The present edition of the ACA Newsletter – Education Europe closes another full year for the Academic Cooperation Association. What has happened in ACA in 2005?
ACA has organised two major conferences: “The other side of mobility” took place in Stockholm in June 2005, organised in cooperation with ACA’s three Swedish members, the International Programme Office, the Högskoleverket and the Swedish Institute. It dealt with the impacts of mobility on the mobile person. ACA’s Austrian member, the ÖAD, hosted the second conference of the year, “The Future of the University”, which was held in Vienna in December 2005. It tackled the reform needs of European universities by focusing on three central issues: funding, governance and the university’s environment.
Four European Policy Seminars were held in 2005. The first three – “What’s new in Brussels” (an update on recent European policy developments) in April, “The Admissions Challenge” on the admission of international students in July and “Between Babel and Anglo-Saxon Imperialism” on language policies and English language taught programmes in September – took place in Brussels and were accessible to a wider public. The final seminar was an on invitation only event. It took place in The Hague in November 2005 and focused on the role of national agencies in the new generation of EU programmes.
The lion part of the work on two major projects was carried out in 2005: Euro Data was a one-year project which aimed at producing data on student mobility into 32 European countries (the 25 EU countries, the four EFTA countries, and Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey) of a quality and degree of differentiation at present not available from any other source. The second major project of the year investigated the Perceptions of European higher education in third (non-European) countries, with a special focus on China, India, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico and Russia. Both projects were carried out in close cooperation with ACA members.
Two new books were published in the ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education: Opening up to the Wider World. The External Dimension of the Bologna Process was based on the presentations delivered at the ACA conference of the same title which was held in Hamburg, Germany, in 2004. On Cooperation and Competition II. Institutional Responses to Internationalisation, Europeanisation and Globalisation, was the second volume of a study coordinated by the Centre for Higher Education Policies Studies CHEPS.
Last but not least, the ACA Newsletter – Education Europe was completely overhauled and got its new, and final name. The secretariat would like to thank its former Communication project officer Wesley Teter - who is now working as a regional education advising coordinator for the US State Department, based at the Fulbright Commission in Berlin – for his excellent work.
These many other smaller projects have kept the ACA Secretariat busy in 2005, and the New Year will come with new projects, publications, seminars and an annual conference.
ACA would like to thank its members and friends for the fruitful and pleasant cooperation during the past year. We wish you a Merry Christmas, a happy New Year and a peaceful and relaxing holiday!
The ACA Secretariat
