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United Universities 5th Panel Discussion

Europe, 29 June 2021. The UUU Panel Debate n°5 has invited administrators of European University Alliances to talk about the “Powers of the Periphery. How networking empowers regions and fosters creativity.”

Watch the teaser: youtu.be/RYk4iSzYPSk

What is periphery? Is Brussels an appendix of Berlin? Is Berlin a suburb of Leipzig? Haven’t the inhabitants of the Capitals not always been the marginalised? Are the vitamins not in the skin of the apple, rather than in the core? Is Oscar Wilde right that only shallow people do not judge by appearances, and “the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible…?″ The centre produces the periphery, and how free and diverse universities are, depends on their environment and history, their funding and their inter-relatedness with the world.   This discussion wants to learn about European University Alliances, a little what they are, and a lot how international networking might have changed the meaning of periphery in regard to innovation, science and social development.

Guests

Hannes Raffaseder, composer. He is also Chief Research and Innovation Officer, head of the Institute of Media production at Sankt Pölten University of Applied Sciences, near Vienna in Austria, and coordinator of the European University Alliance E³UDRES² led by his university.

Elena Theodoropoulou, Associate Professor at University of the Aegean in Greece in the field of philosophy of education. As Vice-Rector of Academic Affairs & Student Welfare she is academic coordinator on behalf of the UAegean in the ERUA Alliance. Elena teaches and publishes, among other things, about Education and Ethics.

Rónán Ó Muirthile, academic researcher and educator focused on original storytelling and facilitating others in developing the skills and abilities to tell those stories. He works at the Institute of Art Design and Technology in Dublin, Ireland, where he is also responsible for coordinating his school’s part in the European Universities Alliance for Film and Media Arts or FILMEU.

Audronė Telešienė, professor in sociology and communication at Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania. She is the project scientific lead at KTU of the SMART-ER project, the virtual research institute for smart European Regions at the ECIU University. Her scientific interest lies on the topics related to public governance and sustainable development.

Eric Tschirhart, Professor of Physiology at the University of Luxembourg and Special Advisor to the rector for the university alliance UNIVERSEH and the Université de la Grande Région. Under the team leadership of Eric, the University of Luxembourg will focus on stimulating entrepreneurial skills among students through university-business cooperation, as well as strengthening the sustainability of the network and its communication. Of particular interest for our topic is the University of the Greater region (UniGR), a regional cross-border network of universities founded in 2008, where 7 universities in Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg work together.

Florian Schweigert, Vice President for International Affairs at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and coordinates the EDUC Alliance. In our recent interview about EDUC, a new university alliance including the universities of Masaryk, Pécs, Cagliari, Rennes 1, and Paris Nanterre, he explains the alliance’s focus on shared learning and teaching capacities, and short-term collaborative study programmes. ESNA interview, June 2021

Peter van der Hijden, independent higher education strategy advisor who lives in Brussels. He has worked 23 years for the European Commission where he became Head of Sector Higher Education Policy and contributed to the Erasmus programme, the Bologna Process, Horizon and ERA. He now supports European Universities and promotes micro-credentials.

Host: Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News, www.esna.tv

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Event Video

United Universities 4th Panel Discussion

Europe, 11 May 2021. European University Alliances are coming with a great promise: to make the ‘student-centred’ university happen, and to create courses and degrees for the 21st century.

As of today, there are 41 of these new alliances or networks across Europe testing co-operative models and involving students, researchers and administration. The European Commission funds these co-operations, and the newly created departments in the universities put them into practice.

4th UUU Panel Debate: “Degree design, competence frameworks, and horizontal mindsets”

Watch the teaser: youtu.be/RYk4iSzYPSk

We have gathered for the 4th UUU Panel Debate to see how that actually works! – There is great demand in society to create quality jobs for many, a perspective for citizens of Europe, and an education preparing for a globalised world. What do the efforts look like that the University Alliances put into study programmes for people with a ‘horizontal’ mindset, able to think and work across academic disciplines and national borderlines?

Let’s also ask how education policy evolves – in order to support such a highly complex practice, to create competence frameworks and quality assurance standards coping with diverging national regulations and an uneven economic and cultural pace across the European Union!

