Позитивные изменения. Том 3, № 3 (2023). Positive changes. Volume 3, Issue 3 (2023)

According to the EUA, cultural activities will remain a key element in universities’ engagement with society. Universities will be critical custodians of knowledge and traditions. They will continue to protect heritage, promoting the study and knowledge of culture and language diversity within Europe and beyond. They will continue to be places where people from different cultural backgrounds meet, exchange and collaborate. Universities will foster the development of intercultural competences, a vital contribution in a world where local and global realities converge through the increased use of digital technologies.

TURNING VISION INTO REALITY

“Universities need academic freedom, institutional autonomy, sufficient and sustainable funding and efficient support for collaboration. To face the challenges of this decade, it is critical that Europe’s universities are equipped to make decisions about the paths they want to pursue in order to best fulfil their missions in service to society,” the authors state.

According to the document, making this vision a reality will depend on three factors:

1. Enabling frameworks that strengthen and protect university autonomy in its various dimensions. These include supporting universities in their continuous development and including clear and consistent provisions guaranteeing scholars and students the rights that constitute academic freedom. The frameworks need to consider the needs of science, for example in copyright and data protection regulation, and support transnational collaboration among Europe’s universities.

2. Adequate investments in order to meet the challenges of the new decade. Financial autonomy must be strengthened to enable the university to take strategic decisions and foster institutional profiling. Additional investments in infrastructure, both physical and digital, as well as in academic and professional staff, will be crucial.

3. Strong leadership that needs to be inclusive and transparent in its decisionmaking. Current and future leaders must have support for the development of their leadership skills. The strategy also emphasizes the importance of professionalization of staff in all areas of university management.

PRIORITIES FOR ACTION

Reaching out to society at large and opening up for co-creation will be a continuous ambition for universities in this decade.

To fully realize this vision of universities without walls, a coordinated approach and ownership among the main stakeholders are needed. These include university leadership, students and staff, funders and policy makers. The EUA suggests three priority areas of work, i.e., steps that can be taken today to bring the future closer: reform academic careers, promote interdisciplinarity, and strengthen civic engagement.

REFORM ACADEMIC CAREERS

The reform should be acknowledged and supported by all stakeholders through the following actions:

• Using a broader set of evaluation practices for academic careers, which include a wide definition of impact, beyond traditional bibliometric indicators;

• Promoting further parity of esteem between different career paths, including parity of esteem between research and teaching;

• enabling and valorizing Open Science[160] in career and research assessment;

• incentivizing activities with different forms of impact, including innovation or citizen science;[161]

• making academic careers less precarious and more attractive as life choices in order to develop and retain talent;

• providing more flexibility for academic careers, for switching jobs more easily between academia and other sectors, such as start-ups, industry or public administration. Researchers with job experience outside academia must have access to university careers.

PROMOTE INTERDISCIPLINARITY

Interdisciplinary approaches must be better used for meeting societal challenges across university missions. While disciplines must remain important in order to organize and expand the knowledge production at universities, interdisciplinary approaches must be promoted by:

• recognizing interdisciplinary engagement in academic assessment and reward schemes;

• implementing institutional accreditation[162] to complement discipline-based program accreditation;

• making interdisciplinary teaching part of the professional development of academic staff and supporting academic staff from different disciplines in working together.

STRENGTHEN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

Universities must support civic values. They can do this by:

• supporting the members of the academic community in using their academic freedom to contribute to public debates, encouraging open and evidence-based discussions, countering misinformation and falsehoods and explaining the lack of finality in scientific judgements (that is, the concept that any scientific judgement can be modified or canceled — ed. note);