The Citizen Science Doctoral College, in partnership with CeiED and SPCE-SEC promoted, on March 23rd, a webinar on the European Strategy for Universities. The activity took place online and had as speaker Professor Maria de Lourdes Machado-Taylor, Director of the Institutional Development Office (GDI) in Lusófona Group. 

The session presented the European context of Higher Education in recent years, the challenges that the sector faces today and the proposals of the European Commission’s latest package for Higher Education, launched on 18 January 2022. The measures announced focus mainly on supporting transnational cooperation, where action at EU level is of significant value. It links this to the social context of democratic decline, inequality and diversity, as well as to green and digital transitions and geopolitical changes.

Four flagship initiatives stand out

• the expansion of the European Universities Initiative to 60 alliances with up to 500 institutions in total;
• the pathway to European degrees:
• the exploration of a legal status for university alliances;
• the deployment of the European Student Card;

According to the speaker’s opinion, the implementation of these measures could have an impact on Higher Education as considerable as was the Bologna Process.