the real user. It was the same conceptual movement that attracted me in other domains as well: the real world is transposed into an informational model, the model acquires a certain autonomy, and the results of processing it return upon the real world.

In the evening, after compact days of courses, Mircea would come to the university residence-hotel and we would sit down to work. We pored over the thesis chapter by chapter: what had to be said, in what order, what was essential, what remained only a technological example, how the applications were connected to the model, how a good intuition could be transformed into a clear proposition and then into a coherent chapter, how the model could be represented in UML, then at the beginning of its life as a standard.

At that time, Mircea was in contact with the virtual reality research group in Brest. Important impulses came from there: projects, applications, collaborations, ideas about educational virtual environments and about agents capable of playing roles in a virtual space. Some of the articles written then had me as co-author, alongside the French colleagues. Some were accepted at conferences, others were not. But all of them contributed to the maturation of the thesis.

One of these texts, The Virtual Environment – Another Approach, proposed treating the virtual environment as a multidimensional space populated by entities that interact through flows of information. It was no longer only a 3D scene, constructed geometrically and populated with visible objects, but an environment in which each entity has fields of perception and action, can emit stimuli, can receive information, and can enter into informational links with other entities. From this perspective, the virtual object is no longer merely a form drawn in space, but a presence capable of participating in the dynamics of the environment.

Working with Mircea was for me one of the good parts of the last two years at Ovidius. In an institutional context that was becoming increasingly burdensome, these working evenings still gave meaning to my presence in Constanța. I felt that, beyond the courses and the tensions of the faculty, something durable was nevertheless being built: a thesis, a research direction, and perhaps an intellectual continuity of my doctorand.

CITTI 2000 – the attempt to bring Ovidius into a national circuit

One episode that deserves to be preserved on this page is the conference Theoretical Computer Science and Information Technologies — CITTI 2000, which I organized in Constanța. I wanted Ovidius University not to remain merely a young institution solving its internal problems, but to enter a broader intellectual circuit. The conference brought to Constanța specialists in computer science and theoretical computer science from all over the country and showed that a real university pole could be built there.

The range of topics was very broad and reflected the transitional moment of Romanian computer science from theoretical foundations to modern information technologies: formal languages, automata, computability, complexity, programming, software engineering, databases, networks, the Internet, distributed architectures, artificial intelligence, education and computer science, multimedia systems, and virtual reality.

Viewed retrospectively, CITTI 2000 was also a declaration of intent. It showed what I wanted computer science at Ovidius to be: not an annex of mathematics, nor merely a practical discipline, but a broad field in which foundations, technologies, and applications support one another.

Providence appears in the CD corridor: a bridge toward FILS.

The episode that was to make my move to FILS possible occurred still during the Ovidius period, when nothing had been decided and when I continued to divide myself between Italy, Bucharest, and Constanța. It was not the actual beginning of the FILS stage, but an intermediate, almost providential event that created a bridge between a collaboration that was to end painfully and a new form of return to the Polytechnic.

Curiously, almost at the same time as my connection with Ovidius University was approaching its end, another possibility opened without my seeking it. If Ovidius had been for me a half return to the Romanian university, FILS was to become, in a way, a more natural return to the Polytechnic of Bucharest, though not through the gate by which I had tried to enter in 1994.

The incident took place in the autumn of 2003. I was at the Polytechnic, in the building complex of the Faculty of Automatics, on the occasion of some doctoral examinations in which I was a committee member. I was crossing the large corridor in CD when I heard someone call me. I turned around and saw my old friend Paul Cristea, whom I had known since my student years, when he had been our assistant in Electrical Engineering.

— Luchi, providence has put you in my path. You must save me! he told me, breathless.

— Stay calm, Paul. What happened? I tried to reassure him.

— The final-year students at FILS, the English section, for which I am responsible, want to go on strike because they have not had serious programming courses.

Paul explained that the students had come to FILS convinced they would study Computer Engineering, but had been loaded with all kinds of electrical engineering courses, closer to Paul’s own background than to their professional expectations. They were nearing the end of their studies and felt that they had not received the software training they needed.

— But I do not know them. What do you want me to tell them? I tried to find out.

— It does not matter. Whatever you tell them will be good, Paul flattered me.

I asked him where I could find them. They were in Polizu, in room F202, which they had occupied as a sign of protest. I went straight to Polizu and, indeed, found them there. They were a group of six or seven students enrolled at FILS, English stream, Computer Engineering specialization, who, apart from the first-year programming course, the same for all faculties of the Polytechnic, had had no serious programming course in four years. They had to choose their diploma-project topics, but again, there were no software topics.

I announced to them that I was there by decision of the department leadership and that my role was to “teach them software in a few days.” They understood the irony in my tone, but agreed to get down to books and course notes and, in my absence, to study under remote guidance. I told them I would teach them Java, a fashionable language in those years. After a few hours of lectures, in which I tried to give them the necessary minimum in small doses, I set a diploma-project topic with each of them, to be presented in June 2004, and returned to Italy.

I came back relatively quickly, during the examination session, for exams and for the launch of their project work, all of it programming. Then I understood the quality of this group of students, a kind of sponge for absorbing knowledge. I could not help being drawn in by their enthusiasm, and I assisted them as much as I could, between departures and returns from Constanța, in carrying out their projects.

