Subject: Hague Bernard Rougemont - msg#00029

At regional level, the Western European Union, although a military
institution, had set upa Committee for intellectual cooperation. The
Hague Congress, however, had recommended notonly the creation of the
Council of Europe as the political arm of the European Movement
butalso action in the field of culture. Thus, in October 1949, a
European Cultural Conference washeld in Lausanne from which emerged
the College of Europe at Bruges and the European CulturalCentre in
Geneva. The Centre, under the leadership of Denis de Rougemont,
initiated Europeannetworks of cooperation among institutions and
people interested in similar activities, such asmusic festivals,
European institutes, European education teachers. It contributed to
the creation in1954 of what was to become one of the largest
cooperative ventures in European science, theCERN. The same year, to
help support this work ? that was completed by the Dialogue
descultures, i.e., large conferences trying to define the
specificity of European culture vis-à-vis otherworld civilisations -
, the Centre also launched the European Cultural Foundation on the
model oflarge US foundations, an institution that soon moved to
Amsterdam where Prince Bernard, one ofits governors, could secure
regular funding.Academic cooperationIt was not the Centre, however,
that initiated renewed cooperation in higher education butthe
Cultural Committee of the Western European Union when it sponsored
the 1955 conferenceof European university leaders convened in
Cambridge under the presidency of the Duke ofEdinburgh. A little
less than hundred participants from 15 countries joined that
meeting, the firstGeneral Assembly of what was to become the CRE,
the Conférence des Recteurs Européens, anorganisation whose
institutionalisation was decided at the second conference of
university leadersconvened in 1959 in Dijon. Indeed, it is only in
1964, at the third conference, in Göttingen, thatthe constitution of
the Standing Conference of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of
EuropeanUniversities was formally adopted and the seat of the
organisation placed at the University ofGeneva, the Rector of which,
Jaques Courvoisier, had just been elected the President of the
newassociation.One has to remember that mobility in post-war Europe
was not easy considering the lackof appropriate facilities, the
insufficiencies in transport infrastructures, as well as the border
andexchange controls prevailing everywhere. Moreover, many of the
academic links usual intraditional university life had been severed
by the world conflict. Recreating a European academiccommunity was
certainly no simple task. Models of interuniversity cooperation did
exist,however, like the British and the Austrian conferences of
university leaders, at national level ?both dating from before the
first World War, or at international level, the Association
ofCommonwealth Universities that began activities in 1913. No wonder
then that the restructuringof the European academic community
started with the support of the United Kingdom whereuniversities had
suffered litltle destruction, had retained prestige and had kept a
strong sense oftradition.In Cambridge, participants discussed the
main tenets of the European university, its needfor autonomy and
intellectual independence (both concepts had suffered from
nationalist warorganisation), its mix of services (general culture
balancing utilitarian specialisation), the selection,training and
welfare of its student body, in other words the university's role in
European society.
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4After this reference to the continuity of the intellectual
adventure beyond politicalupheavals, cooperation was furthered
especially by the French and the Germans, following theirpolitical
alliance in the building up of an integrated Europe, a collaboration
embodied by KonradAdenauer and Charles de Gaulle, who had come back
to power in Paris in 1958 to found the 5thRepublic and bring to a
close the Algerian war as well as the French imperial history.
Theinitiative for further cooperation in higher education moved from
Britain to the continent, whereFrance and Germany were committed to
growing and closer cooperation at all levels of commonconcern,
technical and operational ? also in higher education. Thus, the
topics of the two CREAssemblies in Dijon (1959) and Göttingen (1964)
were much more down-to-earth than in Englandin 1955: considering the
shortage of scientists and technologists in a fast developing
society,participants asked how students could be trained
as "Europeans" in terms of humanities, socialsciences and economy ?
reflections which, in 1959, at the beginning of the Common
Marketadventure, also implied for the universities a civic
responsibility for the making of Europe. In1964, the optimum and
maximum size of the academic institution was at the centre of the
debate,a size relative to society's expectations, to the students'
growing presence in higher educationinstitutions, or to the quality
of research and of service to industry.Indirectly, the differences
between a closely knit Europe of sovereign nations (thatinspired the
creation under British leadership of the European Free Trade
Association as acounterpoint to the Common Market) and a Europe
whose member countries were ready toabandon part of their
sovereignty to achieve common aims (the Community of the "Six"
countriesthat had been directly involved in the war feuds) was
reflected in the university association :should it reflect
convergence of higher education policies or push for change in
national systems,i.e., foster the European added value in teaching
and research ? Should it be active or pro-active ?An answer was to
be given at the fourth Assembly invited to sit in Bologna, the
oldestuniversity of Europe, in 1969 : a re-definition of autonomy in
developed societies was todetermine the capacity of academia and
students to influence science policy and career training.Indeed, the
CRE was already playing its part in the political debate, its
Committee (whosedelegates were representing national systems of
higher education) acting as the non-governmentalside of the
Committee of Higher Education and Research of the Council of Europe,
a committeewhere each country was allowed two delegates ? and, at
the time, two independent votes: onewas representing the
authorities, the other the world of higher education. That
Committee,meeting twice a year, was reporting to the Ministers of
Education of the Council and discussedtopics of common interest to
the 22 countries then members of the organisation.Because of the
1968 student troubles, particularly intense in Bologna, the window
ofefficient communist local government in Italy, it was decided to
meet in Geneva instead. By thistime, CRE had become
institutionalised but its ability to weigh on political decision-
making wasbeing questioned by the wave of student unrest that
destabilised many of its members, sinceindividual institutions or
parts of national systems of higher education were being disrupted.
Forexample, the Edgard Faure reforms, in France, shattered a system
that had evolved little since the19thcentury : the map of higher
education changed in a few months and new universities wereborn all
over the country ? often along disciplinary and ideological lines ?
to cater for the massivetraining needs of the post-war baby boom
generation. All countries were affected by
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5transformation as the demand was more or less similar everywhere:
indeed, by the mid-sixties',the European higher education system had
reached a threshold in its growth and the academicinstitution had to
care for new groups of students, for new career paths, for new
relations withindustry and the community.Simultaneously, the
hardships of post-war reconstruction were being overcome by
aflourishing economic recovery that allowed for the democratisation
of European traditionalsocieties ? new groups were accessing to
wealth and requesting a say in the decision-makingprocess. In the
universities, that led to the excesses of government through
assemblies but also toorganised participation in collegial decision-
making, for instance in the Netherlands. Attemptswere made to look
at higher education as a whole, the universities being only one
sector of a moreglobal system of learning. The limits beetween
academic and professional teaching were beingblurred ? for example
in the German Gesamthochschulen. So many of the classical references
ofacademia disappeared at the time that, by 1974, when the
universities were still adjusting to thenew constraints of mass
education, the CRE Assembly that convened in Bologna could only
takestock of the change and reforms that had been happening all over
Europe while trying to imaginehow this would affect higher education
in the following years.The actors of academic cooperationWho was in
charge of academic cooperation and mobility ? Mainly the leaders
ofindividual institutions, all the more so since, in traditional
universities, they had little power apartfrom representative duties.
Thus, in the fifties and early sixties, it was obvious that
internationalrelations were the task of the academic head, often a
well-known scientist whose prestige couldserve the institution's
external linkages, nationally or internationally. Primus inter
pares, theelected institutional head was usually given a short
mandate that did not offer enough time toshape a policy independent
from that decided by the Senate. In those days, universities
wererather small, and collegial governance allowed their elected
leaders to take detached views of therole of their institution ?
also in European affairs. Moreover, because of the difficulties
ofreconstruction and the many administrative and financial obstacles
making travels difficult, staffand student mobility was minimal ?
hence the importance of network cooperation, particularly
inscientific research, like the CERN in Geneva. Hence, in the early
days of CRE, the key organ ofthe Association was the Permanent
Committee, the only international forum where universitiescould
compare notes on their evolution,After 1964, that committee was used
to prepare university positions before discussinghigher education
policy with ministerial delegates in the Committee of Higher
Education andResearch (CHER) ? often the same people whom the
rectors would meet at national level. In fact,each session of the
CHER was preceded by a one day encounter of the university
delegates ? theCRE Permanent Committee - in order to develop
converging views when meeting thegovernmental representatives. The
European added value corresponded to the common grounddefined during
these six-monthly sessions. Apart from General Assemblies, and until
1969 andthe repercussions of student unrest, there was no discussion
of common problems shared by allCRE members. Nevertheless, there was
a general consensus about the function of universities in
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6society and the expected trends affecting academia and there was
little need to assert one's ownviews about the contribution of
higher education to European development.However, with the many and
often diverging roles forced on academic institutions bymass higher
education, a trend calling for international comparisons arising
from the growingfacility of exchanges among institutions of higher
education, at least in Western Europe andbetween Western Europe and
North America (as soon as money convertibility had become therule),
CRE's subdued political presence was felt to represent a rather
discrete ? even minimal -service to the members. Combined with the
fact that the Council of Europe represented only theWestern part of
the continent, it was decided in 1969 to distance CRE from the
Council and to re-affirm the pan-European ambitions of the
association. As a result, the sessions of the PermanentCommittee
became self-standing, focusing on comparative academic development,
and, toencourage participation, it was proposed to have them coupled
with thematic seminars ?restricted to some 60 participants only - in
which key questions of university governance wouldbe discussed.
These seminars were described by some as "continuing education" for
academicleaders who, after the reforms resulting from the 1968
student troubles, were asked by newregulations to get more and more
involved in the detailed management of their enlargedinstitutions.
This also had the consequence, very often, to change academic
leadership, many ofthe prestigious scientists of older days being
reluctant to commit four to eight years of their lifeto university
administration ? at the risk of jeopardising their scientific
career. Hence, in the 70's,strategic management became the locus of
convergence for a new "breed" of academic leaders,usually younger
staff members interested in the university as an enterprise. For
them, often withless global research links than their predecessors,
policy-making at international level had becomea rather esoterical
question. They were more interested in the practicalities of access,
recognition,educational efficiency, institutional decentralisation
or the integration of minority students ? allquestions met first and
foremost at institutional level and in a national context.
Comparisonshelped to relativise one's own problems rather than to
find common solutions. The future lookedvery much like the
extrapolation of present realities: hence the topic of the Bologna
Assembly in1974 ? The European Universities : 1975-1985.This
collective foresight exercise had been overshadowed since 1969 by
another question,long muted but now coming to the fore : What is
Europe ?, an essential matter for Europeancooperation and
mobility.The European questionIndeed, 1968 had also been the year of
the "Prague Spring" and, three weeks before theGeneva Assembly in
early September 1969, the Soviet tanks rolled in Czechoslovakia to
re-establish a regime more pliant to the wishes of Moscow than the
rule of Alexander Dubcek. Apartfrom welcoming refugees, the Western
democracies did not move, abiding by the division ofEurope that had
been born out of the Yalta Treaty. Many, especially among
intellectuals, couldfeel that, by omission, they had betrayed their
proclaimed ideals of democracy and human rights,the same noble aims
that were being used as references in the administrative and
organisationalreforms of higher education in Western Europe. Crudely
said, could Europe East of the ironcurtain still play a part in
regional integration or should the concept of Europe be monopolised
by
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7the members of the Council of Europe - if not by those countries
building the EuropeanCommunity only?Indeed, the European ideal
seemed incompatible with the Communist objectives ofbuilding an
international society much larger than the European continent.
