Roskilde University receives EU funding to develop European University of the Future
The European Commission seeks to strengthen strategic partnerships between European universities through the European Universities Initiative, one of the most high-profile instruments for building a European Education Area, and 24 new alliances across the continent have just been selected. One of these is the European Reform University Alliance, which brings together five young reform universities, including Roskilde University.
Reform universities are founded on the premise of rethinking what a university is and should be. The other participating universities are Université Paris 8 (France), Universität Konstanz (Germany), New Bulgarian University (Bulgaria) and the University of the Aegean (Greece).
“The aim of the alliance is to foster close cooperation between interesting reform universities in Europe. Through this collaboration, we hope to renew ourselves and learn from each other's experiences. At the same time, we hope that the alliance will provide a forum for innovation and alternative thinking in higher education and research in Europe and around the world”, says Rector of Roskilde University, Hanne Leth Andersen.
The partners in the European Reform University Alliance will create a network based on shared goals and values, such as interdisciplinary and critical thinking in research, learning and teaching, and institutional development. The alliance will also help to ensure the exchange of innovative teaching and learning methods, just as the collaboration will promote greater student mobility by offering flexible learning pathways across Europe.
“Roskilde University's special assignment will be to coordinate a think tank for the alliance. The think tank will gather information about experiments and innovative teaching, learning and research across the alliance and across the rest of the world, and contribute to shaping what universities of the future could look like. We will coordinate this part, but the think tank will bring together people from all participating European reform universities. In the future, the idea is that we will do much more together”, says Associate Professor Kasper Risbjerg Eskildsen, who represents Roskilde University in the alliance.
The ambition is to create a community for students and staff - both physically and virtually - across universities in different countries and to educate a new generation of creative Europeans able to collaborate across languages, borders and disciplines to find new solutions to the great societal challenges of our time.
The European Reform University Alliance has formulated a shared vision for the next ten years, and the initial project period runs from the autumn of 2020 and three years onwards. During this period, the co-operation will be supported by approximately five million euros from the EU's Erasmus+ and Horizon 2020 programmes. The European Commission has awarded the title of ‘European University’ to the individual alliances that extend across the EU member states and partner countries.
Read more about the European Universities Initiative on the website of the European Commission.