Guests

Robert Wagenaar, Professor of History and Politics of Higher Education, Director of the International Tuning Academy in Groningen, and author of “REFORM! TUNING the Modernisation Process of Higher Education in Europe. A blueprint for student-centred learning” (2019)

Antonella Forlino, Professor of Biochemistry, and Prorector of International Relations at the University of Pavia, member of the EC2U Alliance. ESNA interview on Deutschlandradio,15.06.2020

François Taddei, Director of the Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity (CRI) in Paris, advisor to the CIRCLE.U alliance, and author of “Learning in the 21st century” (2020). ESNA interview, 30.03.2020

Maria Gravari-Barbas, former Vice-President for International Relations at Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, and Chair of the Cultural Heritage Focus Area of the Una Europa alliance

Host: Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News, www.esna.tv

 

Credits

‘The Graduate’ CREDITS: Embassy Pictures (1967). Cast: Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Katharine Ross. Director: Mike Nichols. Producer: Lawrence Turman. Screenwriters: Calder Willingham, Buck Henry

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Event Project News Video

United Universities 3rd Panel Discussion

Europe, 13 April 2021. Mingling among journalists, authors, strategy advisors, university administrators, researchers, students — to gain deeper insights into higher education policy in Europe. The initiative ‘United Universities of Europe’ has gathered distinguished guests to discuss the current state of European University Alliances, their recent past and imminent future.

This 3rd UUU Panel Debate navigates between past and future. What’s the status quo of European University Alliances? What did they achieve so far? How did Corona and Brexit affect them? What are their current challenges? What will the future look like for them? Will they change the European higher education landscape or disappear?

Journalist Tino Brömme from Berlin, and higher ed strategist Peter van der Hijden from Brussels, discuss it. A special light on the damage inflicted by Brexit on British and Continental universities is being cast by journalist Anne Corbett, Paris, and Nenad Zrnić, vice-rector of the University of Belgrade.

What does the future hold? — Pedro Marques talks about his research on university-society interaction in science-fiction literature, and European students reflect on their utopia of the future university, before Brömme/van der Hijden consider what the upcoming decisions of the European Council mean for European Universities.

Guests:

Anne Corbett is a Senior Associate at LSE Consulting with long-standing experience in the field of higher education and Europe as a researcher, a journalist and a contributor to public policy. She holds a PhD in political science and a BA in History. Her work has appeared in the education press and British dailies. She continues to write for University World News where she recently published A mercantilist approach to higher education post-Brexit. Her books include Universities and the Europe of Knowledge.

Pedro Marques is specialised in regional development, innovation and governance in peripheral regions of the EU. He works at ingenio, a research institute affiliated with the Technical University of Valencia, a member of the European University Alliance ENHANCE. Not only is he a Ramon y Cajal fellow but also a principal investigator in a Innovative Training Network funded by the European Union. He is co-author of the research paper Fiction lagging behind or non-fiction defending the indefensible? University-industry (et al.) interaction in science fiction.

Peter van der Hijden is an independent strategy advisor, helping European University Alliances on the design and further strategic positioning of their proposals. He has worked for the European Commission where his main experience lied in higher education and research: the Erasmus Programme, the modernisation agenda for universities, the European Higher Education Area (Bologna Process) and the European Research Area. His latest article, Mitigating brain drain by connecting universities, discusses a policy report of the European Commission.

Nenad Zrnić is Vice-Rector for International Relations at the University of Belgrade, a member of the European University Alliance Circle U. He is a full professor in the field of material handling and logistics, a corresponding member of the Academy of Engineering Sciences of Serbia. Since 2015 he is a coordinator of one of the working groups for preparing new Serbian Law on a Higher Education.

As part of the 3rd UUU Panel Debate, students of the Una Europa alliance were interviewed about the question: How is your ideal university of the future? They had just participated in Una Europa’s first Student Congress on February 24, 2021. — Their answers showed how aware today’s students are of flexible learning paths, of the world’s ever stronger interconnections and of their own potential to contribute to better learning and teaching environments? The participants are Emily Hartmann (Freie Universität Berlin), Giacomo Zanni (Università di Bologna), Hubert Jakub Bieniek (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), Luca Di Cunto (Università di Bologna), and Weronika Łukasińska (Uniwersytet Jagielloński).