However, the cost paidby the Communists to bring the war to a close ?
in the Soviet Union or among the resistants toNazi occupation in
the West ? had rendered communist parties full if difficult partners
in thedemocratic development of Council of Europe member countries,
France and Italy in particular.Should they remain deprived of
national responsibilities when they were proving goodmanagement
abilities at local or regional level ? Would their allegiance to
international idealsprevail over national loyalties in case of
crisis - not to speak of European allegiance ? Such wasthe dilemma
that was to be solved by the "compromesso storico" that envisaged
power sharingbetween Communists and Christian Democrats in the
Italian Republic.The possible cooperation between Peppone and Don
Camillo ? to mention the popularcharacters of Guareschi's novels -
was not a matter of urgency in the Po Valley only, but also aproblem
of European importance. For instance, the radical changes in Iberian
politics werestumbling on a similar question: what responsibilities
to entrust to the representatives ofCommunist ideals in Portugal an
Spain after the regimes installed by Salazar and Franco
haddisappeared in 1974 and 1975? Would European leftist groups
remain simple puppets in thehands of the Soviet leadership ? Or was
such an evocation of national disloyalty only an aspect ofNATO
propaganda against Comecon countries, particularly at a time when,
in Moscow, détentewas becoming a key word for international
strategies? Indeed, cold war politics were to bereplaced by
regulated competition between two concepts of social organisation ?
as applied to thepolitical, economical and cultural domains. But was
that just another way for the Soviet Union toplay Great Power
politics while maintaining the division of Europe into two opposing
blocks?Indeed, to test the matter, Western countries agreed to set
up the CSCE (the Conference onSecurity and Cooperation in Europe)
with their Eastern counterparts and to launch negotiationsthat led
to the 1975 Helsinki agreements ? a whole section of which dealt
with intellectualcooperation and the mobility of persons over the
East-West divide, a matter of importance foruniversities which, like
in the CRE, claimed to consider Europe as a single whole from
theAtlantic ocean to the Ural mountains.In short, after the
crackdown in Prague in 1969, the two groups of nations were
stillplaying off each other, competing and cooperating - through
their surrogates in many parts of theworld but also directly in
international arenas where codes of peaceful confrontation had
slowlyevolved over the years. This was particularly true for UN
institutios, where the Soviet countrieswere developing closer
contacts with the booming economies of Western capitalism.In the
field of higher education, UNESCO became a focus for East/West
governmentaltalks, inter-university collaboration being considered
as a public responsibility and knowledgedevelopment as a tool of
social development whose importance justified state steering, if
notgovernmental control. In such a context, private efforts based on
the institutions of higher learningthemselves (like those made by
CRE) seemed to politicians at best marginal, at worst, annoying.As a
consequence, various suggestions were made to streamline action in
higher education andresearch, with the aim to encourage their
contribution to the solution of urgent problems, political
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8or economical. One such plan led to the creation of the United
Nations University, more athinktank for the UN system and a network
of institutes focusing on research applied to theproblems of
poverty, hunger and conflict resolution, than a usual university
with students andprofessors.In 1971, the CRE was thus consulted on
the creation of the United Nations Universitysince, in 1967, CRE had
been granted consultative status at the UN Social and Economic
Councilin Geneva (Ecosoc) and at UNESCO in Paris. A year later, in
1972, CRE opinion was asked foranother governmental project, the
setting up in Bucharest of CEPES (the Centre Européen
pourl'Enseignement Supérieur), the forum where public university
policies could be compared on bothsides of the Iron Curtain. After
reflection, the CRE decided to encourage the development of thesenew
bodies even if CEPES could become a competitor in interuniversity
cooperation, all the morestrong that it would benefit from public
support on which the CRE could not count as a non-governmental
organisation (NGO). The new Centre, however, would have the capacity
tostimulate official linkages with "socialist" academics and
institutions with which CRE had moredifficulties as a private
association of university leaders. Thus, collaboration with
CEPESrepresented a welcome way to keep alive the potential of joint
activities in a wider Europe.Simultaneoulsy, preparations were
progressing for the Second Conference of EducationMinisters of the
UNESCO European region ? an area covering the European countries
fromPortugal to the Russian Federation of Soviet Republics as well
as the US, Canada and Israel. Themeeting was held in Bucharest from
26 November to 3 December 1973 and, under Soviet aegis,proposals
were made for the creation of a government-sponsored organisation of
universities inEurope of which Russian institutions could feel an
integral part. TheYugoslav delegation,however, introduced in the
final recommendation a sentence indicating that such a new
associationshould be established "by using the existing structures".
The CRE, as such, was not mentionedbut the Board and Committee
decided that the only "existing structures" in
Europeaninteruniversity cooperation was the CRE. Therefore, to
follow the recommendation of theMinisters in Bucharest, it was
proposed to revise the Statutes of the Association by discussingthe
modifications desired in particular by the non-member universities
of Eastern Europe. Onehas to remember, however, that in the early
seventies, among the 300 members of the CREoriginating from 25
countries, there were universities from Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Poland,Romania and Yugoslavia. Thus, for the CRE, opening further
was in keeping with its traditionalpolicy even if the association
could regret that the pressure for change should be coming from
thegovernments of the region. In September 1974, the 5thGeneral
Assembly of the CRE in Bologna,authorised the Committee to prepare
such a revision and, at the close of their meeting, itsparticipants
convened again as a conference of equals with representatives of non-
memberinstitutions in Eastern Europe under the leadership of the
Rector of Bologna, Professor TitoCarnacini; the conference decided
to set up a Study Group in order to explore the potential ofenlarged
interuniversity cooperation throughout Europe. Based on its
findings, the Study Groupwould meet the Commission appointed by the
CRE Committee to discuss changes in the Statute.These negotiations
were to be brought to a close at an extraordinary General Assembly
of theCRE due to be held in Vienna on 7 June 1975, before the IAU
General Assembly in Moscow inAugust, when the Association of
European Universities would be set up as a contribution to the
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9Helsinki agreement that, later in the year, was to define the
conditions of further détente in Europe? in particular as far as
mobility and intellectual cooperation were concerned.If governments
were trying to bridge the gap dividing the two sides of Europe, they
werealso active at a sub-regional level, in particular in Western
Europe. Thus, in the late sixties, CREwas also asked its opinion
about the creation of a university institution under the aegis of
theEuropean Communities. CRE members, who represented many other
countries apart from the sixnations of the Common Market, were most
reluctant at the creation of a supranationalUniversity, which could
become a key reference in Europe for national or regional
institutions ofhigher learning, a kind of model establishment that
would attract the best minds and offer themost prestigious service,
an institution which would be emulated all over Europe, in the EC
andbeyond ? thus offering a focus for academic convergence, at least
for the whole of WesternEurope. The European dimension of teaching,
however, was considered important as thecontinent needed citizens
and intellectual élites aware of their common heritage: was a super-
university indispensable to meet such an objective ? The CRE
Committee claimed that some kindof research thinktank (very similar
to the UNU at world level), open to graduates wishing toexplore the
European dimension of their topics of interest, would be sufficient.
As this universityposition coincided more or less with the ideas
prevailing in national authorities not ready toabandon their
traditional prerogatives in the education field, the Commission in
Brussels acceptedto reduce the ambition of the first plans in order
to create the European University Institute inFlorence ? in close
cooperation with existing universities which often, for a seconded
staff to theBadia Fiesolana.A similar type of arguments was also
used in the debate concerning the setting up of theEuropean Science
Foundation, at first considered as an organisation meant to emulate
the NationalScience Foundation in the US: i.e., an institution that
would be awarding grants and distributingfunds in the countries
linked to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, thus developing
commoncriteria leading to common policies in the development of
European research. CRE was againasked for its opinion. Mistrusting
any supra-national institution, universities generallyconsidered,
like in the case of the Institute in Florence, that ESF role was to
focus on thedevelopment of the European dimension of intellectual
cooperation simply by coordinating thenational councils for research
so that their grant policies would converge into some kind of
globalunderstanding of the European value added by cross-border
cooperation in research activities.Thus, in the history of CRE,
governments were taking the initiative again: they had doneso in the
early fifties to engage institutions in academic cooperation; this
had led to the firstmeeting of rectors in 1955 and to the creation
of the association in 1959. During most of the1960's, efforts had
been made to assert the collective autonomy of academic institutions
vis-à-visthe governments, for instance by becoming the counterweight
to governmental representation inthe CHER at the Council of Europe.
