The government of Slovakia has granted Comenius University in Bratislava an additional funding of 143 000 euro for ENLIGHT. The Slovak Ministry of Education published a special call for proposals for universities participating in the European Universities Initative in October 2020, after the success of projects with Slovak participation in the European Universities call of 2020. Three institutions worked together to submit a joint proposal.

ENLIGHT RISE, R&I dimension of the ENLIGHT alliance, has passed evaluation phase with a successful score of 13/15 and been invited to grant preparation by the European Commission Research Executive Agency in the context of the Horizon 2020 - SwafS Framework Programme (H2020-IBA-SwafS-Support-2-2020).

The University of Göttingen, as a member of the European University ENLIGHT, succeeded in getting funding from the German Academic Exchange Agency (DAAD) for 750.000 € for the expansion of European structures.

The DAAD is supporting the project „ENLIGHT Transform“, which is intended to strengthen and complement the activities of the university network for a period of three years. The aim of the DAAD initiative is to support the international activities of German universities who, together with their European partners, were successful with their application to be recognized as a “European University”.

It’s probably the biggest challenge of the 21st century: the climate crisis. How we can adapt to these consequences was the main subject of the Climate Adaptation Week on 19th to 25th January 2021 in Groningen. 

In the summer course Innovation Game, presented by Uppsala University and EIT Health, the students will face real health challenges and meet them with serious game design – game principles aiming beyond entertainment.

The Global Engagement and Empowerment Forum (GEEF) is organized by ENLIGHT's associated partner Ban Ki-moon Centre for Global Citizens and is co-hosted with Yonsei University's Institute of Global Engagement & Empowerment (IGEE) and the Ban Ki-moon Foundation for a Better Future in Seoul.

On Tuesday 26th of February the student representatives of all nine ENLIGHT universities elected the first  Student Board. The Student Board takes the lead of the ENLIGHT Student Network through their first term in history.

The physicist Professor Metin Tolan will become the next President of the University of Göttingen. The Senate of the University unanimously agreed this decision today. The University Foundation Committee also approved this proposal unanimously. Tolan succeeds Professor Reinhard Jahn, who held the office until 31 December 2020. Since that time, full-time Vice-President Dr. Valérie Schüller has been Acting President of the University on an interim basis. Tolan's term of office is expected to begin in the spring.

On 19 November the Swedish government formally appointed Professor Anders Hagfeldt as new Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University.

On January 25th 2021, Eva Ferreira was formally appointed Rector of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Between 2017 and 2020, Uppsala University and the University of Groningen work together in the Erasmus+ project LISTO: Latin American and European Cooperation on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The consortium of universities from Sweden, Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina worked with practical tools for university-industry relations and entrepreneurial universities, and developed an International Virtual Classroom for entrepreneurship education.

The MOOC "Understanding EU-Russia Relations: Foreign Policy Actors, Institutions and Policy-Making" (2 ECTS) at the University of Tartu is open for registration. The registration deadline is 4 February 2021 at 22:59 (CET). The course is free of charge and fully online, running on the Moodle platform of the University of Tartu from 8 February to 14 March, 2021. Upon successful completion of the course, participants will be able to receive a digital certificate from the University of Tartu, which is worth 2 ECTS.