Merge or collaborate? EU universities scheme ‘needs two tracks’

The European Union should split its European Universities Initiative into two tracks to accommodate the very different destinations of currently funded networks, an expert has said.

Sebastian Stride, a founding partner of the consultancy Siris Academic, said the scheme, which has funded 41 alliances, should treat institutions seeking to merge into a single entity differently from those “focused more on collaboration”.

These two endpoints require different rules, yardsticks and funding, he said. Those that only seek closer collaboration could be allowed multiple partners in a series of thematic networks, for example, while others wanting “a more integrative, transformational” approach should have fewer participants and stable funding.

The European University of Technology, an alliance that brings together institutions in eight countries, is something of an outlier in explicitly seeking a full merger of its constituent members.

Dr Stride’s suggestion came at an event exploring the data and indicators that might be useful to evaluate and guide alliances.

A study of the current alliances by Andrea Bonaccorsi at the University of Pisa found that universities funded by the initiative tended to be larger, more internationalised and have a stronger research focus than those outside the scheme.

Larger universities have the staff and other administrative capacity put together an alliance bid, Professor Bonaccorsi said, while those that are research-focused tend to enjoy stronger pre-existing international links.

“We know that this type of collaboration requires an enormous effort in terms of resources and broad institutional engagement and that doesn’t make sense, often, for smaller institutions,” said Michael Murphy, president of the European University Association, noting that participants were on average three times larger in terms of academics.

The 292 universities that are in EU-sponsored alliances boast about 395,000 PhD students, about 6,000 more than the 1,024 European universities that are not currently alliance members, Professor Bonaccorsi said.

The European Commission’s aim is that the alliances include partners from all types of higher education institution and cover a broad geographic swathe of Europe. But an analysis of the existing alliances by Marco Cavallaro and Agata Lambrechts, a PhD student and postdoc at the Università della Svizzera italiana, found most were assembled from similar institutions.

They found about three-quarters were made up of one or two types of institution, such as research universities. “Most alliances are built by similar institutions which share often long histories of collaboration, be it in research, education or at [the] whole institutional level,” said Dr Lambrechts.

While overall there was good coverage of the continent across the alliances, Dr Stride said there was something on an east-west divide, with the top six alliances in terms of European project participation having a far lower proportion of eastern European members than the six lowest.

He said prestigious universities generally looked to alliances as “mostly a political tool”, rather than as an alternative route for student mobility. Speaking at the Times Higher Education Europe Universities Summit in May, Professor Murphy said attention from politicians was the “main value” of the EU alliances compared with the myriad other continent-crossing university partnerships.

Yann-Maël Bideau, a European Commission official, said staff were starting a project to map out the indicators that would be needed to evaluate the alliances in the coming weeks. The third funding round of the initiative, which closed in March, dedicated most of its money to “deepen, intensify and expand” existing alliances, including, but not limited to, those funded from the initiatives’ 2019 round. 

Mr Bideau said the most recent funding round got 52 proposals which included about 350 higher education institutions, the results of which would be announced in July.

ben.upton@timeshighereducation.com