Luk Van Langenhove looks at the developments in higher education from a global perspective. Photograph: Saskia Vanderstichele.
In 2017, the French president Emmanuel Macron called for the creation of European universities. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel takes the lead in this. With EUTOPIA, the university will be a founding member of such a European project. Luk Van Langenhove, VUB Assignment Holder for International Institutes and Networking, looks at those European developments from a global perspective.
Text: Ebe Daems
After a call from the European Commission, the VUB submitted a proposal, together with five other universities: the universities of Warwick, Paris-Seine, Gothenburg, Barcelona (Pompeu Fabra) and Ljubljana. One of the unique characteristics of EUTOPIA is that it gives students a prominent role in its realization.
On the frontline
The European Commission approved of EUTOPIA as one of the seventeen pilot projects. Each pilot project goes its own way, so they can then learn from each other’s best practices. “Through this, we get the opportunity to help build the future of higher education on the frontline in Europe”, says Luk Van Langenhove, academic lead and face of the project.
“Higher education is going through an incredible transition period. Education is turning into a global market. Not only is there competition in one’s own country, there is competition all around the world. The best talents are moving from one country to the next. To stay competitive, it is important to hold a place in that global market.”
Higher education is going through an incredible transition period. It is turning into a global market.
Burst the national bubble
On top of that, the way in which university education is being organized is changing strongly: “With EUTOPIA, we want to place the emphasis on digitization, lifelong learning and especially internationalization”, says Van Langenhove. “Our dream would be that a student who enrols in one of the six universities, will be symbolically enrolled in the other five as well. For example through an Erasmus exchange programme, or a collaboration via a digital learning platform. By bursting the students’ national bubbles as soon as possible, we try to strengthen their European identity. Next to that, we try to provide more collaboration opportunities between the different laboratories and researchers.”
Our dream would be that a student who enrols in one of the six universities, symbolically is also enrolled in the other five.
In this project, the VUB takes responsibility for the aspect of education and we will focus on creating EUTOPIA learning communities: “In those, students and researchers of the six universities and from different disciplines will research worldwide challenges together. We base ourselves on the sustainable development objectives of the UN and a couple of missions of the European Commission. We handle themes like climate change, smart cities, fake news, food safety and so on and so forth. The ultimate goal is to train the Europeans of the future with EUTOPIA.”
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Professor Luk Van Langenhove (°1957) studied psychology at the VUB. He was a top official at the Belgian federal science policy and founding director of the United Nations University campus in Bruges. Now, he is a research professor at the Institute for European Studies (IES) and VUB Assignment Holder for International Institutes and Networking.
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