Liviu Matei

King's College London

This article scrutinizes the place and impact of interna-tionalization in higher education prison initiatives. To support this scrutiny, the article first sketches a global panorama of such initiatives and then zooms in on two representative case studies. The analysis in this article shows that introducing internationalization elements in third mis...

Should universities endeavour to support any democratic developments, and possibly even weighty democratic transformations, in their societies? Or should they rather focus exclusively on education and research understood as the production and transmission of knowledge in a narrow (“technical”) sense, confined at best to training the workforce, supp...

The article posits that the predicaments of academic freedom in Europe in the first two decades of the 21st century amount to a crisis with distinctive regional characteristics rather than national or global. The article discusses the nature and origin of the crisis and why Europe (the European Higher Education Area) is a relevant unit of analysis...

Is there a need to reimagine academic freedom? Does it happen? Where and how? As guest editors of this special issue, we have enjoyed the challenge of curating a set of papers under the theme of ‘reimagining academic freedom’. By ‘reimagining’ we refer to an act of imagining again and anew, more precisely to develop new conceptualisations and codif...

The existence of exceptional individuals and individual contributions in higher education can hardly be denied. This is particularly true for, and accelerated in, the last five–six decades, which are special and unprecedented times in higher education, given in particular the shift to mass enrollment and the key role acquired by advanced knowledge,...

This article identifies a new form of internationalization, which can be called "internationalization by integration". It discusses this development as a possible new global trend and delves deeper into a particular case study. This form of internationalization has heretofore not been studied systematically. This new phenomenon can be considered on...

This first report of the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom (GOAF) identifies, analyzes, and tries to explain major recent evolutions in the understanding of academic freedom globally; whether they are expressed in legal, regulatory and policy endeavors, or in explicit intellectual attempts at new conceptualizations. The concept of academic fr...

The study looks at the use of quality assurance (QA) tools to safeguard the Fundamental Values of Higher Education in the European Higher Education Area, namely institutional autonomy, academic freedom and integrity, participation of students and staff in higher, education governance, and public responsibility for and of higher education. This list...

This paper sheds light on the crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic by placing this far-reaching, yet individual, catastrophe in the context of the history of crisis, or crises, of higher education in the massification era and the discourse about these crises.

The future of the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have been debated for more than 20 years (Bergan and Deca 2018). From the very start, even as the implementation of this continental-wide project in higher education got underway and in parallel to historical analyses (“looking back” too) that begun slowly to emerge, th...

The paper argues that the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is currently experiencing a crisis of academic freedom and discusses the need to chart a course out of this crisis. The paper further claims that the crisis, with its two dimensions (intellectual and empiric), is specific to Europe/EHEA; it is not a global or national crisis, although...

This paper makes the point about the existence of a crisis of academic freedom presently that is specific to Europe, or the European Higher Education Area, and discusses the nature and origins of this crisis. The crisis of academic freedom in Europe is both intellectual and empiric. The paper raises questions about how the relationship between high...

This exploratory article discusses teaching as an instrument of building a regional (transnational) identity in the context of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) project. Higher education can be used as a tool of political construction. That can be done by adopting higher education policies that are customised for this purpose, for example b...

Can international universities be anchor institutions? This chapter looks at the case of the Central European University (CEU), a higher education institution that is “densely international” and “international by design”. The analysis of this particular case shows that the answer is positive: international universities can successfully combine loca...

The thirteen papers in this collection address three aspects of higher education, primarily in Europe but also in the United States. These aspects are competition, collaboration, and complementarity, both on the level of policy and on the practical level of impact on students and staff. Competition, especially for funding, occurs between and within...

The case of Central European University (CEU) shows that cooperation in higher education can be useful in order to address crises that have a political nature or origin. By necessity, such cooperation initiatives acquire a clear, even possibly primarily political dimension, in addition to genuinely promoting academic and professional advancement in...

This chapter discusses why governance and funding are currently serious matters of concern for public policy in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). It argues that discussions about governance are particularly intense in times of major change in the world around higher education, and that we are once again traversing such a period in Europe....

This chapter provides an analysis of the evolution of institutional autonomy and academic freedom in Europe since the launch of the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). It points to evidence suggesting diverging paths within and between these two areas of university governance. The emergence of a European notion and model...

What is the Bologna Process? Has it been a success or failure in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in particular, and in Europe more generally? This question, asked time and again, is persistently misconstrued. This explains to a large extent both the inconsistent scholarly literature on the subject and the contradictory evaluations of the Bologna...

There are exceptional moments in history, which show with clarity − and often with brutality − that what happens in or around universities is symptomatic of profound, unresolved troubles in the broader society. Hungary is traversing such a moment.

The Handbook introduces and discusses key concepts in quality assurance in higher education, supplemented by examples of practices and methods from different higher education systems around the world. The examples presented, mainly from Europe, but also from Asia and North America, aim to illustrate the diversity that exists across higher educatio...

National strategies and practices in internationalisation of higher education vary across countries. So does their efficiency and impact. For countries that, like Romania, are considering adopting a national internationalisation strategy and are deliberating what exact model to choose (or develop), valuable lessons can be learned from a well-calibr...

From an educational policy perspective, student centred learning (SCL) is a rather new concept. It has emerged in recent years in national and institutional policy documents, often as part of rather declarative and formal approaches. Such policies are frequently lacking a clearly articulated definition of the concept and its effective operationaliz...

In the first 15 years of the twenty-first century, the evolution of higher education in Europe was both predictable and special. The period of massification and globalisation, fuelled by the prevailing narratives that the knowledge society of the future required ever more schooling for larger proportions of the population and the European integrati...

The paper puts forward arguments in favour of a new approach to the study of internationalisation of higher education. It claims that a systematic mapping of the funding of internationalisation could shed new light on the phenomenon itself and also on the ways it has been conceptualized and studied to date. Preliminary results from a research proje...

The countries of Eastern Central Europe are often considered to share important similarities in many areas, including higher education, to the point of representing a distinctive region on the global map. To date, however, there is no consistent corpus of research available that would expound what these similarities are about exactly, what is their...

The original ambition of the section on Financing and Governance of the 2nd Bologna Researchers’ Conference had been to review key aspects in this area along the Bologna action lines.

This practical handbook provides a concise overview of key aspects of university autonomy, based on selected international studies and other higher education policy literature. It elaborates on specific practical dimensions of institutional autonomy that may be relevant for the reform efforts in Myanmar higher education.

The role of universities and research organisations as drivers for smart specialisation at regional level Brussels, 23 January 2014 The development and implementation of smart specialisation strategies involve a number of stakeholders, among which universities and research centres play a key role. Smart specialisation requires them to re-think the...

The article proposes to characterize the Bologna process as a knowledge society project. Viewed in this perspective, the Bologna process appears to be a surprising success story. Success is expressed in the capacity of the project to generate innovation in higher education, its real impact in Europe, and its global prominence. A major shortcoming o...

The paper analyses stereotypes and prejudices of the Romanian majority about three ethnic minorities: Jews, Gypsies and Hungarians. The specific role those stereotypes play, their origin, and several examples of discrimination are explained in relation to demographic, economic, political and cultural factors, including types of prejudices other tha...