The STYX project: Towards a status

STYX FINAL EVENT – Collective Convergence Towards a Single Institution: Condition or Prerequisite? 

➜ Tuesday 26 March 2024, 10:00-13:00 CET, online

 

Context of knowledge-sharing session

Open to all, especially to those who work on the question of status for European Universities.

The question of the legal status of European universities involves several intertwined folds. The analysis of the legal fold includes the appropriateness and convenience of the chosen legal instrument, the existing legal frameworks, other regulations and bylaws, tax policies, national or other constraints for the staff careers, estimated running costs, etc., that are mostly specific per member state. The other fold concerns phenomena that emerge as relevant and crucially important: the boldness of the institutions, the ambition of the alliance, the sociological acceptance of the initiative by the main stakeholders and the willingness of the regional and national administrations. These factors are key in EUt+’s ambition of strong integration and deep and meaningful systemic transformation. This trajectory is conditioned by the appropriation and the general willingness by actors to move towards a collective and primary identity. This way, the legal entity becomes, not an empty house, but our ultimate common home. The path to this ambition is informed by the sociological understanding of internal engagement and change management.

At this point, two questions show up as the most relevant facets of the Legal status project set up:

On a strategic level, what are the drivers for creating a general affectio societatis towards a single European University, whose common brand and strategy will take precedence over the members’ existing identity, supported by the legal entity-ies that reflect the governance and management of joint activities in EUt+? 

On a managerial level, what are the conditions for harmonising processes and methods, and how to balance them with subsidiarity, so that everyone feels a unique experience in every campus? 

Without claiming to give a definite answer to these questions, the objective of this EUt+ STYX knowledge-sharing session is to provide synthetic feedback on our work and share the insights on these issues of common interest for Alliances.

Practical information

Tuesday 26 March 2024 
10:00-13:00 CET
Online, registration required 

Schedule 

10:00-10:10  Foreword by Tine Delva, DGEAC

10:10-11:25  Status and appropriation: Synthetic feedback from the project analysis

• - General structure and focus of the project
• - A statute for common activities: analysis and feedback
• - Common processes: translating macro into micro
• - A preliminary sociological analysis of processes appropriation

11:25-11:35  Break

11:35-12:50  EUt+ approach: singularity, idiosyncrasy or typicality? Confronting experiences and perspectives

• - Harmonising processes: Which way to success? The efficiency of sharing practices to trigger transformation.
• - Change management: Top-down or bottom-up? Balance between efficiency of steering bodies and subjective appropriation.
• - Creation of a legal status: How to include a legal entity into these processes for acceptance? 
• - Empowering participants: How to enable action through capacity building; how co-construction can be an appropriation method?

12:50-13:00  Conclusion

Leaflet

Material

Please find below slides used for the presentation:

Slides accessible here

The STYX Project 

The European University of Technology (EUt+) has explicitly stated its ambition to fully merge the nine member universities. STYX is addressing the global question of the implementation of the legal tool, services, and processes to advance this trajectory towards this global merging. It is shown that a single overarching structure would be very tricky to implement successfully, as already experimented by various university systems in Europe and abroad. In terms of its institutional trajectory, in this project, EUt+ will focus its efforts on two levels, within the project:

• The definition of common governance bodies and processes, with an increasing integrative trajectory;
• The setting up of an EGTC providing, initially, common services for the partners for what is most valuable for the Alliance: our data (data, data access and data management). 

We are proceeding similarly to the European Union, which was built through the pooling of critical resources and balanced governance bodies with progressive integration. A deeper explanation of the levels explained before is:

Embedding processes

The first level is to ensure that the various processes (decision-making, resource allocation, implementation) necessary to implement the project throughout our institutions become truly embedded within the day-to-day routine of the members. It is essential that EUt+ operations come to be not “one more thing to do”, but on the contrary are so fully and intimately integrated to our core mission that they make one with them. This cannot happen without a thorough work on processes. 

Experiment with the EGTC structure

The second level is to experiment with legal structures to pool part of the services, which was decided to share at the level of EUt+. As an answer to these two needs, the project has therefore two key aspects: 

1. Defining documentation and decision processes and flux within EUt+ bodies and with the partners, and proposing a trajectory to enable their evolution over time.
2. Setting up an EGTC focused on services

All results and analyses will be shared with policy-makers as well as other universities. This page aims to share public results. 

STYX RESULTS

This section hosts all public deliverables of the project STYX. The content of these deliverables represents the views of the authors only and is their sole responsibility. The European Commission and the Agency do not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.
This initiative has received funding from the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme under grant agreement 101114599.

WP 1 – Project management and dissemination 

D1.1 – D1 – Report to the European Commission regarding current legal statuses and their use for the EUt+ project (coming soon)

WP 2 – Sharing processes: feasibility study and roadmap

D2.1 – D2 – Preliminary study for the design of processes and flows that structure EUt+ (sensitive)
D2.2 – D3 – Detailed description of processes and flows that structure EUt+ (sensitive)
D2.3 – D4 – General principles of processes, juridical, technical and sociological analysis

WP3 –  Setting-up an EGTC with a clear service focus

D3.1 – D5 – Analysis of EGTC status in the EUt+ partner countries and level of involvement and contribution of the relevant authorities involved
D3.2 – D6 – Installation guide for EGTC (coming soon)
D3.3 – D7 – Roadmap for common services provision (coming soon)