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Vienna, 22 May 2011

ACA Annual Conference 2011: The excellence imperative. World-class aspirations and real-world needs.

Theme

ACA’s Annual Conferences have become a synonym for high-quality information, analysis and discussion on current policy and practice-related issues in the area of international higher education. ACA Annual Conferences address higher education representatives, such as rectors, vice-rectors, faculty and international relations staff, as well as policy-makers and practitioners from government departments, international institutions, non-governmental organisations and think tanks. They offer opportunities for learning, exchange and networking at a high level. 

The 2011 Annual Conference, organised in collaboration with ACA's Austrian member organisation OeAD, brought together a group of leading thinkers to address, from a wide range of perspectives, the central question of how the quest for excellence—in all its complexity—is playing out in Europe and beyond. The two-day conference took place in lovely Vienna on 23 and 24 May, and drew over 300 participants. It was preceded by a welcome reception and a social programme on 22 May.

Programme

Pre-conference day: 22 May 2011

 

   14:00 – 16:00   

Registrations

16:30 – 18:30

Guided walks – Choice between:
> Vienna at First Glance
> Vienna Advanced

18:30 – 20:30

Welcome reception

 
1st conference day: 23 May 2011

 

           08:30              

Registrations

09:15

Welcome addresses
Hubert Dürrstein, CEO, OeAD
Rolf Tarrach, ACA President / Rector, University of Luxembourg

09:45

Opening keynote
Georg Winckler, Rector, University of Vienna

10:30

Coffee break

11:00

Session 1: The ‘concept’ of the world-class university

Chair: Bernd Wächter, Director, ACA
What is a world-class university?
Jmail Salmi, Tertiary Education Coordinator, World Bank

European higher education: where do we stand on excellence?
Adam Tyson, Head of Unit Higher Education, European Commission, DG Education and Culture
How to build a world-class university?
Patrick Aebischer, President, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne
World-class Universities and Rankings: a fatal relationship?
Ellen Hazelkorn, Vice President, Research and Enterprise, and Dean of the Graduate Research School, Head, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology

13:00

Lunch

14:30

Session 2: Excellence beyond research
Chair: Hanneke Teekens
, Director of Communication, Nuffic
All Real Teaching is Meeting: Excellence and the Dialogical principle
Walter Grünzweig
, Professor of American Studies, TU Dortmund University
The responsible university
Sjur Bergan
, Head of the Department of Higher Education and History Teaching, Council of Europe
The liberal arts concept
Marijk van der Wende, Founding Dean, Amsterdam University College
Dare to be different! Rankings and the dangers of conformity
Sijbolt Noorda
, President, Association of Dutch Research Universities

16:30

Coffee break

17:00

Dialogue
Higher education for the 21st century
Helga Nowotny, President, European Research Council (ERC)
Rolf Tarrach, ACA President / Rector, University of Luxembourg

18:00

End of 1st conference day

20:00

Conference dinner

 
2nd conference day: 24 May 2011

 

            09:00              

Session 3: Excellence and internationalisation

Chair: Erich Thöni, University Representative International Relations, University of Innsbruck
Nine misconceptions of internationalisation
Hans de Wit
, Professor of Internationalisation, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
Must excellence be in English?
Wolfgang Mackiewicz, President, European Language Council
The other face of global mobility: higher education serving students from migrant communities
Dirk van Damme, Head, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), OECD

10:30

Coffee break

11:00

Parallel Workshops

Workshop 1: Quality in mobility: a fata morgana?
ChairIrina Lungu, Policy Officer, ACA
SpeakersAnnette Julius, Head of the Northern Hemisphere Department, DAAD; Arthur Mettinger, Vice-President, University of Vienna

Workshop 2: Internationalisation at home
ChairBernd Wächter, Director, ACA
SpeakersHanneke Teekens, Director of Communication, Nuffic; Wesley Teter, Regional Director, EducationUSA, U.S. Department of State