The 1968 disruptions proved how weak this attempt hadbeen at
building a sense of academic community in Europe. When CRE decided
in 1969 to severthe institutional links existing with Strasbourg, it
represented a courageous initiative as it forcedon the universities
the need for a commonality of purpose at a time of fragmentation and
growingdiversification of higher education. But destabilisation had
touched the association too and theEuropean credibility of the
organisation was being challenged by the difficulties met to welcome
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10new members in the Eastern part of the continent. In other words,
CRE was not strong enough asa NGO to live up to its political
ambitions. As a result, Greater Europe, instead of consolidatingthe
European Rectors' Conference, evoked the creation of competing
groups, the CEPES as partof UNESCO, on one side, the new association
asked for by the Ministers of Education of theEuropean region, on
the other. Indeed, governments could impose their agenda because the
CREhad not reached a level of development ? and of internal
consensus - making it strong enough toface on its own terms the
difficult requests emanating from public authorities. Especially at
thebeginning of the seventies, when higher education budgets, partly
because of the 1973 oil crisis,were being cut everywhere despite
growing numbers of students, leaving institutions of higherlearning
all the more dependent on their national governments. As a result,
the CRE had to be re-active rather than pro-active; this was the
gist of the debate in Bologna in 1974 : how to maintainspecificity
while accepting the agenda of the Ministers' meeting in Bucharest to
organise détentetheir way ?In such a context, the 1975 extraordinary
General Assembly could only widen the gapbetween those members
(mainly from Mediterranean Europe and partly from Germany),convinced
that changed attitudes in communist countries and parties were
allowing for renewedand trustworthy cooperation between all parts of
Europe ? a political bet ? and those members(mainly in North Western
and Northern Europe) reluctant to indulge in collaborations
closelysupervised by governments. The nine months between the
Bologna meeting and the ViennaAssembly were not sufficient to bridge
such a gap, all the more so as the Study group wascomprised of those
members ? and non-members ? who were committed to facilitating
theinclusion of universities not yet affiliated to the CRE. The
debate in Vienna centered on thecontinuity of the CRE as an
organisation in the new Association of European Universities to
beconstituted in Moscow two months later. Members of the Study group
had come to theconclusion that those members joining the Association
in Moscow could consider the organisationas new from their point of
view, the old CRE members could consider that the Association
ofEuropean Universities, of which they were becoming automatic
members, was indeed the legalsuccessor of the CRE. Such an ambiguity
was refused in Vienna and when it became clear that theneed for
legal continuity reflected the majority opinion, the supporters of
the compromise left themeeting, thus making impossible any decision
for lack of a quorum. The remaining participantsthen voted a
resolution asking the Board to "ensure renewed negotiations with our
partners inEastern Europe". As a result, the Russian universities
broke all ties with the CRE while theRumanian, Czechoslovakian and
Hungarian members resigned. The six member universities fromPoland,
however, became dormant members. On the eve of the Solidarnosc
movement, i.e., in thelate seventies, they paid all their fees in
arrears, thus indicating that there had not been anyinterruption in
their belonging to the CRE since 1975. As for the universities in
Yugoslavia, thosewhich had not yet asked for CRE membership did
so.In other words, the question What is Europe? had been answered
inconclusively if oneremembers the hopes for extension that had been
expressed in 1969. Six years later, the CRE wasmore western European
than ever before and had not turned into an early proponent of
thecompromesso storico. Its membership covered the countries members
of the Council of Europe,as before, but the lien privilégié with the
CHER had been lost. In short, a failure for all concerned
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11as most members agreed on the need for wider representation even
if they differred on the way toreach this goal. In 1979, after four
years of consolidation based on the internal reinforcement ofbasic
activities, the Helsinki General Assembly confirmed the choice
remained implicit in Viennaby electing for President Gerrit Vossers,
the Rector of the University of Eindhoven, one of theproponents of
CRE continuity against François Luchaire, President of Paris I, who
had been akey member of the Study group negotiating the
metamorphosis of the CRE into an Association ofEuropean
Universities. To stress the point that the opening - or not - of the
CRE to enlargedmembership reflected a deeper rift in Western society
concerning the role of the Communists inEurope, it is to be noted
that François Luchaire, in 1973, had signed the Programme commun,
onbehalf of the radical party in France (radicaux de gauche), a
document that brought the Frenchcommunist party into the democratic
process that led in 1981 to the election of FrançoisMitterrand, the
leader of the Socialist Party.From academic cooperation to
mobilityFrom 1955 to 1975, academic cooperation had developed mainly
at institutional level, theleaders of the universities carrying the
burden of international relations, expressed in bi-lateralagreements
spelling the possible extent of cooperation between their own
establishment and itsforeign counterpart. Multilateral collaboration
existed through international organisations, such asIAU or the CRE,
but rarely implied university members other than the rectors,
presidents or vice-chancellors. UDUAL, in Latin America, another
regional organisation, had already developeddeans networks so that
those responsible for teaching and research in a discipline would
meetregularly to compare notes and discuss potential cooperation.
Because of its pan-Europeanambitions and the East-West divide,
however, such a development was impossible in Europe as aregion.
This was recognised early as the CRE was clearly thought of as one
group of leaders,meeting as persons because of common functions
rather than as delegates of their universities.Student unrest in
1968 proved that other members in the institution could claim
representationfor its present needs and future development: indeed,
hierarchies went toppling down after 1968while new structures of
governance and democratic participation were set in place. As
mentionedearlier, such changes called for a new generation of
leaders, people much more involved ininstitutional operations than
their predecessors. Thus, in Vienna, the proposed change of name
ofthe CRE (a club of rectors) into the Association of European
Universities (a network ofinstitutions) proved no real bone of
contention ? even if, because of the meeting inconclusiveness,the
new name became law in 1989 only.By 1975, the universities had
integrated the changes needed for the mass higher educationcalled
for by the equalitarian requirements of 1968; they had also learned
to cope with changedteaching requirements while receiving less
support per student: this had contributed to the needfor new
decision-making structures as well as the growth of new institutions
that were competingwith older universities. Indeed, the academic
landscape had changed fully. As a result, the secondphase of the
development of CRE as an organisation (in fact, until the early
nineties) was verymuch built on meeting the needs of the leaders as
heads of universities ? in terms of management,strategies and the
dilemmas of institutional development. On the basis of such
operationalgrowth, university autonomy could be claimed vis-à-vis
subsidising governments and, in the
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12association, collective autonomy could be re-inforced so that, in
the long run, the re-integration inthe European academic community
of Central and Eastern European partners would be seen asnormal ?
universities as famous as Prague, Halle, Leipzig, Budapest, Pecs,
Cluj, Cracow, Warsaw,Vilnius or Tartu having all played key
historical roles ? similar to that of Western institutions -
ingiving their countries cultural references making them full
members of the European family ofnations. This would be all the more
natural that they also would have to answer growing studentdemand
and face budgetary marginalisation in state appropriation.Thus, in
the seventies, the emphasis on institutional building was first
translated intouniversity to university collaboration, moving slowly
from central management agreements todepartmental joint ventures.At
a lesser degree, that was also true for Eastern universities. In so
far as nationalistreferences were undermining internationalist
claims for a "socialist" Europe, there were indeedpossibilities for
real academic cooperation linking institution to institution. This
would take ten tofifteen years, however, even if, already in May
1976, the Rector of Trieste and the Conference ofRectors of Italian
Universities had invited ? with CRE's blessing ? universities from
both sides ofthe East-West divide to discuss the impact of the
Helsinki agreement on development studies,certainly an area of
interest for possible cooperation. The results of that "autonomous"
meetingwere presented at the 1977 bi-annual conference of the CRE
organised in Athens, which centeredon a consultation of the members
on how to improve collaboration ? with members and non-members - at
all levels of institutional development. As a whole, they did not
feel much concerned?These efforts had been reported to the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europewhen the CSCE met in
Belgrade in 1977 to take stock of the implementation of the
1975recommendations made in Helsinki. In 1978, the Rector of Warsaw
University repeated theinvitation made at Trieste and offered a
platform for the discussion of the impact of the Helsinkiagreement
on environmental problems and higher education. To reaffirm the
convergence of thespirit of the 1975 agreement with the open door
policy of the CRE, the organisation also acceptedthe invitation to
organise in 1979 its 7thGeneral Assembly in the capital of
Finland.In other words, after 1975, institutions had to start a
process of re-discovery of the other,also in Western Europe where an
important rift between North and South had become apparent.At first,
the CRE kept a low profile - also because of financial difficulties
born out of the costs ofthe Vienna Assembly and its preparation.
However, it kept organising the bi-annual conferencesthat brought
together rectors from several countries in order to compare common
problems fromtheir "non-specialist" viewpoint, each session being
facilitated by a member. This showed themultiplicity of experiences
existing in Europe as far as institutional development was
concerned.The discussion also called for some reflection on the
commonality of the situations prevailing invarious parts of the
continent if European trends were to be made apparent. This CRE
turning inon internal academic problems was only slightly
compensated by participation in externaldiscussions held by IAU, the
CHER or UNESCO. There was also contribution from members inthe early
development of the Joint Study Programmes (JSP), organised by the
Institute ofEducation of the European Cultural Foundation in Paris,
programmes that were experimenting theideas that were to become
central to the ERASMUS programme launched by the Commission in
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13the second half of the eighties. Moving from the level of
institutional responsibility, JSP's wereindeed entering the
universities at the level of the departments that ensure the
teaching of variousdisciplines whose international and multilateral
rapprochement was being encouraged. This wasto prove the main
booster of academic cooperation in the late eighties and the
nineties. In the lateseventies, their future impact was not apparent
yet and, in the CRE, work still concentrated onthe global
institutional responsibility of the academic leader for the
university's place in society.If, from 1975 to 1979, the CRE licked
its wounds, from 1979 to 1984, under PresidentVossers, it became pro-
active again. The 7thAssembly in Helsinki had asked "to increase
thedirect involvement of members in analytical processes by
stressing, in particular, the regional andsectorial dimensions of
universities as institutions". Next to the forum represented by the
bi-annual conferences, smaller seminars were organised to study
daily problems of management,thus making participating university
leaders aware of the convergences and divergencescharacterising
European university policies. Five management seminars for newly
appointedexecutive heads were thus offered during the quinquennium
in conjunction with the IMHEprogramme of the OECD, a new partner for
the CRE. Another four meetings were organised inconjunction with
national rectors' conferences wishing to give an international
perspective to aburning issue at the fore in their country. CRE was
setting up the European visiting team whilethe national conference
was organising the meeting with its members. Thus, in 1981, at La
Rabida,in Spain, the problems of university autonomy, as dealt with
by the new university law, were setin the context of practices
prevailing in other countries of the continent. The same topic
wasdiscussed a few months later with the universities of Turkey
where important changes in the lawwere also being planned. In 1983,
regionalisation at a time of economic recession was the subjectof
yet another meeting with the Spanish rectors, this time in Cordoba
while, in the Autumn atDubrovnik, the rectors of Yugoslavia asked
their university management system to be comparedwith academic
decision-making in other European institutional settings.In all
these sessions, the underlying motive was the new identity of the
university in amass higher education system. Moreover, could the
universities have a common Europeanspecificity in a changed social
context ? The Board, in 1981, set up a consortium of researchers
toanswer that question. Seconded by member universities, they
embarked on an interdisciplinaryenquiry to set the present situation
in its historical context: after all, it was not the first time
thatacademic institutions had to transform in order to adapt to new
social conditions. As a result,these experts proposed to analyse the
evolution of the universities' social function. In 1984, forthe
25thanniversary of the association, CRE presented its members with a
Historical compendiumof the European universities. This represented
the preliminary stage of a much more ambitiousHistory of the
University in Europe, a four volume work using similar analytical
grids to describethe evolution of the university in European society
during the late Middle Ages, the EarlyModern period (until the
French revolution), the industrialisation and colonial period (until
WorldWar II), and the post-war years. Although with much delay, the
first three volumes have reachedpublication stage at Cambridge
University Press ? while German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanishand
Chinese translations are being made. The last volume is still in
preparation. The hope of theCommittee in the early eighties was to
develop a model of interuniversity co-operation in which
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14the CRE would be the catalyst of new ideas, the sponsor and
coordinator of studies led with thehelp of members and the support
of external funding agencies.In a way, the universities were
learning how to "read each other's context" and torecognise the
problems of sister institutions while becoming aware of their own
specificity.Institutions were not required to change in function of
international developments, simply tobecome aware of their place in
the system of higher education in Europe. CRE's role was that of
abroker bringing partners together without taking sides. This was
certainly a necessary first stepin the field of international
relations ? then, as it is now. It justified any position taken by
theassociation as a whole, even if such papers tended to remain
rather superficial as long as themembers did not go into converging
changes expressing the European commonality of theirvarying
situations. In February 1980, in Hamburg, the CSCE organised a
Scientific Forum wherethe CRE presented such a memorandum on the
conditions of international research development.A few months later,
in June, the 3rdConference of the Education Ministers of the
UNESCOEuropean region met in Sofia where they were presented with
the CRE account of the East/Westnegotiations engaged by universities
since the 1973 recommendation in Bucharest. In paragraph94 of their
final report, the Ministers accepted the status quo and indicated
that any widerparticipation of universities in European integration
should use the channel of the CRE to moveforward as quickly as
possible.What could have appeared as a victory for the proponents of
continuity, however, wasdifficult to turn into enlarged CRE
membership of Eastern universities. A special meeting of theBoard
had been convened in Geneva in June 1981 to explore new forms of
collaboration; rectorsof the universities in the capital cities of
countries not yet represented in the association had beenformally
invited. As none answered positively, the meeting had to be
postponed while links werekept through visits to regional rectors'
conferences, like the Balkanic one, and through attendanceof the
Dubrovnik seminar, Univerzitet Danas, or participation in the work
of CEPES.The difficulty to move forward was certainly increased by
the current political situation atthe time. One of the indirect
results of the Helsinki agreement had been the development of
theSolidarnosc movement in Poland that led in 1981 to a union
supported government that wasworking for the democratic and economic
transformation of the country. New laws were voted, inparticular in
the field of higher education. Would the example of Poland be
followed in other partsof "socialist" Europe or would the
transformation be stopped ? like in Prague in 1969 - before itproved
too dangerous for the system as a whole East of the Iron Curtain ?
