EUT+ Dublin Week 2024

TU Dublin is hosting over 100 colleagues from the eight European members of the alliance this week, with events taking place across the University’s campus in Grangegorman.  Warmly welcomed to Dublin by John O’Connor, Strategic Lead EUt+ at TU Dublin, and Dr Deirdre McQuillan, Project Team Leader EUt+, the delegation will collaborate on an ambitious plan to create a unified European University with nine campuses across Europe. 

This is the third year TU Dublin has hosted an EUt+ working week, but the first time it has welcomed new colleagues from Universita degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (UNICAS) in Italy to Grangegorman. “Attendees will be very busy fine-tuning deliverables and project plans for a range of tasks, but there will be opportunities for our visitors to explore what our University and Dublin have to offer, with TU Dublin Conservatoire performances and visits to tourist favourites such as the Guinness Storehouse organised for our guests” affirmed John O’Connor.

EUt+ is one of 50 alliances participating in the European Universities Initiative, which aims to cooperate with higher institutions from all across Europe to benefit their students, staff, and society. After a three-year pilot phase, EUt+ set out its strategy for the next phase of the European Universities to realise its ambition to rethink the role of universities of technology in society, while building a new institution on a European scale with a global footprint.

Speaking at the opening plenary session, Timothée Toury, Secretariat General of the Alliance, emphasised the impact of the new higher education package presented at the end of March by the Vice-President of the European Commission Margaritis Schinas and the Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Iliana Ivanova. The three initiatives tackle the legal and administrative barriers to partner universities setting up competitive joint degree programmes at Bachelor, Master or Doctoral levels.

The busy Dublin agenda includes conferences, workshops, and informal working sessions where colleagues will collaborate on a range of matters related to delivering high-quality education and conducting cutting-edge research. Plenary sessions include masterclasses about the European curricula framework for cluster development and drafting deliverables for KPI implementation.

The highlight of the week will be an event hosted by the EUt+ Ideas Institute think tank entitled “What European Values?” featuring renowned policy experts and academics who will come together to offer their perspectives on the values that underpin the heart of the European project in the spirit of debate and open discussion. The EUt+ Ideas Institute was established to examine the features of sedimented conceptual ground and to allow discussion to take place in the context of a university, which has a fundamental remit and the role of posing questions without conditions. This must include an examination of the professed European values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, rule of law and human rights.