One of them, Radu D., had an apartment near Piața Domenii, where he lived alone. He invited his classmates to move in with him, and the three rooms turned into a small “software factory.” People sat on sofas, on the floor, wherever they could. Coffee and Pepsi-Cola were drunk and, in silence, work went on. I was enthusiastic.

The second semester also passed and I had to come to their diploma examination as project supervisor. They presented themselves very well, and Paul Cristea, the chairman of the committee, took me aside to tell me:

— Luchi, you must return to the Polytechnic. What are you doing in Constanța? Your place is here.

He knew everything that had happened ten years earlier, when I had tried to return to Automatic Control, so he continued:

— I cannot bring you to Automatic Control, but at FILS I have this possibility.

I thanked him, but explained that I could not leave my activity at Ovidius, just as I could not leave my activity in Italy. Therefore, at the risk of being even more overloaded, I accepted only on the condition that I be allowed to organize my own schedule. Paul set to work and, by autumn, everything was ready: the teaching load, the competition, the approvals.

At that time I did not know what was going to happen in the autumn at Ovidius. All summer I worked on preparing the two sets of courses, trying, as far as possible, to make them as similar as possible. In August I was informed by Crenguța about the maneuver at the dean’s office of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science and at the Department of Computer Science and Numerical Analysis. She had been called to the police to give a statement concerning the powers of attorney for collecting my salary and my presence at courses.

The end of a presence that had become uncomfortable

The period begun under the sign of a reciprocal chance — offered to me by Ovidius University and, at the same time, offered by me to the university — did not end as serenely as it had begun. After almost ten years of collaboration, my presence in Constanța, with its special regime of modular teaching and periodic travel from Italy, began to be seen differently by the new leadership of the faculty. What had for years been accepted as a useful solution for consolidating computer science gradually became a reason for reproach.

In the meantime a new dean had arrived, Professor W. B., a young mathematician who seemed determined to free himself from the professors brought in during the years when the faculty was being built, especially those considered too expensive and too little present in the daily life of the department. I and Cristian Calude fell into this category. We were, in an ironic sense, the “sacred monsters” of a stage that the new leadership wanted to leave behind.

The pretext was the salary. It was said that I did not justify my remuneration by effective presence in the department, although my teaching regime had been known, accepted, and practiced for years. Worse, an attempt was made to cast a shadow also over Crenguța, who had been delegated, on the basis of documents signed by me, to collect my salary.

I felt then that it was no longer an administrative discussion, but an attempt at discrediting me. I received an undated and unsigned summons from the bureau of the Faculty Council, asking me to clarify the “effective performance” of the activities in my teaching load, under the threat of disciplinary termination of my employment contract. The dean’s office had also decided that my salary would no longer be paid starting in May, without my receiving a written explanation at that time.

Under these conditions, I understood that my presence at Ovidius University was no longer desired. Through the letter addressed to the rector on 1 September 2004, I requested the termination of my employment contract “by agreement of the parties,” beginning on 6 September 2004.

I do not think my departure produced much emotion in the faculty. Apart from those close to me — Mircea Popovici, Crenguța, and a few young assistants — few probably understood what I had tried to do there during those years.

Thus the Ovidius stage came to an end. Not with a ceremony, not with a word of thanks, not with recognition of the journeys made and the courses taught, but with a summons and a resignation letter. It was a harsh lesson: institutions sometimes enthusiastically receive what they lack, but do not always know how to respect what they have received.

It took no more than that for me to break with Ovidius University through my resignation request. Without this unworthy episode, I would have continued collaborating with them on an hourly-paid basis, giving them all the help they needed.

From 15 September 2004 I was employed as a professor at FILS. The calendar coincidence is significant: at Ovidius I had requested termination of the contract beginning on 6 September 2004, and only a few days later a new stage of my university life began. The door that had closed in Constanța was unexpectedly reopening in Bucharest.

Thus the Ovidius stage ended and the FILS stage began. Not through a plan prepared in advance, but through a succession of events in which I recognized, once again, the strange way in which life closes one door for you just as it prepares another. In Constanța I had become uncomfortable; in Bucharest, a few students urgently needed what I knew how to give them. For a professor, that was the best reason to continue.

Ovidius remained for me a half return to teaching: I did not return completely to Romania, nor did I intend to, I did not settle in Constanța, and I never fully belonged to that place. But, for almost ten years, I was there enough to teach, to train students, to support young assistants, to supervise doctorates, to organize a national conference, and to try to give computer science in Constanța a direction. Very little was missing for us to form a doctoral school in computer science there. Three doctoral supervisors were needed: myself, Calude, and ...? We had found the third, but he withdrew at the last moment. Another had to be found. There was no more time...

The end was bitter, but it cannot cancel what was built. The fact that, almost at the same time, FILS opened another gate toward the Polytechnic for me shows that providence wanted this stage not to end in a clear defeat, but in a change of location, one that was even advantageous for me. In Constanța I had become uncomfortable for the leadership, while in Bucharest a few students urgently needed what I knew how to give them. For a professor, that was the best reason to continue teaching.