Notes from the IMPACT-HUM Workshop, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 20 May 2026
There is a question that European university alliances tend to circle rather than confront directly: not what they do, but what they are for. The distinction matters. An alliance can produce outputs — joint programmes, mobility figures, co-authored papers, shared platforms — and still leave the deeper question unanswered. The IMPACT-HUM Workshop in Vitoria-Gasteiz, convened by ENLIGHT+ at the Faculty of Arts of the Basque Country University, was unusual in that it attempted to confront it.
The clarifying move of the day was also the simplest: a careful account of what impact is not (Glória Nunes, ENLIGHT). Performance management is not impact. Quality assurance is not impact. Outreach, communications, societal engagement, technology transfer — none of these, however valuable, constitute impact. They are conditions for it: scaffolding erected around a building that must be constructed by other means. Impact, properly defined, is transformation — within and beyond academia — that is durable enough to change how people behave, how institutions operate, how systems of collaboration function.
That definition sharpens a problem that tends to be obscured by the vocabulary of KPIs and metrics. In Research, outputs are at least countable: papers, patents, citations, and spin-offs. In Education, the main output is people (Igor Campillo, ENLIGHT), and people carry their transformations quietly, over decades, in ways that no data-collection instrument is designed to catch. I said as much during the roundtable: that I can still name the professors who transformed my understanding of the world, more than forty years after the fact — the precise books they opened, the specific quality of the astonishment they produced. That is educational impact. It is also, by definition, invisible to any framework an alliance might construct.
This is not an argument against frameworks. EUTOPIA’s own Impact Strategy, which I presented, defines impact as the durable transformation of people, institutions, and collaboration systems, mapped across four levels and nine areas, measured through a combination of quantitative KPIs and qualitative evidence. It is a serious and necessary instrument. But its value depends on the honesty with which we acknowledge what it cannot see. Universities and alliances, like all institutions, are abstractions; they are created by individuals, led by people and exist for people, and that fact should govern every number we produce. The real risk of sophisticated measurement systems is not that they lie, but that they make invisible what they cannot count, which is often the most important thing.
The responses to this concern are various and instructive. YUFE (Julia Cora) approaches it through the systematic capture of experiences and perceptions, organising their impact frame around talent, society, and academic growth — an attempt to hold the qualitative alongside the quantitative without collapsing one into the other. ENLIGHT works through a structured sequence: purpose first, then scope, then data, then assessment — insisting on asking why before asking how much.
Underlying all of this is a larger shift that reframes the question: the move from the classroom as a world to the world as the classroom (Igor Campillo). Challenge-Based Education, as outlined by Frerderik Verbeke (ENLIGHT), is not simply a pedagogical method; it is an acknowledgement that the university has always been too small to contain what learning requires. Universities, as the Rector of the Basque Country University observed, tend to be isolated. Alliances are the intelligent structural response to that condition, frameworks for doing together, and at scale, what no single institution can manage alone.
That tension — between scale and the irreducibly personal — ran through the afternoon’s roundtables as well. On CBE in practice, concrete accounts of university-society collaboration in the humanities and social sciences showed both the fertility and the friction of working at the boundary between the institution and the community. On joint master programmes and the European Degree Label, the discussion of governance, accreditation, and sustainability made plain the institutional weight that must be carried before any student receives a certificate bearing two universities’ names — and before multilingualism and multiculturalism become, as ENLIGHT proposes, not merely a subject of study but the very medium of a shared degree (Frederik Verbeke, EHU).
The coherence was that the same question, approached from different angles — pedagogical, strategic, political, personal — kept producing the same answer: that the durable transformation of a person is not a metric but an event, and that the task of alliances is to create the conditions in which such events become more likely, without confusing the conditions with the thing itself. Igor Campillo put it with the concision that long reflection sometimes earns: impact is not something we do — it is something that happens.
