European Integration and the Governance of Higher Education and Research (Higher Education Dynamics (26))

The high level Douro seminars are now a well-established tradition in the annual activities promoted by Hedda, a European consortium of nine centres and ins- tutes devoted to research on higher education, and CIPES, its Portuguese associated centre. At the seminars, each member of a small group of invited researchers presents and discusses an original research-based paper that is revised afterwards taking into account the comments of the participating colleagues. The revised papers form the basis for the annual thematic book published by Springer in the book series called Higher Education Dynamics (HEDY). Paying tribute to the regularity of the seminars, it was decided that the volumes originating from the initiative would be collected in a ‘series in the series’ called the Douro Series. Previous seminars were dedicated to in-depth analyses of different aspects of higher education systems and institutions, including institutional governance, the emergence of managerialism, markets as instruments of public policy, cost-sharing and accessibility of students to higher education and developments in quality assurance. The present volume aims at analysing the change process which the European university is undergoing as a consequence of European integration efforts. In the case of higher education, these have materialised, amongst other things, in the - plementation of the Bologna process, while the Lisbon summit also has important consequences for the university. In March 2000, the Lisbon European Council set the goal for the EU to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world by 2010.

Given the overall ambitions and goals of the Lisbon agenda and the Bologna process, and other relevant supranational and intergovernmental European integration processes, it is obvious that these processes are intended to affect the university in all its basic structural features, including the way it performs its basic activities. However, the European Commission does not have formal authority with respect to the university, nor did the governments that signed the Bologna process develop an executive administrative capacity for implementing the Bologna Declaration. As a consequence, whether and how the supranational and intergovernmental European integration processes actually affect university governance and the university as a social institution is far from clear.

The authors of this volume have dedicated considerable effort to the analysis of the Bologna process implementation. They offer a unique and critical view of the nature and possible effects of these very complex processes.