Brussels, 21/02/2008 (Agence Europe) - European Union universities and higher educations institutes are currently confronting a globalised and extremely competitive environment. Their funding is now more than ever a crucial question insofar as they have to meet several challenges: ensure necessary reforms to remain competitive; become more attractive; renew their programmes in order to respond to the new training needs oriented towards research; foster their partnership for exchanging best practices; guarantee their autonomy and make how they work more transparent. The aim of a European University Association conference of experts on 7-8 February in Brussels was to ensure European higher education institutes have sustainable funding. This association represents and supports higher education establishments in 46 countries by providing them with a location for exchanging information for promoting their development and inter-university cooperation. At this event, Commissioner Jan Figel regretted that member states only spent 1.13% of their GDP on university funding. He also pointed out that the EU was interested in modernising universities. He stressed that “universities should become responsible for their own long-term financial sustainability tapping public and private sources”.
Christina Ullenius, the EUA vice-president, affirmed that “only institutions that know the full costs of their activities and projects can judge if they are operating on a financially sustainable basis”. Thomas Eastermann, the EUA programme director, then provided the initial results of an investigation, carried out with European Commission support, on sources of university funding. The enquiry will be published in the autumn. Preliminary conclusions demonstrate a high level of diversity in financing mechanisms between European countries and even between regions in a single given country. They illustrate a need to provide an overall detailed picture of models of existing public funding, of the legal and financial environments in which these models apply, and of additional financial sources to which establishments can apply. Although it is clear that universities should identify the total cost of their activities to implement a healthy financial framework that is viable in the long term, there is no common terminology for coherently identifying and understanding what is meant by “total costs” and each establishment has its own definition. The obstacles to implementation of efficient financing systems, such as a lack of external financial support and a lack of autonomy are also highlighted. Ms Ullenius added: “We believe that strong universities with greater autonomy and accountability, rather than universities over-regulated by national and European governmental agencies, will be able to play their full part in responding to a changing society and its demands, and in contributing to the revised Lisbon Agenda on Growth and Jobs”. In its “Lisbon Declaration”, the EUA outlines the essential priorities for competitive universities up to 2010: 1) build the European higher education area with more focus on key objectives, student centred learning, and application of European system for earning and transferring credits; 2) internationalise this area by exporting the European Bologna model, making European universities more attractive to foreign students, and encouraging establishments to elaborate strategies for cooperation and international exchanges; 3) encourage research and innovation through greater endorsement of research teaching. Excellence in PhD programmes should also be proposed; institutional research strategies developed; innovation capacity promoted; collaboration between universities and companies created; universities should be compelled to be more accountable for indirect costs of research and should introduce a more flexible legal framework; 4) adopt an approach more geared towards quality; 5) guarantee autonomy of institutes and viable long term funding through diversification of funding sources and using private contributions in higher education.
This last point was not supported unanimously. Some academics like Professor Athanasia Tsatsakou, the vice rector for academic affairs at the Salonika Aristotle University in Greece, is totally opposed to what he describes as the privatisation of universities and the too frequent use of private funding. He told EUROPE that universities had to be generously funded by governments and affirmed that public funding guaranteed the autonomy of higher education establishments. Two schools of thought can be discerned: the Anglo-Saxon paradigm that is obedient to economic criteria; and the other, as supported by Southern European countries, which is more based on the production and transmission of knowledge and know-how. Mr Tsatsakou also asserted that the public model prevented “an extreme instrumentalisation of knowledge by respecting as far as possible, humanist and social values from the European tradition”. (I.L.)