Host:

Tino Brömme, a graduate in communication science and media consultancy, has worked for over 30 years as a journalist, publisher, moderator and event manager across Europe. He was the founder of the multilingual student magazine WORK|OUT, and the news agency ESNA. He publishes articles and multimedia content, mainly on science policy, and is currently preparing a documentary film about Universities in the 21st Century.

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Event Interview

How see students the university of the future?

Europe, 24 February 2021. As part of the 3rd UUU Panel Debate students of the Una Europa alliance answered the question: What is your ideal university of the future?

Participants:

  • Emily Hartmann (Freie Universität Berlin)
  • Giacomo Zanni (Università di Bologna)
  • Hubert Jakub Bieniek (Uniwersytet Jagielloński)
  • Luca Di Cunto (Università di Bologna)
  • Weronika Łukasińska (Uniwersytet Jagielloński)

More on the UnaEuropa student congress:
www.una-europa.eu/calendar/una-europa-students-dream-the-future-european-university

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Event News

The European Uni – One Idea, Different Models

Registration here

Berlin & online, 3 March 2021. As part of the Una Europa Staff Week, on March 3rd, 9.30 a.m. CET, the homonymous University Alliance plans an online talk titled “The European University — One Idea, Different Models.”

The organisers have chosen a broad approach, they think “that the idea of the European University has seen the development of multifaceted models over the course of the last years. There is a proliferation of networks and programs, which aim at making the European university landscape more diverse and inclusive by fostering relationships between universities and encouraging collaboration between a multitude of different actors. In this talk, we want to ask which steps have been taken towards the idea of a European university and discuss directions for future developments that unfold from the joint activities of university alliances, networks, and partnerships.”

The FU website informs: “There is a proliferation of models, programs and formats among [University Alliances]. The aims and objectives of the various networks are very heterogeneous. Some concentrate their co-cooperation on specific research themes, others on student mobility, some want to create a unified European Campus, others plan to create ‘only’ joint programs. Most of them hope to enable students at some point to obtain a degree by combining studies in several EU countries. Some chose partners who were very much like themselves, others went for complimentary partners.”

In this talk, representatives of the three networks Una Europa, Eutopia and Unite! have been invited to discuss the different paths these networks are currently going. They will talk about challenges they all have to face and the hopes they have for their future development. Among the questions to be discussed will be the following:

  • Which strategies and instruments of cooperation have been successful, particularly in times of a pandemic?
  • How far do the universities within the networks want to go in terms of forming a new joint European identify?
  • What are currently the main challenges in building European structures and programs – legal issues, financial issues, visionary issues, national egoisms to name but a few?
  • Where do the new networks see themselves in comparison to already existing European higher education institutions?
  • How far did some individual universities already change in the process?
  • What are the biggest positive aspects of the networks? Or is it too early to tell?
  • What are best practice models? A fusion of European universities into one or a European network?
  • Some networks have UK member institutions – how will the networks deal with Brexit?
  • How can we make the networks sustainable in terms of finance?
  • How would you measure the success of a ‘European University’?
  • Where do we envisage the networks in ten years from now?”

These questions will be discussed by our panel of experts:

  • James Smith, Vice-Principal International at University of Edinburgh, and Representative of Una Europa
  • Eva Wiberg, Vice-Chancellor at the University of Gothenburg, and Representative of EUTOPIA
  • Jens Schneider, Vice President of Transfer and International Affairs at Technische Universität Darmstadt, and Representative of UNITE!

The panel discussion will be moderated by Verena Blechinger-Talcott, Vice-President International at Freie Universität Berlin, and Representative of Una Europa.