When GeneralJaruzelski seized power in 1982 and tried to turn around
the achievements of Solidarnosc, CREimmediately asked members to
reinforce their linkages with Polish universities while the
Presidentand Vice-President visited the Universities of Warsaw and
Cracow to indicate clearly theirsupport of the democratic
organisation of higher education. In the event, the law was not
replacedeven if it was interpreted in a restricted way and if some
of the leading proponents of reform werekept under house arrest for
a few years. In the West, the 1981 government of François
Mitterrandincluded Communist Ministers but, in Italy, with the
assassination of Aldo Moro in 1978 and thetrain attack at Bologna
station in 1980, the Red Brigades had been putting in jeopardy
allattempts at power sharing between Christian Democrats and
Communists. In brief, the political
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Page 15
15situation was too volatile in Europe to allow for institutional
cooperation between universitiesfrom the two sides of the
continent.Then, on the basis of contacts made at the IAU - on the
Board of which CRE wasrepresented as an associate member - new
collaborations were extended to other partners, theAmerican Council
of Education, in Washington, the Inter-American Organisation of
Universitiesin Québec, or the UDUAL, in Mexico, whose President and
a delegation of seven Latin Americanrectors met the CRE Board for a
three-day session in Munich in 1983, on the eve of the IAU mid-term
conference. Was not Latin America one of the world regions least
known to non-Iberianuniversities in Europe but, also, one of the
most "European" in terms of academic organisationand culture ? Would
not such commonality justify a programme of cooperation open to
membersof the two associations ? The idea would need another four
years to be realised. In Europe, CREco-sponsored conferences open to
its members such as the 2ndWorld Congress for Engineers'Continuing
Education organised by SEFI (the Société européenne pour la
formation desingénieurs), or took an active part in the evaluation
meeting of the Joint Study Programmes(Brussels, November 1985?) that
gave birth to the ERASMUS programme in 1987. Theincreasing presence
of the Commission in higher education ? mainly to make possiblethe
freedomof movement of workers and professionals required by the
Treaty of Rome ? led the Committeemembers representing Community
countries in the CRE to set up their own caucus to discussEuropean
Commission matters, the Liaison Committee that was to become in 1995
theConfederation of EU rectors' conferences after having taken
distance from the CRE, partly withthe support of the Commission's
Taskforce for Education which needed a counterpart
in "smallerEurope" to consult on EC proposals in the field of higher
education. To maintain a widerunderstanding of Europe, however, the
CRE was also encouraging regular relations with thenational rectors'
conferences that were members of its Committee: the WRK (the
WestdeutscheRektorenkonferenz) had already organised in earlier
years meetings of the secretaries of nationalconferences in Lindau,
South of Germany. The idea was revived and CRE sponsored
meetingsheld in 1979, 1980, 1983 and 1984 to monitor the potential
of convergence in higher educationpolicies throughout Europe. Thus,
in a continent officially divided into two parts still,
academiccooperation, to become credible, had to distance itself from
its East/West "obsession", on oneside, links to socialist countries
becoming relative to university cooperation with the rest of
theworld, and, on the other, to anchor its European development in
the similarities of nationaltransformations in higher education ? be
they encouraged by the European Commission or thegovernments of the
various countries on the continent.Hatching a European academic
community : from 1984 to 1989In Athens, the 8thGeneral Assembly
elected as President, Carmine Romanzi, the Rector ofthe University
of Genoa. An Italian war hero, a microbiologist of high repute in
his country, anoffspring of a family of university teachers going
back to the early years of the Universities ofBologna and Naples, a
long time rector of his University and the politically well-
connectedPresident of the Italian Rectors' Conference, he was
embodying the balance between tradition andprogress - the theme
adopted by the Committee for the quinquennium. His glorious past was
noreason for procrastination but, on the contrary, an obligation to
move, adapt and change. If Gerrit
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Page 16
16Vossers, his Dutch predecessor, had presided over the CRE
developing as a broker between itsmembers and its partners,
recognising each other's existence, the new President would take
theorganisation one step further and develop its mediating role.
After a period of "reading eachother's situation", members would be
invited to facilitate each other's development throughcommon
activities ? thus, hatching a sense of common responsibility that
would make possiblebelonging to the same cultural community, a
community where universities are the locus ofEuropean
integration.This was the meaning of the festivities organised in
1988 for the 9thcentenary of theUniversity of Bologna, also the Alma
Mater of the Universities of Europe. Following GiosuèCarducci's
lead ? the poet and professor of Italian literature who master-
minded the 8thcentenarycelebrations around the role of universities
as the common institution of Italian unity -, theuniversities were
to be recognised a century later as the institutions common to all
countries in theregion, indeed the crucible of Europe in the making.
With support coming mainly from the Italiangovernment and of Fiat,
Fabio Roversi-Monaco, the Rector of the University of Bologna,
andGiuseppe Caputo, his advisor, proposed a full programme of
activities over more than a year,refurbishing and opening academic
buildings, organising scores of scientific meetings,
grantinghonorary doctorates not only to famous scientists but also
to political figureheads of thecontinent - from the Pope to Mikhail
Gorbatchev. The idea was to re-affirm the political functionof the
university in the intellectual development of society ? the leaders
of the variousgovernments of Europe recognising the critical role of
academia in the shaping of the ideas that ledto the integration of
the different cultures of the continent into a harmonious European
whole.Hence, the proposal to draft a document of reference on the
universities' European identity, theMagna Charta Universitatum
written under the aegis of the CRE, its President being the
firstsignatory of the document on 18 September 1988 during the
crowning ceremony of the centenarycelebrations. This festive act
involved some 430 university rectors from all over Europe, Westand
East (Russia included) ? and from other parts of the world too ? who
solemnly signed theCharter while the traditional partners of
academia were witnessing this symbolic assertion ofuniversity
autonomy and academic freedom, the authorities being represented by
the President ofthe Italian Republic, several Ministers, a host of
Ambassadors as well as by Church prelates andthe City leaders.For
the CRE, the involvement in the Bologna centenary was but a part,
althoughessential, of a full progamme of activities analysing the
constructive tension born out of theuniversity polarisation between
tradition and progress : academic excellence, new
informationtechnologies, university/industry relations,
internationalisation, academic leaders as agents ofchange were all
topics discussed during the quinquennium. As a result, in October
1985, theCommittee asked governments to invest in communication
networks as the support ofinteruniversity cooperation and, a year
later, pressed European authorities to launch theERASMUS programme
of academic mobility and to by-pass last minute objections. By
then,CRE members, made aware of comparable needs, could imagine
areas of commonality in actionsleading to the further development of
their shared identity. Acting as a facilitator pointing tofields of
potential collaboration, the CRE explored the feasibility of various
progammes whichwere proposed to the attention of members :
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17? In 1985, following the Cordoba seminar of 1983 on regional
institutions of higher education, aseries of seminars were organised
on the survival conditions of newly created universities :
sixinstitutions acted as a core group and invited another twenty to
discuss specific aspects oftheir development, the basis for a Maarch
1986 report to all members entitled "From infancyto
maturity:creating a university".? In October 1986, the Madrid
General conference - opened to all members - discussed
theuniversities' links to society, in particular to industry, with
the help of the former ResearchMinister in France, Hubert Curien,
but also of top managers from ICI, IBM-Europe, Hewlett-Packard,
Olivetti or Telefonica. In 1987, the Committee, taking account of
the new links setup with leading manufacturers in communication
technologies, decided that CRE wouldbecome one of the founding
members of the Euro-PACE programme, proposing advancedcontinuing
education for industry, a programme steered by a Directing group led
by HubertCurien and where Gerrit Vossers, the CRE former President
was representing the universityworld next to a delegate from SEFI,
the other eleven members representing as many leadingindustrial
firms in Europe. Several of these industrialists were also members
of the EuropeanRoundtable of Industrialists (ERT), an association
created by Per Gyllenhammar, the thenPresident of Volvo in Sweden.
The ERT working group on education was chaired by thePresident of
Nokia, Kari Kairamo, who organised in September 1987 an exploratory
meetingin Helsinki with a delegation of the Committee. This led to
the creation of a CRE/ERTUniversity/Industry Forum that was launched
in Bologna on 16 September 1988 with akeynote on industry's
expectations of universities by Giovanni Agnelli, Fiat. The Forum
firstmet in February 1989 in London and then in July in Paris,
bringing together a small group often to twelve university and
industry leaders under the presidency of the CRE Vice-
President,Professor Hinrich Seidel, from the University of Hannover.
