Emma Sabzalieva We live in an era of intense and growing international connections, but also in a world of significant positional differences between localities, states and regions. In this context, how can the idea of the world-class university be used by states to survive and succeed? What does this idea look like in states […]

  Davide Donina In recent decades, science studies have increasingly recognized that single academic disciplines are ill equipped to address complex problems that modern societies and science face (Nature 2015). Accordingly, interdisciplinarity has become a hot topic and a buzzword in the policy discourse for science and higher education. Yet, translating policy discourse into policy […]

Grischa Fraumann At any rate, altmetrics, or alternative metrics, are gaining momentum in higher education (Holmberg, 2016). This post is based on my master’s thesis (Fraumann, 2017) that explores the usage of altmetrics with a focus on research funding. Altmetrics track down and count the mentions of scholarly outputs in social media, news sites, policy […]

Olivier Bégin-Caouette In the Europe of Knowledge, there are strong pressures on national governments to increase funding for research; one of Europe 2020’s headline indicators is to increase combined public and private investment in R&D to the equivalent of 3% of the GDP (see graph below). Beyond the amount of resources invested, it appears critical […]

Roland Bloch and Alexander Mitterle Universities have become central crossing points in modern society. They coproduce the narratives of our time, ranging from politics over neurogenetics to climate change. Universities educate students for diverse roles in society: nurses, musicians, lawyers, physicists, managers, neuroscientists, and philosophers have all been credentialized by higher education systems. In recent […]

Que Anh Dang  How might we understand the changing governance of scientific research at national, regional and supranational levels in Europe? What are the prevailing and conflicting political, economic, cultural and ideational discourses, discursive contexts and rationales for constituting and governing intermediary research executive agencies? How do they operate? What are the consequences/outcomes caused by […]

Beverly Barrett The internationalization of higher education is a response to the pressures of globalization. There are economic, political, and social explanations for the reforms that have taken place in Europe since the Bologna Process launched 18 years ago on June 19, 1999 in the historic university city of Bologna, Italy. Correspondingly, these explanations for […]