Sources: Una Europa | FU Berlin

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Event Video

UUU Panel 2.2 – New professions and EU strategies

Berlin, Brussels, Bremen, 8 December 2020. The initiative United Universities of Europe organises panel debates on higher education and science policy. The 2nd of these debates examines “Vocations and Competencies in the Age of European Universities.”
In a first step, professionals, policy officers, coordinators of the newly formed European University Alliances (watch this conversation with them here) talk about their international, challenge-based, change-oriented work. A short intermission informs how UUU is poised to mirror and shadow the growth of these new structures, the European University Alliances (see here).
In part two, Peter van der Hijden, connoisseur of European science policy, points at the new professions being created in and around the Alliances and the re-skilling taking place in the universities, in their libraries, data management, admissions etc.. Eva-Maria Feichtner, Vice President for internationalisation at the University of Bremen, sees great chances in the university networks for academics and employers alike – creating a competitive international scientific education, as well as attractive career paths and staff journeys across the alliances. Her counterpart, Jörg Niehoff, policy officer at the European Commission, provides political context about role of higher education institutions in providing skills for the green and digital transformation, the EU transformation agenda for HEI, the experience from the Labour Market Relevance and Outcome partnerships and how all this translates into the context of the European University Alliances.

Guests:

Host:

  • Tino Brömme, ESNA European Higher Education News

TRANSCRIPT

     This is the second part of the United Universities of Europe panel discussion from Berlin. After the first half, we are now talking with Peter von der Hijden, our man in Brussels. Hello, Peter. We have been starting a conversation about the professions in the European University Alliance. When we noticed that they are structured like research projects in work packages with certain topical fields which reflect the tasks and the working fields and the professions in this alliances. Do you think that this University Alliances are creating a new group of staff, a new profession?

Peter van der Hijden Yes, I think so. Listening to the colleagues, the biggest change is the scope and extent, as Katrine said, and the speech. Now, what does it mean for the jobs? It is creating new jobs like directors, coordinators; the job of Tino, our kind host today, is a new job, you could say. But more exciting and more deeper for me is the transfer of the old jobs. And those old jobs are the people that I call the ‘gang of five hundred.’ And those are the five hundred Alliance task managers, and they do the real work of the Alliance. And those people have the job, they have a regular job in administration, education, research and innovation. They are, for example, programme directors, locally, they are responsible for the virtual campus, locally, they are responsible for H.R., for the library, they are researchers and teachers. But now all over sudden, they find themselves to collaborate in the Alliance task teams, and they are now building the course catalogue for the Alliance, what they used to do on their own. They are building the virtual campus for the Alliance, what they used to do on their own. They are working in H.R. on a tenure for the whole alliance. So you can move jobs between the institutions. They are working on open sience for their institution, but now in the task team for the entire Alliance. And this is a change for those professionals. It’s a kind of upgrading. It helps them to benchmarking to become better professionals. It also helps to integrate the members of the Alliance, to a certain extent, it’s a partial merger. But if you focus on the professional aspect, this is motivational, this motivates these people. They suddenly, and that’s the perspective that I want to give, when you work in an Alliance task team, for the library, for the H.R., for the student admission, you have a career perspective, locally, of course, but also in the Alliance. You may, at some point, shorter or longer term, go work in another institution as part of the Alliance. When the kids leave the house, you can go for one year to Finland or to Rome because you have a career in the Alliance, even hopping to other alliances, as we were just encouraged to do by the colleagues putting forward their vacancies. So for me, that is something motivating, and it changes the nature of your work. It makes you start dreaming, even if you never leave the place where you work. In YUFE, they call this the ‘staff journey.’ And I think it’s a good idea, Tino, that you put the ‘gang of 500’ in the limelight, next to our dear coordinators and Presidents, of course.

     Thank you, Peter, for this brief intervention.

And we come directly to Eva-Maria Feichtner, the vice president for international relations at the University of Bremen. Hello! I know you have to go at one o’clock, so we have to be quick with you. The interesting thing is, on one side, we have seen how the coordinators and the work package leaders and the project officers for the alliance are working. Now, we see your perspective as a Vice-President, responsible for the staff and for the management of the University Alliance. This keyword ‘staff journey,’ how does it relate to the jobs that these people have?

