- Several processes of European cooperation, coordination and integration pertain to changes in the parameters of the primary activities of higher education institutions, teaching and research. In the current political language these processes are referred to as belonging to the “Europe of Knowledge” and to the efforts geared towards creating European areas of higher education and research. The systemic borders of the higher education landscape in Europe are in the process of being transcended and we are seeing the (partial) redrawing of such boundaries. Taken together the ongoing processes may represent shifts in boundaries between levels of governance, between policy areas and shifts in means of control over knowledge, and more specifically the knowledge produced, transmitted and disseminated within and by higher education institutions.
- These developments have long roots but are most clearly crystallised the last two decades. Higher education and its institutions are involved in a debordering (Kohler-Koch, 2005) process with a long term institutionalisation of a European dimension of teaching and learning, as well as academic research in Europe. This development has been regarded as transformative:
The European higher education area may be set to transform the European states’ higher
education institutions as fundamentally as the nation state changed the medieval universities
(Corbett, 2005, p. 192)
- Over time the European level has become the locus of complex interactions that connect various levels of knowledge governance, less as grandstand European integration than as many smaller, composite and intricate processes of change. At the same time conscious efforts of integration and coordination have gained considerable momentum over the past ten years. European higher education is in a period of experimentation and innovation, but also in a period where new initiatives and ambitions have had some time to settle, be challenged or blend with the already established practices of higher education. Hence it is a time when a possible transformation of higher education is not only a prediction, but also an assertion that can be supported or refuted by evidence. Concurrently, it is a potent area for empirically founded studies of whether such framework changing developments are indeed taking place and what implications can be detected.