Footnotes-of-the-Month

After all the gloomy news about higher education cuts, and increases in tuition fees in many countries, comes brighter news that the European Union has pledged to create one million new research posts over the coming decade. The announcement has come from European Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn  in  Horizon 2020, which outlines plans to create one million jobs in research and innovation over the next seven-year research programme.

Professor David Marquand, a long-time supporter of the Europaeum, has recently released a new, highly acclaimed book called The End of the West: the Once and Future Europe , published by Princeton University Press. David Marquand, a former member of the British Parliament and former Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, argues that Europe's problems stem from outdated perceptions of global power, and calls for a drastic change in European governance to halt the continent's slide into irrelevance.

Exploring the baffling contrast between postwar success and current failures, Marquand examines the rebirth of ethnic communities from Catalonia to Flanders, the rise of xenophobic populism, the democratic deficit that stymies EU governance, and the thorny questions of where Europe's borders end and what it means to be European. Marquand contends that as China, India, and other nations rise, Europe must abandon ancient notions of an enlightened West and a backward East. He calls for Europe's leaders and citizens to confront the painful issues of ethnicity, integration, and economic cohesion, and to build a democratic and federal structure.

The End of the West shows that the continent must draw on all its reserves of intellectual and political creativity to thrive in an increasingly turbulent world, where the very language of "East" and "West" has been emptied of meaning.

The Europaeum is one of the sponsors of a high-level event in Paris June 23rd - 25th run by the New York Review of Books, after providing crucial logistical support and office space for the organising NYRB foundation in the months leading up to the event. The event brings together some of the world's leading intellectuals and academics in honour of the ideas and work of Tony Judt, former professor of European Studies at New York University. His last perhaps most political book, Ill Fares the Land, has received rave reviews, as did his last major work, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, written during his period of severe illness suffering from terminal motor neurone disease. It is planned to include senior figures from Paris 1-Sorbonne at the event. The distinguished list of speakers include Professor Ronnie Dworkin from NYU/Oxford who spoke at the Liberalisms conference co-supported by the Europaeum last year, Chris Patten who is a Europaeum trustee and chancellor of the University of Oxford, and Jacques Rupnik, Director of Research, CERI, Sciences-Po, Paris, who debated recently in Oxford with our Secretary-General on the development of the ECE region. Click here to view the conference Programme

In a recent feature piece written for the Financial Times, veteran financier and philanthropist, George Soros, who has done so much to support scholars across the globe, enters the deepening crisis over the future of the Eurozone.

Lord Patten, who is one of the Europaeum's Trustees, and who as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, has also been a supporter of the association down the years and has chaired events for us for time to time, has just been appointed to yet another key post.

The growth of university graduates throughout the world has increased dramatically over the past decade, but perhaps no other country has had such an explosion of graduates as China. Thus, in 1998, China produced just 830,000 graduates a year - in 2010 that number grew seven times to over six million students. This was the result of an ambitious plan to bolster higher education in China that saw the exponential growth of colleges and universities throughout the country.

EUROCLIO, History teachers association, has just announced another in a series of Historiana Seminars - this time on the theme Rights and Responsibilities, to take place July 7-10th, 2011 in Riga, Latvia.The series of Historiana Seminars took off in November in the Hague, the Netherlands with a successful event attend

The first of an exciting new series of high-profile lectures, run under the title of Humanitas Lectures for Oxford and Cambridge took place in Oxford on November 29th, given by Lord Norman Foster, one of the world's leading architects, on the theme of urban sustainability.

Higher Education systems across the world have been undergoing radical changes over the past decade, in response to many factors - new ways of teaching and learning, technological advances, increased  competition to attract the best, international demands and increasing applications, the global recession and now dramatic cuts in public funding.

We have always warned that ranking league tables is  always inevitably flawed and, at best, a useful snapshot. But as they are produced and so widely scrutinised, we would like to offer an update from three recent tables, of course focussing on our own partner members.

One of our new Europaeum Trustees, H.E. Karel Schwarzenberg, set up a new political party in the Czech Republic last year, after resigning from the Government. The party recently had some considerable success in its first ever test at the poll. The new TOP 09 party represents a break with the Civic Democrats which have dominated the conservative agenda for years. But this year TOP 09 received 16.7% of the vote in the May general election, giving them a powerful voice in the political scene of the country.

The Europaeum Review, commissioned to mark our 15th anniversary, encouraged the association to focus more graduates and on doctoral students - often forgotten in the spare of international meetings - and certainly our graduate workshops, regular summer schools and colloquia now place greater emphasis on doctoral students. This was the theme of a recent European Universities Association meeting at the Freie Universität Berlin, attended by more than 200, to discuss how universities should develop strong, research-based doctoral programmes.

European universities continue to feel the adverse effects of the global financial crisis, with no sign of improvement coming soon.

From time to time, we have featured results from various league tables of university performance. Whether we like these or not, they are here to stay. Indeed, some have argued that the Europaeum needs to be study league tables when considering potential new members. Now a new higher education index has been developed by the British Council with the Economist Intelligence Unit, which assesses a country's higher education institutions based on how "open" they are to international collaboration.