Eva-Maria Feichtner Well, let’s start from the idea of a ‘student journey,’ because I guess that’s more familiar to all of us. So we want students to move all over Europe, all over our different campi. And now our idea at YUFE was, it’s not only your studies, life is a journey, professional life is a journey. We’re convinced that if we want students to move around, the institutions can’t be solid. The people working at the institutions can’t be purely home based, they must have this experience themselves. So that’s what brought us to concentrating on this tough journey. So we are enabling our employees, enabling everybody working in the university environment, to go out, experience the building up of the European University, experience how their profession is carried out somewhere else, go and connect, go and meet with others and learn and develop.

We are thinking of that as a very physical thing. Right? We want people to go out on job shadowing projects and things like that. But we all know the pandemic has cut that short, pretty much brought it down to zero. And what we did, and I think that was pretty successful, is to quickly come up with training programmes, virtual training programmes that brought together people who otherwise wouldn’t have met in the same way. So as Peter pointed out, the librarian, the H.R. expert, they had the opportunity in a very low threshold way to meet, to connect. In a way, the pandemic has helped us to become more inclusive. I mean, just think for a moment, you just mentioned, well, the kids have left the house. They could go for a year somewhere. That’s the answer we get from many people whom we try to get moving here. They are saying, “no, I have three kids in school, what do you think? I’m not moving anywhere. And by the way, there’s a pile work”. And now I can go and tell them, “well, there’s a staff training tomorrow at two o’clock. It lasts for two hours. You can meet your colleagues in Finland, you can meet your colleagues in Spain. That’s your opportunity to experience Europe.” And people do. And people come back to us and say, “you know, that was great. And, you know, I’ll seriously think about going out now and taking up this burden of organising everything around, because I want to experience the real thing.” So we’re all waiting for the pandemic to be over to get back to a new normal that people can actually take up what they have started digitally now.

     We have time for one more question, Eva. We have been talking about ‘lifelong learning,’ these are people who leave university to become professionals, but maybe come back. How can the Alliances contribute to this?

Eva-Maria Feichtner  By offering lifelong learning to people in a more close-to-their job way than universities were doing that way back. So our dream is that our graduates go out and don’t forget YUFE, but come and visit every now and then, for professional development courses, for maybe taking up the role of a professional expert, advising our students, working together in challenge teams, or the like. So I think of professional development in its true sense lives from changing perspectives, in the same way we want researchers to take every now and then the position of a professional service staff member and vice versa. And we want people to go out from and come back to our Alliance. That’s what I think is the the truly enriching things we can work on.

     This is the old communist idea to send the intellectuals to the camps.

Eva-Maria Feichtner Well, that’s a peculiar way to think about it, but maybe yes, let’s dare to say yes.

     And why not? On the other side, the organisation bottom-up of the coordinators, who coordinate within the universities and between the members of the Alliance, is building up structure. It’s building up a creativity that hasn’t been there before. Well, Eva, I thank you so far.

     Let’s go over to Jörg Niehoff, who is a policy coordinator at the European Commission, and let’s apply a last different perspective on the question we have today. Because the European Commission is now taking the money and putting it into programmes to push forward certain developments. So Jörg, the Transformation Agenda, as it is called, of the European Commission, where is it going? What is the direction?

Jörg Niehoff  Yes, thank you to you and good morning to everyone. The Transformation Agenda is not yet there. So let me perhaps bring the context in here. Some of you might have seen that the Commission has published on the 30th September two communications that are relevant also for higher education institutions. Is the one on the European Education Area and the one on the European Research Area. And both put higher education institutions at the core of a transformation of the society. So what we want to do with the stakeholders, in particular the European universities and with the Member States, is to develop by the end of next year, a Transformation Agenda for higher education institutions. And that will not have the TGV speech that Nadine quoted before, perhaps rather long distance that a TGV can pass. And it is something that has to be co-created, co-designed with the stakeholders, with the policy makers at national level.

What we have identified in our communication, are four focus areas that we believe are important. The one is Connectivity among higher education institutions. That what we see also with European Universities, bring them in the context to work across borders on common challenges, but also connectivity with their local ecosystem, because that’s where you have societal impact, where you connect to the labour market, that is extremely important for us.

