EUTOPIA MORE

BACKGROUND AND NEEDS ADDRESSED

The Alliance started with a pilot phase, EUTOPIA 2050, a project within the framework of the European Universities Initiative. Already during the EUTOPIA 2050 project, several accompanying and follow-up initiatives, such as EUTOPIA TRAIN (Horizon 2020 SwafS), EUTOPIA SIF (Horizon 2020 MSCA COFUND), and FLECSLAB (Erasmus+, KA220HED), were successfully submitted. The EUTOPIA alliance is now in its second phase, EUTOPIA MORE, which lays the foundations to reach our ten-year ambition.

Our initial EUTOPIA 2050 project rested on one conviction: today’s challenges call for a transformation of universities. They should re-think the skills that universities need to provide to students and staff; the way that research can achieve high impact within academia and beyond; and finally, our level of action by supporting local-to-global initiatives to face today’s challenges. This initial conviction has only been reinforced by the new developments since 2018: the COVID-19 pandemic, which catalyzed the digital functioning of universities; the growing awareness of the issues related to climate change, which require a shift in social models and individual behaviours; or the tragic war in the European Union’s neighbourhood, which demonstrates the continuous need to defend European values. Solidarity and cooperation are needed more than ever as paths to resilience in our missions as universities. Such large-scale challenges can only be addressed by channelling interdisciplinary skills and operating at an international level, connecting the local to the global. Furthermore, knowledge is becoming ever more complex and subject to change, making a life-long learning perspective necessary.

In light of such challenges and resonance with the new policy initiatives for Higher Education, Research and Innovation, led by the European Union and the European Commission, EUTOPIA MORE places at its heart the empowerment of students, staff, and partners through Connecting Communities across campuses, disciplines, and borders. Indeed, we firmly believe that solutions to contemporary challenges cannot be engineered from the top but can only be built from the bottom up, flexibly, relying on the distributed expertise of various communities.

OBJECTIVES

The ambitions of EUTOPIA MORE are thus threefold:

1. First, we will create the conditions for communities to connect across our campuses around projects tackling education, research or outreach challenges of global relevance;

2. Secondly, the education initiatives of EUTOPIA will allow us to showcase, within a joint EUTOPIA College, our enriched curriculum at the Bachelor, Master and PhD programs, together with the innovations coming out of life-long learning initiatives;

3. Third, we will connect our initiatives in research, innovation, and outreach geared towards tackling the big societal challenges of today and integrating our academic communities within the EUTOPIA Global Institute of Knowledge Communities, involving local and global partners.
   
   
   The Connecting Communities approach will foster the emergence of innovation, and our shared commitments will provide the coherence of our common efforts, ensuring that EUTOPIA is:

• Geared towards the challenges of the future. Our alliance is challenge-driven 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. Our alliance provides 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. Our alliance builds on its place-making strengths, connecting cultures and contexts to enhance European capability and creativity and support the international preeminence of European innovation and influence.

EUTOPIA will thus inject alternative ways of organising teaching, research, and outreach to its environment into the daily functioning of our universities, thus supporting a process of self-transformation from within and guided by our shared values. In its very essence, this translates into the following vision and mission:

VISION

To empower future generations with academic knowledge to contribute to a more sustainable society, connecting communities on a local, European and global level

MISSION

We connect communities to transform our universities into open, inclusive, diverse, and innovative enablers for outreach impact on societies.

Starting of the Project: December 2022

Duration of the Project: 4 Years (Until 2026)

Budget: 14.4 Million Euros

Partners:  Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy), CY Cergy Paris University (France), Dresden University of Technology (Germany), NOVA University Lisbon (Portugal), University of Gothenburg (Sweden), University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), Pompeu Fabra University (Spain), University of Warwick (UK)