On the ERT side, Kari Kairamo,from Nokia, had been replaced by
Olivier Lecerf, the President of Lafarge-Coppée. The groupdecided to
focus activities on adult education, a key area for
university /industry cooperationin Europe: the Forum studies were to
lead to common positions to be presented to theEuropean Community
and to national governments.? In November 1986, in Ravello, South
Italy, at the occasion of the 40thanniversary of theFulbright
Programme, the CRE co-sponsored with the University of Salerno a
conferencewhere 12 representatives of US and Canadian university
associations joined as many delegatesfrom European universities to
discuss how to develop a transatlantic dialogue at a time
whenAmerican interest was moving away from Europe to other world
partners, Japan in particular.Little came out of this meeting but,
in 1987, the Vice-President of the American Council ofEducation
(ACE) joined the Hamburg seminar for newly appointed executive heads
andpicked up the project so that, in October 1989, a new session of
the transatlantic dialogue,under CRE /ACE sponsorship, was organised
in Hartford, Connecticut, the first of a series ofmeetings organised
every two years in alternation with Europe and America.? In early
April 1987, following new discussions with UDUAL members at the 1985
IAUGeneral Assembly in Los Angeles, some 30 European and Latin
American rectors met inBuenos Aires to define the area of their
possible cooperation, e.g. university management andinstitutional
development ? burning issues for several countries in Latin America
that had
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18recently returned to democratic structures of government, like
Argentina, where the results ofthe discussions were presented to the
newly elected president of the Republic, Raul Alfonsin.The debate
had been facilitated by a former Minister of Education in Spain,
then professor atthe Autonomous University of Madrid, Federico Mayor
Zaragoza ? who was to become thenext Director General of UNESCO
where he proved always supportive of the newprogramme, which became
to be known as the Columbus programme. The programme hadbeen
presented also to Jacques Delors in Brussels by the then president
of the LiaisonCommittee of the Rectors' conferences of the
Community, Bart de Schutter, who was told inJuly 1987 that the
Commission would support the programme ? a promise made true in
1989when 435'000 ECUs were set aside in Brussels for two years of
activities with LatinAmerican universities. Meanwhile, meetings in
Campinas, Brazil (April 1988), Cascais,Portugal (July 1988), and
Salamanca, Spain (December 1988), had focused activities
ofcooperation on institutional evaluation in the field of teaching
and on university/industryrelations in economic development.? In
Madrid, October 1986, and Aix, April 1987, first contacts were
established with thePeople's Republic of China through their
delegate at UNESCO in Paris. This led, in October1987, to the visit
in Europe of six Presidents of Chinese universities ? who could
discusscooperation with CRE member institutions in an special
session of the Committee in Ghent.In June 1988, the CRE was
represented by the WRK Secretary General at a seminar in
Beijingdiscussing the reforms of higher education proposed by the
government in China. However,following the Tien-Anmen repression of
student unrest in 1989, the CRE suspended thatdeveloping linkage and
expressed its strong disapproval of the governmentasl crackdown
onleaders of higher education in China.These were all new areas of
concern for the CRE. The association tried to act as a stimulusfor
international cooperation and academic exchange in fields of growing
interest for memberuniversities: ICT, university/ industry
relations, or the presence of Europe in the world at large.The on-
going concern for East/West linkages remained a high priority,
however, and, thanks toCEPES, it was possible to organise in April
1985, following the 28thbi-annual conference of theCRE in Vienna, a
meeting of the Board in Budapest with delegates of non-member and
memberuniversities from Eastern Europe. Participants reiterated the
importance for their institutions toincrease contacts between the
two sides of Europe. Two months later, in June, the Presidentvisited
Sofia and met the leaders of Bulgarian universities ? most of whom
he saw again in LosAngeles with representatives of Soviet and East
German institutions, at the IAU GeneralConference of August 1985.
There were clear signs that the modalities of cooperation in
highereducation were being reappraised in the Soviet Union, as the
presence of Russian universities inBologna in 1988 was to indicate.
Indeed, in February 1987, a conference of COMECONuniversities in
Moscow had decided to extend the possibilities for institutional
cooperation withWestern universities, as part of the perestroika
policy defended by Mikhail Gorbatchev. On thatbasis, the rectors of
the universities in capital cities of socialist Europe had asked
their Polishcolleagues ? still members of the CRE ? to organise in
Warsaw a meeting on the model of the CREbi-annual conferences. To
follow up on this request, the President and the Deputy
SecretaryGeneral of CRE made in May 1987 an official visit to Poland
and were received by the
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19Universities of Warsaw and Cracow to lay down the basis of the
proposed conference withleaders of Eastern universities. It was held
in Warsaw from 15 to 18 June 1988 and discussed Theuniversity as a
crucible of European culture. The more than 90 participants ? 30
representinguniversities from non-member countries (only Romania and
Albania were missing) ? insisted ontheir belonging to a common
European culture that subsumed ideological differences and
madeacademic cooperation a necessity. The idea was to launch a
programme for East/west cooperationin environmental sciences, which
became the Copernicus programme, a tribute to the Polish hostsof the
meeting.To pursue the matter, after the the Bologna centennial
festivities where rectors of mostEastern countries signed the Magna
Charta Universitatum, the President and the Secretary generalvisited
in October Hungary and Bulgaria ? where Professor Romanzi was
invited for a workingdinner by Todor Jivkov, the then President of
the Republic. In January 1989, both met for aworking lunch in Geneva
the Soviet Minister of Education, Guennadi Yagodine, who
wasattending the International Conference of Education. Earlier, in
September, at the time of theBologna festivities, the 4thConference
of the Education Ministers of the UNESCO Europeanregion had met in
Paris and received a memorandum of Prof. Romanzi and Prof.
Bialkowski, theRector of the University of Warsaw, who were the
official hosts of the ground-breaking Junemeeting. This document
outlined the changes since 1973 and asked for the support of
theCopernicus programme. To follow on this demand, the Director
general of UNESCO, on 14November 1988, invited the Deputy Secretary
General to a meeting at the Paris headquartersgathering officers of
the agency dealing with environmental matters to see how
universities couldbe involved in the discussions concerning the
future of the planet in ecological terms. This contactled to a
seminar involving member universities and experts, from UNESCO and
otherorganisations, organised at the invitation of the University of
Catania, Sicily, in April 1989.There, the pilot phase of the
Copernicus programme was outlined, the focus being laid on
law,health and economics as normative disciplines in environmental
discussions, the development ofthe programme being given priority in
the Baltic and Danubian basins ? areas where Eastern andWestern
Europe do meet. Finally, in September 1989, the 9thGeneral Assembly
welcomed some25 new members from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and the Soviet Union, thus bringing toa close the saga that had
begun in the early seventies.The broker's role, developed earlier,
did not disappear with the development of themediator's function of
the CRE during that period. Thus, the seminars for newly
appointedexecutive heads were organised on a yearly basis with OECD
support while the editorial board ofHistory project had regular
sessions to plan the different volumes: it also organised in
Eichstätt,in Bavaria, in September 1985 a seminar bringing together
researchers ready to explore a domainnot yet well documented, The
Church, the State and the University in the early modern period.The
word "brokerage" can also sum up the effort made to develop a
network of of 20 universitypress editors, from East and West, the so-
called Viterbo group, as the University of Tusciahosted its first
session in November 1987. Could they help each other in their
reporting ofEuropean university affairs ? There was clearly space
for cooperation based on mutual trust andthe group met again in
Bologna in 1988 and in Durham in 1989.
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20The strengthening of university cooperation witnessed from 1984 to
1989 was paralleledin the European Community ? that comprised 12
member countries after Spain and Portugaljoined in 19986 ? by the
Single Act proposed by Jacques Delors in 1985: a new stage was to
bereached by 1992, the Community evolving into a Union. In fact the
Community was asking itsmembers to move from common projects, based
on comparable approaches, to the compatibilityof their decisions,
i.e., to a full commitment to an integrated Europe. In other words,
Europe, frombeing a marginal element in national affairs would
become central to the development of allparticipating countries. By
the early nineties, would the world of higher education and
research,reach this new level of cooperation, "compatibility" ? the
normal consequence of wide"readibility" and of well
tuned "comparability" ?Opportunities gained, references lostAt the
end of the Durham Assembly, the CRE seemed to have bridged the
East/Westdivide and to be ready for the further consolidation of its
members' European sense of identity.Programmes like Columbus, the
Forum or Copernicus were addressing current problems of
theuniversities' scientific and institutional development while
offering discussion forums where tocompare management practices and
to experiment new modalities of action. The statute had beenmodified
to ensure that the CRE Committee would become a key forum for the
universities ofEurope when bringing international affairs at the
core of their development. Indeed, projects hadbeen developed and
new cooperative activities initiated.However, with the fall of the
Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, the organisation wasentering a zone
of deep political and social turbulence full of opportunities and
dangers, like mostof its partners and stakeholders in Europe ? if
not in the world at large. How would the associationadapt to the new
situation ? Indeed, the polarisation of European politics had
suddenlydisappeared, sweeping away more than forty years of
intellectual habits, political reflexes andcultural prejudices based
on manichean fears of the other "side". Greater Europe, from the
Atlanticto the Urals, had become a reality but turning it into a
reality proved more difficult than ever, forits sheer size opened
the way to regional differentiation while, at its centre, reunified
Germany hadto learn a new role: become the axis of regional
cooperation rather than its margin. Loyalties,national or regional,
started shifting; old identities reappeared linked to long forgotten
culturalmyths. In fact, at a time of opening frontiers and lowering
borders, Europe, rather than unite,fragmented into smaller and
smaller pieces while differences in wealth ? between countries,
regionsand social groups ? were fast becoming apparent. Considering
the cost of economical upgrade andsocial transformation in the East,
solidarity was less and less of an accepted political mode and
theeasy solution seemed to lie in some kind of 19thcentury laissez
faire. This meant focusing on theindividual as the prime bearer of
the future of the continent, thus reducing the time horizon
fordecisions to personal urgency. In a few years, Europe moved from
grand ideals to the short-sightedness of precariousness, a world
without common references, a society leaving groups ofinterest at
each other's throat, not only in former Yugoslavia but also in
Western societies wherecrime and insecurity were extending - at
least in the mind of the citizens. In such a moving context,where to
find opportunities for rebuilding confidence and commonality of
purpose, the ingredientsof social efficiency? Was subsidiarity
enough to bring decisions close to citizens in need of trust or
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21should new modes of concertation be invented to recover consensus
and shared references?References ... but what for, for which
society ? in the long term?Should not the university be the
traditional centre of the reintegration of a society on theloose?
Indeed, as a network of knowlege institutions, universities should
prove that cooperationis possible in a European continent where work
and life conditions are more and more dissimilar.Beyond the
ambiguities of choice dictated by the loss of social references, the
CRE, therefore,could develop the projects and programmes set up
earlier and emphasise in their potential forintegration ? the key
word in a society at a loss. Building on the past, this meant a
three-prongedapproach: to integrate in the association the
universities from Eastern and Central Europe; tointegrate the
policies of European academic cooperation, and to integrate member
institutions inthe wider Atlantic context of collaborations with
North and South America. In all cases,interinstitutional networks
would be stressed ? as they allow for flexibility and
directinvolvement with the problem at hand, thus representing a
possible key to stability in a contextof turbulence. The commitment
to Europe which seemed reasonable in Durham would thereforeneed to
become a commitment to other Europeans, people and institutions, if
some social orderwere to be found again in continental affairs. Such
a social order was experimented by variousnetworks of institutions
and people focusing on areas of shared concerns, commonality
ofidentities or joint projects development. When successful, these
networks institutionalised intoassociations rather than disappear
once their initial objectives had been met, thus giving birth to
acrowd of new actors in the field of higher education in Europe.