The second element is Inclusion. We want to have higher education institutions that are more open to a diverse student and research body. And, we had that before, also offer better opportunities for lifelong learning, which again makes it necessary to connect to the local ecosystem. Secondly, Digital and Green. I mean, if you look at all the big policies that we are currently driving, the green and digital transitions are at the core of these things. And I think Covid has made us much more aware of the need for digital transition. And there is also a dedicated communication on the Digital Education Action Plan. The green transition is equally important and there are again higher education institutions at the core of basically building the workforce and the skills and the competences that we need for the green transition. And that is something that I believe also European Universities can drive to a certain extent.

And the last one is Innovation in higher education, in education, in research, in driving transition. So what we expect to see by the end of next year, is somehow an alignment and agreement on what that Transformation Agenda should look like. What are the incentives that we need in terms of funding coming from different programmes, national, European, but also in terms of policy approaches that we need. And what we have learnt from other initiatives, like the HEInnovate initiative that supports the transformation of universities to become more entrepreneurial, more innovative, is that you need the bottom-up approach that we see here, but you also need some of the soft tools, self-reflection questionnaires that allow you to find a common direction where you want to go and the leadership that you need that drives that transition. So you need an understanding where to go, which is the direction, the leadership, and the commitment to drive that change. And today we look at European Universities, but I would really encourage all European universities to look at the other tools the DG EAC provides, be it labour market information experiences. I mean, a lot of the things that you are trying to drive, they also require that you have a better connectivity to the businesses to understand what are the requirements in terms of skills, transversal skills that you need for future jobs.

     HEInnovate instrument, how has it been adopted yet? How does it work?

Jörg Niehoff  It is something that has been going through a long, long way. It was designed together with the colleagues at the OECD at some point in time, and we have a number of building blocks. At the core, and that is accessible for all institutions, is the self reflection questionnaire that is also on the Internet that has been used by, I think, thirteen-hundred universities across Europe to drive their transition. I think more than twenty-thousand individuals have used that. So this is something that is not a benchmarking, but it is something that allows institutions with training programmes and etcetera to somehow position themselves: Where are we today in becoming or in being entrepreneureal innovative higher education institutions? And what are pathways for us to further improve on that? And of course, you can also use that in the context of European Universities. We have been contacted by some that want to use the tools as well.

The second is, that we are having, together with the OECD, country reviews, where countries approach us directly and say “listen, we want to have your support in analysing our system and showing pathways for development.” We are doing this, for example, currently with Slovenia, and we see that Slovenia is not only using this element ofhow to become more innovative with the educational system. At the same time they look also in labour market relevance of universities. So they are using two of our policies support mechanisms to have assistance in designing their master plan for higher education for the next years. And there we are closing a loop because, of course, the countries use our tools to find a way where they want to develop, that wwould inform the consultations for the Transformation Agenda, and so we somehow create a common directionality of where we go with the European system to make it overall more competitive and more powerful in terms of addressing the challenge that we have.

    Jörg, thank you so much. This was a very, very fast summary of the European policy supporting and instructing the European Universities. 

We can summarise that we have seen on one hand how inside the European University Alliances, the jobs, the positions, the professions of coordinators, project officers and work package leaders are creating a new network of professionals. We have also seen together with Eva-Maria Feichtner that the University management is trying to create interesting, attractive career paths so that the people who are steering and creating these University Alliances are well prepared and are learning all along the way. And also, we have seen the European Commission is supporting these efforts, is also pushing into a direction for creating new professionals that come out of the universities. So to help the universities develop their educational programmes and their research into a more European and more connected Europe. I want to thank all the participants for being today with us. I can only remind again of Dante, who said that we are here to acquire virtue and new knowledge. And that is what the European University Alliances are doing.

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Event Video

UNICA Panels: Starting in the (post-)Covid Era

30 November 2020. Organised by the association UNICA and chaired by its President Luciano Saso, the online panel inquires which lessons can be learned so far from European Universities and what are their plans in the (post-)Covid Era?

Topics

  1. Research and education
  2. Governance models
  3. Communication and multilingualism
  4. Impact of the COVID pandemic

Participants Panel 1

Participants Panel 2