European higher education policy as a plastique palimpseste: understanding national visions for the European Universities Initiative

Journal article

Abstract:: Since 2019, the European Union has set out on the endeavour to create ‘European Universities’ through its latest flagship higher education programme, the European Universities Initiative. These ‘European Universities’ are transnational university alliances that have been given the ambitious task to ‘transform the higher education landscape in the European Union’. European Union institutions, member states, and these ‘European Universities’ have different visions and understandings of what this transformation implies and what direction it could take. This paper offers a novel conceptual framework, plastique palimpsestes, to explore how different and entangled national institutional contexts, historical perspectives, and higher education policy priorities configure the development of the European Universities Initiative. This study investigates the first two pilot phases of the European Universities Initiative through the analysis of policy documents and 70 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders at national and European level involved in the development of the initiative. This inquiry aims to provide an empirical and conceptual contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship in higher education, public policy, and Euro- pean studies.

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Language:: English
Keywords:: higher education

European Commission

European Universities Initiative

university alliances

European universities

member states

palimpsests
Pubs id:: 2107537
Local pid:: pubs:2107537
Deposit date:: 2025-04-08
ARK identifier:: ark:/29072/ora_40f1a5bd00844c459c6af05446edc2c4

Copyright holder:: Charret et al.
Rights statement:: © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

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