WS14 – Academics

In partnership with :

Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) : www.ulb.ac.be (english version)
Fondation Bernheim : www.fondationbernheim.be
European University Association : www.eua.be

Workshop presentation

The university was once reserved to a small minority of the population, and its major role was to educate and perpetuate a scientific, intellectual, administrative or economic elite. In Europe, and now in China, the number of university students has literally exploded. Society as a whole, the economy and the administration, and the services to businesses and individuals need increasingly educated people. This enlargement and spread of higher education implies first of all an increase in public and private schools. A global market of higher education is being formed, which the famous “Shanghai rankings” symbolises. The old ideology of temple of knowledge “autonomy” vis-à-vis political authorities as much as economic powers stands up poorly to analysis today.

Within the term “higher education”, tremendous differentiations are occurring between a small number of prestigious schools devoted to the preparation or reproduction of future elites and the leagues of schools in charge of providing society with the leagues of educated people it needs, with the resulting gap between students’ traditional aspiration for the status that their diploma will give them and the reality of their future professional and social integration.

Education is expensive. The dividing up of its cost between the public sector, the families, the students and the employers is a major political and social issue, even more so because the obtaining of a diploma no longer necessarily guarantees the hoped-for “return on investment”. Does the very structure of the university and of the teaching it provides, which has been greatly formed by history, see eye to eye with the needs of societies? In particular, does the way the subject matters are divided into disciplines prepare young people to take on the multifaceted realities of their society and their job? All this is the object of intense reflection as much in China as in Europe, where the “Bologna process” in response to the unification of job markets has tried to make diplomas homogeneous.

How do the academics themselves perceive these issues and their responsibilities today? Above and beyond the many inter-university partnerships that bind China and Europe, how are they integrated in their respective societies and how do they perceive the challenges?

This will be the guiding theme of the workshop.