CRE, one of the older players, wassought as a partner by several of
those new organisations; but, to stay credible, it also had
tostrengthen its own programme and profile.In August 1990, at the
IAU General Assembly in Helsinki, the need for
internationalcooperation among Eastern and Central European
universities was thoroughly discussed in thewings of the sessions
and ideas exchanged about the adaptation to the new context of
Communityprogrammes like ERASMUS, COMETT or LEONARDO. Collaboration
in structured networksof institutions focusing for a few years on
specific concerns seemed the only way to cope withthe many different
problems and ambitions of former "socialist" universities.
Partnersrepresenting university associations, like the CRE, national
cooperation agencies, like DAAD andNUFFIC, and thinktanks for
European affairs, like the Institute for Education and Social Policy
inParis, then decided to set up a consortium and propose to the
Commission the management ofwhat was being discussed as the new
TEMPUS programme. A bid which was won in 1991.To mark this new
dimension of European cooperation, in May 1991, the CRE organisedits
Spring meeting in what was still Leningrad. Participants discussed
the management of qualityin higher education when excellence becomes
relative in a totally diversified world of highereducation. In
February 1993, to follow up on this commitment to the universities
of the otherEurope, CRE convened with the University of Saint
Petersburg a seminar for CIS political andacademic leaders
interested in the extension of the TEMPUS programme to the Republics
of theformer Soviet Union ? the future TEMPUS-Tacis, another set of
varied networks of cooperationbetween institutions. To strengthen
its activities, the association also needed the backing of
morepermanent groupings of universities. That is why, in March 1990,
CRE sponsored the creation inGdansk of the Conference of Baltic
University Rectors, somewhat on the model of the already
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22existing Conference of Danubian Rectors, both associations
becoming key partners in thedevelopment of the Copernicus programme.
The Secretary General and his Deputy were alsoinvolved in the early
development of the Central European University in Prague and, in
1993,CRE and ACE were asked by the Soros Foundation, the main
supporter of the CEU, to make astudy on the problems of university
management in Russia.In other parts of Europe, networks had also
become central features of academiccooperation, thanks to the
development of the mobility programmes of the EuropeanCommunity, all
based on multilateral consortia of universities. The ERASMUS, COMETT
andLEONARDO programmes had also indirect networking effects: to take
advantage of EU support,many universities developed associative
groupings, built around some common features (type orsize of
institutions, location or thematic profile, for instance). Thus were
first born the Coimbragroup ? very much in conjunction with the
Bologna 900thanniversary -, and then the Santander,Compostela,
Utrecht or UNICA networks, to name but a few. These groups of some
thirty toforty institutions were trying to develop a shared European
profile through common activities,joint studies and convergent
projects. Other groups, some already in existence, found theirraison-
d'être in dealing with specific aspects of academic cooperation in
Europe. These"thematic" networks were interested in distance
education (EDEN and EADTU) or in continuingeducation (EUCEN) and
were based on institutional members while, in international education
(EAIE), in research on higher education (CHER and EAIR) or in
university administration(HUMANE), the participants were individual
members, mainly officers in higher educationinstitutions discovering
common professional interests with a European dimension. They
alldeveloped as full organisations during the nineties.Most of their
institutional members were also affiliated to the CRE, whose remit
waswider and perhaps less operational in terms of professional
development. CRE had recognisedtheir importance in the
Europeanisation process of academic institutions and started to
cooperateon specific projects, for instance with the Coimbra group
on ICT. It also co-sponsored the 1993conference of the International
Roundtable on Counselling when, in Bordeaux, it discussed how
toimprove advisory services for students. It joined in 1993 the
advisory council of ACA, theAcademic Cooperation Association just
set up between national agencies for universitycooperation ? most of
which had been partners of CRE in the consortium for the development
ofthe TEMPUS programme. It blessed the creation in 1991 in Amsterdam
of EAIE, the EuropeanAssociation for International Education, and
took regular part in its activities. It collaborated withEUCEN, the
European Universities Continuing Education Network, and took part in
thescientific council of its thematic network, THENUCE, when it was
created in 1996. It developedjoint projects with the Centre for the
Strategic Management of Universities (ESMU), for instanceon The
European cohesion of universities North and South of the continent.
In 1994, theSecretary General joined the Administrative Board of
ESMU ? which, with ACA, also managesthe ERASMUS and then the
SOCRATES programmes for the European Commission. CRE alsocalled on
the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers (CHER) to draw on its
expertise inhigher education for its own studies and programmes.
With ERT, the University /Industry Forumpublished in 1992 a report
on continuous education, in 1993 a study of the europeanisation
ofmanagement training and, in 1994, recommendations for the European
Commission on the
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23reshaping of education in Europe. In June1992, the European Forum
joined with the USBusiness/Higher Education Forum to organise in
Brussels a large transatlantic conference on"Fortress Europe"
attended by scores of industrial leaders and university officials
interested inthe implementation of the Single Act and the Maastricht
Treaty. Indeed, in the shifting landscapeof European politics, the
development of the European Union looked like one of the rare
fixedlandmarks people could refer to ? its attractiveness
translating into the affiliation in 1995 ofAustria, Finland and
Sweden, thus bringing the Community to 15 members. The need for
closecooperation on technical dossiers grew as a counterweight to
the increasing inability of allparticipating countries to unite on a
common understanding of an integrated political organisationof the
region.In other words, the integration was built on the euro-
compatibility of instruments whoseuse required a sense of
commonality which was not often present in countries still
recognisingeach other's existence rather than adapting to each
other's needs ? at least at the level of thepeople. Progress
depended much more on the goodwill of Parliaments than on the
conviction ofcitizens ? the Danes refusing the Maastricht Treaty in
June 1992 and the French accepting it by amost narrow margin
(51.01%) in September. The Commission in Brussels multiplied
initiatives inmany areas under various instrumental pretexts rather
than showing the flag and calling forintegration as a political
necessity. The federation of the continent was progressing under
thecloak of a confederation of nations, allowing Eurosceptics to
point to the Eurocrats' supposedhidden agendas whose completion was
presented as non democratic. Would the system grind to ahalt,
especially if several new countries were joining the process, mainly
from former "socialistEurope"? Could EU countries impose the "acquis
communautaire" in a strict way to candidateswhile, at the same time,
hesitate on the depth and strength of the federation process
forthemselves? Had Europe, as a counterforce to international
ideals, lost impetus with the collapseof communism? Or would it
survive only as the tool of "little Europeans" (similar to the
19thcentury "little Englanders") reluctant to adopt a world role
based on the actual strength of thelargest market of free moving
goods, people and capital in the global economy?Universities in the
nineties were absorbed by the growing scale of student exchange,
inparticular by the success of the ERASMUS programme, the flagship
of European co-operationwhich involved participants by the
thousands. The integration capacity of the programme wasbased on the
commitment of professors ready to compare their courses with those
of colleaguesin other countries and to adapt teaching so that home
and guest students would develop a sense ofcommon value ? which was
translated into the European Credit Transfer System. This
successinduced the Commission to publish in the Autumn of 1991 a
Memorandum on Higher Educationin the European Community, thus
launching a vast consultation on the future of academiccooperation
in Europe, especially after the Maastricht Treaty would give the
Commission a fewrights to work on educational matters. The CRE
Committee decided to prepare with the LiaisonCommittee of EU
national rectors' conferences a joint answer and, after members had
beenconsulted and recommendations discussed, conclusions were
forwarded to the EU EducationTask Force in November 1992 supporting,
in general, an increase in co-operative activities.Advice was also
given at the time on requests from the Commission on network
development,support strategies for Central and Eastern European
universities, about international staff
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24mobility or the internationalisation of university leadership in
teaching and research. WithProfessor Antonio Ruberti, the Vice-
President of the Commission, the two organisations keptregular
contacts - in 1993 (in Aalborg) and in 1994 (in Brussels). In other
words, the EU-limitedaction was more and more in need of a wider
understanding of Europe, as the Eastern universitieswere grappling
with a mix of traditional pre-war references, on one side, and of US
models ofmodernity, on the other ? experimenting market solutions in
organisational development that wereunknown or at least untried in
EU countries. In that situation, there was a growing need
forconvergence of objectives between the "small European" viewpoint,
represented essentially bythe Liaison Committee, and the wider
understanding of Europe, that had accompanied CRE sinceits early
beginnings in the fifties.In 1995, however, the responsibility of
the student exchanges moved from the thousandsof departments
involved in mobility activities to the much smaller number of
institutions towhich these departments belonged: to simplify the
organisational chart, also on the EU side, thevarious programmes
were given a common structure, the SOCRATES framework. The focus
puton the institutional contract in ERASMUS gave CRE, as an
association of individual institutions,a new visibility in Brussels.
