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EUTOPIA: designing a real and believable European university

EUTOPIA is a challenge-led, student-centred, place-based, inclusive alliance of entrepreneurial, change focused universities that has been successful in its bid for a €5m grant from the Erasmus+ ‘European Universities’ programme. The awarded project will employ:

  1. A long-term vision project: horizon is 2050
  2. A mid-term project and ambition: 2025
  3. And a short-term piloting plan (3 years, from 2019 to 2022) to realise its ambitions.

 

Vision, mission and plan

Long-term vision

EUTOPIA’s vision is of a fully federated inter-university campus alliance that is:

  • Geared towards the challenges of the future

The alliance will be challenge-drive to prepare students and staff as European citizens and lifelong learners who care and act for the future of the planet and humanity.

  • Student-centred and student-empowering

The alliance will provide transformative and open learning opportunities, and extended horizons of expectation and ability, both across Europe and throughout the world.

  • Attentive to the plurality, potentiality and international pre-eminence of Europe’s regions

The alliance will build on its place-making strengths, connecting cultures and contexts in order to enhance European capability and creativity, and support the international pre-eminence of European innovation and influence.

  • Committed to the principles of openness and inclusion

The alliance will foster and support knowledge co-creation, by building open resources and collaborative platforms, endorsing open science agendas, and sponsoring the access, mobility and inclusivity mechanisms that liberate our intellectual and social potential.

 

These values are encapsulated in EUTOPIA’s collective vision:

EUTOPIA is a challenge-led, student-centred, place-based, inclusive alliance of entrepreneurial, change focused universities. EUTOPIA is made up of a core group of like-minded universities for whom change is not simply the output from our alliance, but the driving force that brings them together.

Mid-term mission

EUTOPIA will establish by 2025 the foundations of this federated university. This Project focuses on five core areas, in order to:

  • Prepare students, staff and learners to be empowered European citizens in today’s disruptive World
  • Adjust the university organisation and practices to lead the challenges of the 21st Century
  • Increase and intensify the Europeanisation of programmes on offer
  • Catalyse place-making by the universities in partnership with their regions, engaging with all agencies to embed and empower the transformative effect of universities
  • Serve as an example for other universities, across Europe and in the wider international arena, in order to share and develop the focus on building transformative, challenge-driven and contemporary universities.

 

To do so…

The joint mission of EUTOPIA is to build a distinctive, daring and driven alliance of transformative and engaged institutions. EUTOPIA will produce challenge-driven research and teaching, prepare empowered European graduates, champion regional and international involvement, and support diversity, inclusivity and widening citizenship.

Short-term piloting plan and activities

The piloting plan will initiate the project and ambition that are guided by the vision. The anchored project therefore carries the acronym ‘EUTOPIA 2050’: European Universities Transforming to an Open Inclusive Academy for 2050.

 

The EUTOPIA 3-year plan is organised in seven Work Packages, each one with a specific goal. All of them include three different types of activity (strategy development; development and implementation of tools and instruments; implementation of pilot cases).

 

The Work Packages are as follows:

  1. A governance structure and strategy for managing a European University alliance
  2. A common Learning Community
  3. A common set of Knowledge Creation Communities
  4. A place-making capacity, policy and practice
  5. An inclusion and balanced societies policy and practice
  6. A grounded and global internationalisation
  7. A sustainability and dissemination policy and practice

 

Further information about Work Packages.