The last 20 years have seen rapid transformations to higher education institutions (HEIs) across Europe and beyond, affecting cross-border circulation of ideas, knowledge production, people and practices. These trends – along with contingent circumstances such as economic downturns, pandemics, and wars – have generated multiple crises.

The transformations involved are complex and ambiguous in meaning. On the one hand, engaging with global discourses of teaching and research enables policy learning, shifting patterns of academic prestige, and facilitates research dissemination. On the other hand, these transformations increase managerial influence on academic practice. They also generate pressures on individual institutions and whole nations, for example through competitive university rankings, which are taken as a signal of excellence in both national and international arenas. Perceived geopolitical security threats and culture wars have eroded the meaning of academic freedom (e.g. in terms of what can be taught and researched) and have affected the formation of academic identities as well as academic mobility. 

The 2008 economic crisis and its ongoing effects have impacted on Higher Education systems, not least in the countries of the European South, where varied forms of privatization are seen as important for their survival. The Coronavirus pandemic provided impetus to further privatisation in the form, for example, of the digitalization of teaching and learning, especially in the context of the internationalisation of HEIs. As governments seek to respond to these crises by aligning Higher Education more closely with what are perceived to be global economic needs, for example through the European Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs), the sector is currently facing challenges around its purpose, as well as its relationship with the national states, its publics, and supranational agencies.   

This symposium will reflect on these changes, focusing specifically on the ways in which crises and transformations have been experienced in Sweden, England, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Italy, and Spain.    The aim of the symposium is to critically examine these developments, and to consider ways of responding to them. 

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