Empower European Universities (EEU), an NGO, website www.empowereu.org wants to contribute to a better Europe by promoting the full empowerment of the European Universities. Europe is faced with several, one might call it crises, like the demographic change, the worldwide sustainability crisis and the remnants of the financial crisis of 2008 (the great recession, which particularly hit Europe and the US). European Universities could play a substantially larger role in invigorating Europe than they do at the moment as was stated in a manifesto of some 20 top experts in June 2010, giving birth to EEU.
EEU’s approach is to “grade” annually or bi-annually the universities policies of each of the 27 EU countries in terms of empowerment and at the same time to “test” the vigour of the universities in that country, amongst others in terms of their attractiveness to foreign students, foreign researchers and for international research financing. Special attention is paid to the European cross-border collaboration. The framework is developed from the EU main office in Maastricht in strong interaction with the 27 members of the contact group (one in each EU country.) The Higher Education Policy Group of Oxford University (Professor Bahram Bekhradia), CHEPS (Professor Jürgen Enders), CHE (Professor Frank Ziegele) and Professor Gudmund Hernes (Oslo University of Management) have been approached to be part of this process of assessing Government University Policy, based on a notion of the existence of “optimal policy”. The framework will be finalized at a symposium in Maastricht on November 23, 2011 after which the implementation follows with a first report on the State of European Empowerment of Universities in April 2012.
