NEWS & EVENTS

Five years have passed and the ENLIGHT community has successfully achieved two and a half projects including Erasmus+ and Horizon Europe calls. In this timelapse, often predated by imperative action to secure European funding, including task distribution, deliverables and project-related documents production, reporting and auditing, personal affinities and academic complementarities have subtly arisen. These are at the base of the alliance that the ENLIGHT community strives to build as a longterm inter-institutional engagement and a life & work transformational enterprise.  

The former project-based network is evolving into a truly integrated international shared space that should produce activities embedded as core institutional strategy rather than add-ons, with permanent dedicated staff and budgets at each partner. To this end, the consolidation and strategic selectivity of high-impact areas that create unique value appear as the way to ensure that the alliance provides tangible and lasting outcomes. 

ENLIGHT is foreseen by Nati Mansilla-Ovejero as “an integral part of our universities´ operations. Success will be visible in the routines we establish: joint teaching initiatives, seamless administrative cooperation and shared support structures. The alliance should feel accessible, predictable and strategically coherent: a natural extension of how we work, rather than an exception”.  

These largely shared aspirations are somewhat challenged by the complexity of the geopolitical and economic context, with Education competing against Defense and Economic stability for resources, brain drain acceleration if integrated pathways are not created, and rapid technological changes like the mainstreaming of the use of AI. Internal complications also appear in view of such an ambitious goal: “The success of ENLIGHT will depend on maintaining authentic institutional ownership and bottom-up innovation while demonstrating the systemic transformation the European Commission seeks”, Alexandra Doring says. 

The priorities for joint action in the next five years include securing the best possible tools for mobility and collaboration, including digital platforms, mobility frameworks or administrative processes, where learners and staff are regarded as members of a community –just like home learners and staff. Also, developing cross-cutting areas like sustainability, inclusion and innovation where collective efforts can drive systemic change appear as key drivers for cooperation and the future of our respective institutions. 

In this regard, significant human achievements are always as much based on people as they are in tools and action. In such complex cooperation environments, new professional profiles integrating extensive expertise are arising. “These professionals function as essential mediators operating between leadership and administration, connecting multi-level stakeholders and multi-actor networks across cultures, managing divergences between partners with different interests, breaking down silos and ensuring practical implementation of collaborative tools. As the alliance matures, this work will demand even more sophisticated capabilities and ENLIGHT risks undermining its own transformative ambitions if high turnover, driven by coordination overload, inadequate HR funding and absent career pathways occurs”, stresses the European Strategic Watch lead. These “new profiles” are identified, reported and described in the MESRE evaluation report "Évaluation qualitative de l’effet transformant d’être membres d’une Alliance d’Universités Européennes (AUE)" that has just been published on its website. 

Another crucial endeavour includes the cooperation schemes developped by the alliance to mediate between the demands of the European Commission and territorial innovation ecosystems.  Something like a “Regional Innovation Observatory and Foresight Network” could become a useful tool to monitor territorial skills needs, innovation challenges and emerging opportunities across partner regions in the upcoming years, thus aligning regional insights to alliance research and education capabilities. 

All of this lasting effort deployed; all of these human, technical and economic resources utilised, only make sense if they serve our communities, and more specifically today´s learners who will become tomorrow´s leaders. In this regard, Leah Vandeveer, Secretary General of ENLIGHT, claims to be “impressed by the overwhelming engagement of our academics and more particularly of learners in our bottom-up initiatives and course offer”.  

In the upcoming years, she remarks, “we will focus strongly on deeper sustainability, embedding structures that last beyong funding cycles, strengthening our stakeholder involvement and building long-term external partnerships. The openness and willingness of our teams to collaborate across institutions has made the perception of ENLIGHT as a purely top-down initiative slowly fade, as more and more staff is getting involved”.  

“I see ENLIGHT as a community of universities working together almost instinctively –co-creating, sharing resources and giving learners, academics and staff a real sense of belonging to something “bigger” than their home institution-“, she envisions.  

We are off to a great ENLIGHT@10!