Higher Education and Globalization in the Context of the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The competition of civilizations forced the European universities to adapt to the competition with the Chinese and American universities. European integration cannot advance without the collaboration between European universities. An answer to these challenges is the CIVICA project, the European University of Social Sciences, a consortium of the following universities: Bocconi University (Italy), Central European University (Hungary), European University Institute (European Intergovernmental Organization), Hertie School of Governance (Germany), The National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania), Sciences Po (France) and the School of Economics in Stockholm (Sweden). This experiment aims to become one of the European pilot universities, in the first round of applications for Erasmus+ in February 2019. The experiment takes into consideration the most important resource of a country: the human resource. The network of universities that are part of the CIVICA consortium will group approximately 38,000 students, 7,000 teachers and 3,000 people from the administrative apparatus. The London School of Economics is part of the CIVICA consortium, as an associate partner. At the Bucharest conference, the public presentation of the consortium and its objectives, the rectors of the seven universities set out to educate the future generations of professionals in social sciences, in order to solve the most pressing problems of the world. Creating a European identity is essentially the long-term, fundamental objective of the CIVICA consortium. In the context of this conference, we interviewed a few representatives of CIVICA, and their answers will be analyzed in this paper’s section dedicated to the results of the research.