IN MEMORIAM TRAIAN ROTARIU, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AT BABEȘ-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY (12.02.1943 – 28.12.2021)

Abstract

Traian Rotariu, emeritus professor of Sociology at the Babeș-Bolyai University, passed away on the 28^th of December 2021, leaving behind an outstanding oeuvre for the Romanian social sciences and a legacy of institutional building that materialised in the creation of the Department of Sociology, after the fall of the state-socialist regime and, ten years later, of the Centre for Population Studies at the same university. His academic career started in 1968, when he joined as a research assistant the Sociology Laboratory within the Babeș-Bolyai University, led by the late professor Ion Aluaș (1927-1994). At the time, he had already earned a BA in Mathematics (1965) and, after working as a high school teacher for a couple of years, he commenced studying for a second BA in Philosophy. Motivated by his increasing interest in social sciences and quantitative methodologies, he successfully competed for a scholarship of the Ministry of Education to pursue doctoral studies at Paris V René Descartes University (Sorbonne), under the supervision of Raymond Boudon, between 1974 and 1977. His PhD thesis, entitled Education et mobilité sociale (1977), addressed the problems of social mobility in developed capitalist societies and concentrated on the role of the school system in social reproduction. Its Romanian translation was published in 1980. In 1977, he became a research assistant and in 1979, he earned the position of lecturer at the Department of Philosophy with Babeș-Bolyai University. The late 1970s and 1980s meant an intensive period of empirical social research alongside Professor Ion Aluaș and fellow young academics, despite the formal restrictions on social sciences imposed by the regime. They analysed the social changes induced by industrialisation and urbanisation, ranging from internal migration to social mobility, demographic changes, family life, and transformations of rural households.