The European Universities initiative was conceived to develop higher education across the EU, with a tight focus on students and teaching. Higher education institutions from different countries were invited to form alliances and bid for Erasmus + funds to develop joint curricula and boost mobility. But innovation and entrepreneurship increasingly appear in the alliance playbook, particularly when the partners are close to the market.
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Andrew Gunn
reflects on the first few years of the initiative and assesses how it might help shape the future of European higher education.
The idea of a European University is as old as Europe’s political union itself. A supranational university was first mooted in 1948, and various proposals were discussed amongst the founding members in the early years of the European Community. However, none of these proposals came to fruition, owing to a lack of consensus amongst member states over what form it should take.
These discussions identify what would be an enduring fault line running through the European political project: is it about economics and trade or culture and social solidarity, or both? And where does higher education fit into both of these differing rationales?