This move corresponded to the change within CRE from thePresidency
of Hinrich Seidel, the President of Hannover University and the
former President ofthe German Rectors' Conference, to that of Josep
Bricall, former Rector of the University ofBarcelona and former Vice-
President of the CRE. There was certainly a continuity of purpose
butalso an inflexion in activities, as the Commission chose to work
ever more closely with theuniversities as institutions and with CRE
as their representative ? the Liaison Committeebecoming the
mouthpiece of the systems of higher education, at the national level
mainly. ForCRE - whose new President had been closely linked to the
growth of EU mobility programmes asthe Spanish university
representative in the EU ministerial committee steering their
development- this meant, in particular, monitoring the European
strategies of institutions involved in theERASMUS programme under
SOCRATES: the European policy statements required by theCommission
from the 1800 institutions demanding EU support for mobility
activities were allanalysed and, through visits in the institutions,
compared with what the universities were reallyachieving through
their European programmes. When SOCRATES opened to Central and
EasternEuropean institutions, the analysis was extended to these
establishments too. Thus was built afull scan of Europeanisation
processes in actual academic development that covered SOCRATESI
until year 2000. This led to recommendations for improving the
programme as a tool ofEuropeanisation that were regularly presented
to the EU Committee of Education bringingtogether the
representatives of the governments taking part. Thus grew the
credibility of the CRE? in the Commission and in governmental
circles ? as a reliable partner for European integration.Other
progammes were launched by CRE with the support of Brussels, for
instance on theEuropean commonalities existing in universities'
financial policies, in terms of income generation(1998) and of
strategies of expenditure (2000).In parallel, from 1995, the CRE
increased its support of member universities ? in theirinstitutional
development. In some countries, quality evaluation had been
developed in theeighties already, like France, Britain or the
Netherlands. Other countries were also testing the needfor
assessment of higher education, mainly in terms of the relevance,
costs and efficiency of
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25academic programmes and services, rather than in terms of
institutional fitness for teaching andresearch. The emphasis put
generally on programmes reflected the need for social
accountabilitywhereas the stress on quality management supported the
internal capacity for change ofinstitutions confronted with a great
variety of demands. That was the areawhere CRE launched aprogramme
on quality strategies. Such a process oriented approach was much
more open toEuropean comparisons than the assessment of teaching
programmes whose content usuallydepended on national regulations for
curriculum design. At that level, the EU had tried, throughthe so-
called "pilot project", to bring together the four existing national
quality agencies andgovernmental officiers interestedd in
accountability but, as a group, they could only decide toshare good
practice and compare notes on their evaluation procedures ? as
recommended inDecember 1995 at the Las Palmas conference that had
been opened by the President of CRE, nbythen a stakeholder in the
world of European evaluation. That was the origin of ENQA,
theEuropean Network of Quality Agencies set up much later, in
2000.Institutional evaluation was the normal outgrowth of CRE's
involvement inEuropeanisation processes and, from 1995, the
association offered its members the possibility toreview their
adaptation to the needs of change ? in teaching, learning or
research as far as qualitymanagement and management quality were
concerned. Thus, by 1998 and the 12thGeneralAssembly, more than 50
institutions had requested reviews of their development capacity,
i.e.some 10% of the membership, while universities in other parts of
the world, mainly LatinAmerica, showed an interest in testing the
CRE "audit" system. Simultaneously, from 1996, CREalso offered
members the possiblity to evaluate their ICT policies, 11
universities joiningdiscussions on the use of new technologies for
teaching, to be followed by another 32 in 1997 ?while 5 of them were
asking a full assessment of their activities in the field.In a way,
like the governments, the universities had accepted to deepen
theirunderstanding of their techniques for development, to check
their costs and benefits in order toexpand or reduce their progress
towards European solutions that would be reached through somekind of
incremental process. The European ambitions of the projects were
very much subduedalthough, in Central and Eastern Europe,
universities were trying to assess the Euro-compatibilityof their
many reforms after the demise of communism. In 1996, CRE was thus
asked by theCommission to review the impact of 300 TEMPUS projects
on management and reform in thatpart of the continent, a report
being prepared on the basis of internal evaluation documents andon
the visits of 18 institutions in 11 countries to contribute to the
next stage of the TEMPUSprogramme. In 1997, that report was re-
drafted and reorganised into a Manual for universitymanagement in
PHARE countries, a document that was used for training workshops not
only inHungary but also in Russia ? outside the PHARE region ? in a
seminar held in 1997 also. Theinvolvement of CRE in the area had
been prepared by the launch in 1990 of an Academic TaskForce (ATF),
the resources of which came from member universities and some
governments(Austria, Sweden, and Switzerland, in particular) in
order to support the re-integration into theEuropean academic
community of institutions severely hindered in their development by
politicalconflict and lack of resources. After 1994, and the war in
Bosnia and Croatia, ATF broughttogether on a yearly basis, in
Dubrovnik or Sarajevo, the universities of the region and
membersfrom other parts of Europe to cooperate on specific
development projects. For war-afflicted
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26universities, management seminars were organised in 1997 and 1998
in Bosnia, Austria orCatalunya, thus giving CRE enough visibility to
be entrusted in 2000 the secretariat of the Highereducation group of
the Stability Pact. This commitment to solidarity between Eastern
andWestern Europe also reinforced cooperation with partners of old,
like the Council of Europe orUNESCO-CEPES, or opened the gates to
new ones, like the Salzburg Seminar, whoseUniversities' project
helped institutions from Central and Eastern Europe, including
Russia andother CIS countries, to test their capacity for reform
relative to the change agenda prevailing inWestern Europe and the
US.Indeed, Europe, for CRE, had always been more than the additions
of internal reformsand, keeping to its traditional "wider Europe"
understanding of the presence of its members in theworld, the
association, in the nineties, reinforced its presence in world
higher education throughvarious programmes.In the late eighties,
cooperation with North America was anchored, on the US side, in
theAmerican Council of Education, that helped develop the
transatlantic dialogue due to become,every two years, a regular
feature in the programme of the two organisations - the last one
beingorganised in Québec in July 2001 with the help of the
Association of Universities and Colleges ofCanada. The universities'
future in a transatlantic community ? sharing common
organisationaland scientfic objectives ? was also the topic of a
structured ACE/CRE conversation supported bythe Pew Foundation and
the Higher Education Research Institute of the University
ofPennsylvania, both in Philadelphia, that gathered some twenty
university leaders and academicexperts from Europe and North America
over a series of meetings held in Trento and Olomouc in191 and
Wingspread, Wisconsin, in 1992 : this resulted in a special issue of
Policy Pespectives,outlining the risks and opportunities linked to
the massive growth of higher education andindicating the potential
of development strategies common to both European and US
universities.The focus on university leadership and its capacity for
inducing change in higher educationinstitutions was also at the core
of the Columbus programme linking, in the early nineties, some30
Latin American universities with half that number of European
establishments in order tocooperate on institutional development and
strategies for management. From 1989 to 1993, thepilot phase of the
programme was EU funded ? more than a million ECUs ? but also
receivedproject support from governments and foundations in France,
Portugal and Spain, the lattercountry helping in the framework of
the 5thcentennial anniversary of Columbus landing in theCarribbean
Islands, while Brasil, Chile, Mexico and Venezuela were also
contributing to thedevelopment of the programme, by then based at
the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. For thefirst time, universities
from the whole of Latin America were developing multilateral
contacts andstarting network collaborations on key areas of
institutional development ? curriculum design,SME support, ICT use ?
on the model of European patterns of networking. Study visits to
15European universities were thus organised in 1990 for 30 rectors
coming from all over LatinAmerica, while European rectors were
exploring the use of new technologies in Mexico in 1992.The
relevance of European university/industry linkages was discussed in
Caracas in 1990 andBuenos Aires in 1992. On the basis of visits by
European and Latin American experts inindustrial relations, these
discussions were turned into common activities, workshops
onintellectual property rights in Costa Rica (1990) and Salamanca
(1991), training seminars on spin
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27off enterprises in Cuernavaca (1992) or Warwick and Twente (1993),
study encounters onEuropean models of quality evaluation in
Valparaiso (1990) and Sao Paulo (1991) ? all events thatled to
various publications, in Spanish and English. In 1994, the
discussions extended to qualityevaluation and to lifelong learning
as areas for change in university management. The Commissionused the
experience gained from these activities to organise the ALFA
programme, which becameits priority for Latin American higher
education after 1994, thus marginalising its interest forColumbus.
The about 40 universities which, by then, were benefiting from the
CRE programmewere asked to take over the responsibility for its
development and to create an autonomousnetwork reflecting their own
ambitions in transatlantic cooperation. CRE and AULA (theAssociation
of Latin American Universities supporting the programme) would
remain involved asfounding fathers of the new association. By 1998,
it could count on 49 members in Latin Americaand 21 in Europe ? each
paying a yearly fee of 4000 dollars to ensure the independence of
theprogramme ? also vis-à-vis the Commission that was still
financing specific projects, ontechnology transfer or regional
development for instance.Two lessons can be drawn from the chequered
history of the Columbus programme:intercontinental cooperation
allowed CRE to experiment in many fields of higher education thathad
been mentioned as of growing interest by the EU Memorandum on higher
education but forwhich it was proving difficult to find in Europe
resources and partners ready to test newmodalities of cooperation.
This vanguard role was also deemed important enough for
participatinguniversities to invest time and money, often at a
considerable level, in the success of the projects,thus validating
the relevance of European experience for Latin American partners ?
and vice-versaas the programme was never thought of as a simple
effort in development aid. In other words,European universities had
to understand their own strengths and weaknesses to benefit fully
fromthe collaborations launched with Latin America, their
transatlantic partners holding like a mirrorfor them to become
conscious of their raison-d'être and identity.The Copernicus
progamme went through a similar development, this time focused on
the1992 Rio Summit on sustainable development: could universities,
as founts of knowledge,contribute to the analysis of the dangers
inherent to a short-sighted exploitation of the worldresources? In
1990, CRE took part in the European region forum convened in Bergen
to preparethe Rio Summit and, in 1991, it joined the working group
on "education for the environment"based at the UN secretariat in
Geneva, the platform for educational NGOs interested
insustainability. This led the CRE Committee to prepare and launch
an Urgent Appeal to thegovernments participating in the Summit
requiring public support for universities' work in thearea, a text
that was forwarded by UNESCO to the Ministers in Rio. Following the
Summit, theCRE proposed its members to sign at a meeting in
Barcelona in September 1993 a Universities'Charter on Sustainable
Development, outlining 10 principles for the institutional
management ofsustainability, a document that was endorsed by 235
universities ? and which is still the basis forthe activities of the
Copernicus programme today. In 1991, in Angers, a group of sixty
specialistsfrom member universities also decided to draft a common
course in European environmental law,a 600 page textbook that was
published in 1993 in Cambridge, the French version coming out in1994
in Paris. This material had been tested in Summer schools in Visby
(1992) and Budapest(1993), as the Copernicus programme was trying to
bridge the East West divide in the Baltic and
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28Danubian areas. In Wageningen, in 1993, a similar enterprise was
launched for preparing a coursein environmental economics, that was
published in Cheltenham in 1994. That same year, with thesupport of
the World Health Organisation and of UNESCO, it was proposed to
prepare a toolkitfor the teaching of environmental health in higher
education. All these publications were testedand used in summer
schools that had become yearly events in Budapest ? where the
UNESCOhad also created a UNITWIN chair in the field ? while, in
Visby, a workshop was also organisedin 1995 on environmental health.
