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Unite! looks to the future

VI Unite! Dialogue in Turin

2022/09/29

With over 250 academic, staff and student participants coming from nine European Universities, the Unite! Alliance sixth Dialogue was just hosted at Politecnico di Torino on September 20-22. The Alliance, which concluded its sixth Dialogue, was recently awarded with additional funding from the European Commission. Together with the University delegations, other main participants were EC representatives, CRUI Rector’s Conference, the main German technical Universities’ network – TU9, plus Torino, Barcelona and Stockholm municipalities and the other five CLUSTER European Alliances.

The Dialogue symbolically represented the closing of the project's pilot phase and the launch of the Alliance's second phase, recently refinanced by the EC for the next four years.

Darmstadt, Barcelona, Helsinki, Stockholm, Graz, Wroclaw and Torino technical Universities, together with the comprehensive Universities of Lisbon and Grenoble, gathered at PoliTO for three days of conferences, workgroups, labs to present the next four years of activities, the main Erasmus+ pilot phase closing results, and the H2020 ongoing activities.

The Rectors of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology and the Graz University of Technology also signed the Unite! Charter, thus sealing their official entry into the Alliance.

The Alliance's Erasmus+ project is focused on education and training, specifically addressing a joint doctorate degree, and has involved more than 500 people in the academic, administrative and student communities in the past three years.

The pilot phase of the second main Unite! project, funded within the H2020 program and focused on research and innovation, was another key theme of the Dialogue: all staff involved in the two projects gathered for the first time on this occasion.

Starting in November 2022, the second phase of the Alliance activities will begin

“The VI Dialogue was a great success, both in terms of the amount of participants and the level and variety of speakers at the different panel discussions organized over the three-day duration of the event”, commented Professor Roberto Zanino, Unite!’s Key Liaison Officer for Politecnico di Torino: “for the first time, all the Rectors and Presidents of the nine partner Universities came together in a workshop moderated by CESAER Secretary General, David Bohmert. At the same time, it was possible to bring together in a round table discussion representatives of cities such as Turin, headquarters of different European University Alliances, as well as to organize a meeting between representatives of all six CLUSTER network Alliances, including Unite!”.

Previous Unite! Dialogues

Unite! Dialogues are the key format to raise the visibility of Unite! in the member universities and their ecosystems, and to disseminate the Unite! vision among university faculty, staff and students. Previous Dialogues were:.

Unite!

The European Universities Initiative

The European Universities Initiative was launched in 2019 to push for the establishment of a European Education Area by 2025. European Universities are transnational alliances of higher education institutions from across the EU that share a long-term strategy, promoting European values and identity. The initiative is designed to significantly strengthen student and staff mobility and to foster the quality, inclusion and competitiveness of European higher education.

In response to a first call of the Erasmus+ Programme in 2019, the first 17 alliances were selected for a 3-year pilot phase to lay the foundations for future European universities. Unite! has been among these first 17. Another 24 alliances followed in the 2nd call in 2020.

Unite!’s new funding starting end of 2022 falls into the calls of the further roll out of the European Universities Initiative. It plans to increase the number of European Universities to 60 with more than 500 universities by mid-2024, supported under Erasmus+ with an indicative budget of EUR 1.1 billion for the period 2021-2027. The aim is to develop and share a common long-term structural, sustainable and systemic cooperation on education, research and innovation, creating European inter-university campuses where students, staff and researchers from all parts of Europe can enjoy seamless mobility and create new knowledge together, across countries and disciplines.”