Like for Columbus, but a few years later, in 1997, it was
decidedthat the University of Dortmund would take over the
secretariat of a programme that shouldbecome autonomous from CRE
under the leadership of a steering group nominated by
theparticipating universities. The new organisation was born at a
conference in Utrecht in 1998 and,still today, is presided by the
former President of the Dutch Open University in Heerlen,
Prof.Rietje van Dam.Thus, over the nineties, CRE experimented on
behalf of its members in two areas ofinteruniversity cooperation,
transatlantic collaboration and sustainable development: both
werecentred on university management ? although curriculum
development, in terms of content,played an important part in
Copernicus, for a few years, the emphasis remaining
thesustainability of academic institutions as partners in ecological
development. When theseprogrammes were considered strong enough,
they were spawned and new networks were born.However, to be
recognised as an important partner, any organisation needs a strong
andhighly visible programme of its own, in which others can join. If
the period was characterised byfragmented and multiple efforts in
university cooperation, an attempt was now needed to bringsome
coherence to these many developments: Europe had lost a long held
sense of identity whenthe Berlin Wall fell. A few years later, could
it regain some awareness of its specificity ? vis-à-visthe US and
the growing commercialisation of knowledge that was developing in
various countrieswhere universities were on the look-out for new
resources at a time of severe budgetaryrestrictions ?In September
1998, the UNESCO convened in Paris a World Conference on
HigherEducation, in order to put back on governmental agendas
training and scholarship as top prioritiesfor social development. To
prepare that world event, each region organised conferences and,
inEurope, CRE ? in close collaboration with UNESCO-CEPES in
Bucharest ? convened in Palermoin September 1997 a European Forum
not only for university leaders but also for delegates fromstudent
organisations, teachers' unions, scientific associations, industrial
groups and educationministries. This large group of participants had
been asked to draft the European agenda forchange for higher
education in the 21stcentury, that would be proposed to the World
Conferencea year later as the European contribution on modalities of
change in teaching and learning,professional training, scholarship
and research as well as the transmission of those cultural
valuesmaking the specificity of Europe as a civilisation. The
European question was back at centre stage? particularly as the
region had to delineate at the World Conference its capacity for
cooperation? and urge for competition ? with the other parts of the
world. The whole discussion had beenprepared by numerous case
studies from member universities while, in parallel, to prepare
the1998 General Assembly in Berlin, a project, with the support of
the EU, was being developed todetermine the expectations from
regional authorities, local firms, chambers of commerce, students
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29and their families, secondary schools and other higher education
instituions, cultural associationsand other stakeholders vis-à-vis
university services in teaching and research while assessing
theuniversities' capacity to meet such demand. Four aspects of
academic relevance were consideredessential to enhance the pro-
active role of higher education institutions in Europe:
humanresources development, social and cultural development,
regional and economic development, aswell as communication
development. Surveys of members and visits to institutions allowed
todraw commonalities of purpose and situation that went beyond
national borders to regroupinstitutions according to regional
specifities - peripheral regions, regions of re-industrialisation
orregions of economic boom.By August 1998, and the General Assembly
in Berlin, there were thus clear signs that theloss of European
meaning that followed the end of the East/West divide was being
replaced by agrowing awareness of a common destiny ? where the
deregulation of higher education was beinginterpreted in a
restrictive way, where the role of higher education as a public good
called forgreater attention, where the universities' function in the
integration of society was back in focus,in terms of culture,
economy and social diversity. The countries of Europe had learned of
eachother, discovered their differences and common features, learned
about the dangers of divisiveallegiances that had brought
hostilities and war damages back to the core of Europe
whenYugoslavia broke down to pieces. The discipline asked from EU
members to launch a commoncurrency was pointing again to new
federative stimuli: indeed, Europe is more than the sum of itsparts
and the universities were ready to make sense of this reallity, now
that they were aware ofstrong commonalities. After a detour through
a commitment to Europeans, as institutions andcitizens, could higher
education return to a commitment to Europe, as a focus for
integration?The new century : Europe regainedThe economic and
monetary union had been a slow process, thaat started in 1969when,
on 12 February, Raymond Barre proposed "a policy to meet the ecoomic
and monetarychallenges of the day". However, at the end of the
century, two generations after World War II,should slow and
cumbersome consensus-building be the rule again in order to achieve
furtherintegration in all fields of European activities, among the
fifteen members of the Community oramong the larger group of nations
making wider Europe? In May 1998, a first answer wasproposed for
higher education by the conference organised at the Sorbonne to
commemorate the800thanniversary of the University in Paris. The
French Minister of Education, Claude Allègre,had invited his
British, German and Italian colleagues to attend a symposium open to
themembers of the university community - students, staff and
academic leaders from France andneighbouring countries mainly ?
where the four Ministers chaired for two days various workinggroups
in which they could test the multiple views from the academic
community before signing aDeclaration which was inviting
institutions and governments to "harmonise" academic servicesand
university provision, an anathema in European jargon as the word
smacks of uniformityalthough it should invite concertation, if the
musical reference is taken seriously.Other EU governments, from
Portugal to the Netherlands, felt most embarassed by thismove from
their colleagues to which they had not been associated. So, when the
Italian Ministerof Education, Luigi Berlinguer, proposed to hold a
similar meeting in Bologna in June 1999, all
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30countries decided to join, all the more so as the invitation was
extended to nations still outside theEuropean Union. The host
University called on its old partner of 1988 to prepare the
meeting,and the Ministerial group that sponsored the event asked the
CRE and the ex-Liaison Committee,institutionalised since 1995 as the
Confederation of EU Rectors' conferences, to represent
highereducation in the finalisation of the meeting and of the draft
of the Bologna Declaration that wouldbuild on and enlarge the
proposals of the Sorbonne Declaration signed a year earlier in
Paris. Oithad been decided that the Ministers would meet following a
day of academic discussions amongrepresentatives of all sectors of
the academic community and, on that basis, that they would givethe
final touch to the Declaration that was to be signed by 29 countries
on 19 June 1999 in theAula Magna of the University of Bologna where,
11 years earlier, the role of universities asinstitutions of
European commonality had been solemnly reaffirmed. By the end of the
century,the organisations born out of the post-war integration
movement were full partners in thepolitical deliberations concerning
the future of higher education ? a fact that evoked the necessityof
their merger so that the universities of Europe would speak with one
voice again, whilerepresenting the institutions as such ? as
individual members - and their organisation in nationalsystems as
well ? as collective members. Two years of deliberations were needed
to achieve thisaim and, on 31 March 2001, the European University
Association was born in Salamanca.In Bologna, the governments had
taken the initiative again while the EU Commission wassomewhat
marginalised to an observer status. This could look rather
dismissive but it expressedthe reluctance of many at the traditional
approach of the Commission in consensus-building. Tooslow, too
cumbersome, too esoteric if the citizens of Europe were to
understand the process.Thus, the Bologna Declaration proposed a
simple aim: developing an open European highereducation area by
2010. It indicated the means to achieve this goal, the use of
commoninstruments like the a two tier degree structure (BA and MA),
the diploma supplement, theEuropean Credit Transfer System, quality
evaluation or the Europeanisation of curricula. Thesetools
corresponded to deepening levels of integration: the Diploma
supplement and the BA/MAarchitecture invited changes at national
level but were not calling for adaptation to other members'needs and
ambitions. ECTS was asking for more, however, as the comparison of
learningoutcomes could entail changes in national curricula or
institutional courses in order to facilitatemobility and, at a later
stage, allow for credit accumulation. Cooperation in quality
finallytranslated comparability into compatibility, so that trust
could be given to the level achieved inthe provision of higher
education, all over Europe. Each stage requested greater commitment
tothe commonality of purpose and action in the field of higher
education so that, by 2010,educational services should flow freely
from one side of the continent to the other, like materialgoods do
today. This will imply that the providers of education will draw
resources (people ormoney) from all parts of the area - like
industrial firms do today when assembling cars ortelephones - in
order to develop and package the most enticing products, be they
courses orresearch projects, data or publications. But it will also
mean that providers will not only beinstitutions resembling today's
universities but also networks involving publishing houses,
mediacompanies, and other specialised communicators. Students of all
ages will draw on the mostconvenient services, relevant in terms of
their intellectual interests, career development or
socialcommitments. And there will be common measurement to compare
the value of the service, aEuro of the intelligence allowing for the
compatibility and cohesion of the promised knowledge
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31society ? the same way today's common currency binds the
production and trade of goods allover Europe.For learners, teachers
and administrators, the freedom of movement in a commonEuropean
intellectual space will offer equal conditions of access to the many
providers and usersof higher education, equal conditions of support
to knowledge development, in people andinstitutions, equal
conditions of assessment and recognition of services, of skills
andcompetencies, equal conditions of work and employment. In other
words, the tools given by theBologna Declaration are there to invent
a European model of higher education and training strongenough to
allow hard discussions on choices of society, as requested by
questions of substancelike lifelong learning, the social
contribution of students to institutional building, or
theattractiveness of European higher education vis-à-vis the rest of
the world, themes that wereadded to the Bologna process by the
Prague Summit in May 2001, the first stock taking exerciseby 32
governments of Europe willing to monitor the realisation of the
Bologna intentions.Indeed, because the Declaration was not binding
legally, because it emphasised theimportance of tools of adaptation
rather than important changes of substance, it allowed aflourish of
new initiatives taken at institutional, regional, national or
European levels. The keyleitmotiv of it all: convergence of action
leading to coherence of development so that Europeancitizens
recognise themselves ? and each other ? as full partners in a
cohesive society ofknowledge. That had been very much the topic
discussed by the first meeting of Europeanuniversity leaders in
1959 ? presently seen under a new angle now that higher
educationinstitutions are being encouraged to build on their
collective autonomy by "putting their acttogether". Thus, from
Bologna to Prague, the CRE and the Confederation accompanied
theprocess, taking part in numerous meetings to explain its scope
and purpose, to encourageinstitutions to enter the European movement
of change and adaptation, to define the Euro-compatibility of
academic action in the various parts of the continent. In this
exercise, theuniversity associations counted on the support of
traditional partners, the Council of Europe andTEMPUS when the
integration of South East Europe in the Bologna process is the focus
ofattention, UNESCO CEPES when the definition of Europe is to be
fixed in function of other partsof the world, the IMHE programme of
the OECD when the consequences of convergence onuniversity
management need to be discussed, the European Union when the
monitoring of theBologna process, its validation in experimental
terms, and the commonalities of change call forglobal understanding.
Stronger links with other sectors of the higher education community
alsomean close contacts with student organisations, like ESIB, or
with EURASHE, the association ofinstitutions for vocational higher
education. A coherent and cohesive Europe also has an influenceon
the region's role in world higher education. Therefore, CRE and EUA,
its successororganisation, is working ever more closely with ACE and
AUCC, in North America, with AARU,the Association of Arab
Universities or with AUAP, the Association of Universities of
AsiaPacific, developing joint projects, enlarging common work in
university management in terms ofquality evaluation, strategies for
change and cultural diversity.To conclude ...
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Page 32
32From the post war Europe divided by borders, frontier check ups,
the non convertibilityof money ? i.e., a Europe deprived of mobility
in a landscape still scarred by earlier bombings ? toa Union now
encompassing 400 million people from Grece to Britain, from Finland
to Portugal,some fifty years have passed. The universities, in their
own development, have embodied most ofthe changes, sometimes ahead
of general development, sometimes after. They suffered from
theEast/West divide, tried to bridge the political gap, became full
partners of academic mobility,through ERASMUS, one of the most
successful programmes in the field and a preview of an openEurope,
they joined in the re-engineering of wider Europe, coping with its
blunders, in Yugoslavia,or its breakthroughs, the TEMPUS programme.
They are now invited to invent the open Europeof the mind that will
shape the society of knowledge which the region is hoping to
developthrough the Bologna process. From the periphery of the
European integration movement,universities have now moved to the
core. The challenge of adaptation has never been bigger.Moreover, as
higher education has never been placed so well in the jockeying for
politicalinfluence, the tools for reinventing the Europe of
intelligence are there. The Bologna process isstrong but it could
break as it is based on instrumentation processes that could fail
whenideological choices will need to be done. What type of society
do Europeans want? What doescohesion mean in democratic decision-
making? Is the service of intelligence really a public good?These
are the problems of tomorrow. The university is well placed to
contribute to their solutionif it keeps loyal to its identity, as
the only institution that is common to all countries of thecontinent
and the place that makes sense of Europe and where Europe does make
sense.





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