Workshop 3: Does language matter?
Chair: Queenie Lam, Project Officer, ACA
Speakers: Wolfgang Mackiewicz, President, European Language Council; Esko Koponen, International Education Advisor, University of Helsinki

Workshop 4: The responsible university
Chair: Laura Rumbley, Deputy Director, ACA
Speakers: Neil Kemp, Visiting Fellow, Institute of Education, London; Ulrich Grothus, Deputy Secretary-General and Director for Strategy and Projects, DAAD

13:00

Lunch

14:30

Feedback from the workshops

15:15

Too few and too many: the impact of demographics on higher education in the 21st century

Wolfgang Lutz, Director, Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences / Founding Director, Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID, WU) / Leader, World Population Program (IIASA) / Professor of Applied Statistics and Director of Research Institute on Human Capital and Development (WU – Vienna University of Economics and Business) 

16:00

Final panel discussion
The lessons learned

Chair: Bernd Wächter, Director, ACA
Ulrich Grothus, Deputy Secretary-General and Director for Strategy and Projects, DAAD
Eva Egron-Polak, Secretary-General and Executive Director, International Association of Universities
Marijk van der Wende, Founding Dean, Amsterdam University College
Neil Kemp, Visiting Fellow, Institute of Education, London

17:00

Goodbye
Bernd Wächter, Director, ACA

Speakers

Patrick Aebischer

Patrick Aebischer was born in Fribourg, Switzerland. He trained as an MD (1980) and a Neuroscientist (1983) at the Universities Geneva and Fribourg in Switzerland. From 1984 to 1992, he worked at Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island, USA) as a member of the Faculty of the Division of Biology and Medicine. In the fall of 1992, he returned to Switzerland as a Professor of experimental surgery at the Lausanne University Medical School (CHUV). In 1999, Patrick Aebischer was elected President of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL).

Sjur Bergan

Sjur Bergan is Head of the Department of Higher Education and History Teaching of the Council of Europe. He represents the Council of Europe on the Bologna Follow Up Group and Board and chairs the Bologna group on Qualifications Frameworks.  He was a member of the editorial group for the Council’s White Paper on Intercultural Dialogue.  Sjur Bergan is series editor of the Council of Europe Higher Education Series, the author of a book on Qualifications: Introduction to a Concept as well as of numerous articles on various aspects of higher education policies.  His latest publication is Speaking across borders: the role of higher education, co edited with Hilligje van’t Land of the International Association of Universities.

Hans de Wit

Hans de Wit is professor of Internationalisation and Special Senior Policy Advisor International at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. He is also a private consultant. He is the co-editor of the ‘Journal of Studies in International Education’ (Association for Studies in International Education/SAGE publishers).

He has held several positions, including director of the Office of Foreign Relations, vice-president for International Affairs and senior adviser International at the University of Amsterdam, in the period 1986-2005, and director of International Relations at Tilburg University in 1981-1985. He has a bachelor, master and PhD from the University of Amsterdam.

He has written several books and articles on international education and is actively involved in assessment and consultancy in international education, for organisations like the European Commission, World Bank, The Dutch Flemish Accreditation Organisation NVAO, IMHE/OECD, and ESMU. He has undertaken Quality Reviews of a great number of institutions of higher education in the framework of the Visiting Advisors Program (VAP), IQRP, IQR, Eurostrat, and is involved in a pilot project for a European label on internationalisation for degree programs, for the Dutch Flemish Accreditation Organisation (NVAO) and the European Consortium for Accreditation. Together with Uwe Brandenburg of CHE he recently wrote a polemic essay: ‘the end of internationalisation’.

Hans de Wit is founding member and past president of the European Association for International Education (EAIE). Currently he is, among other positions, member of the Board of Trustees of World Education Services (New York), the TOEFL Board, and the Advisory Board of the Open University of Catalan.

Hubert Dürrstein

At present Hubert Dürrstein is CEO of the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD-GmbH). Since 1999, he has also served as Professor for Forest Engineering at the BOKU-University (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences) in Vienna and was Dean (2000-2001) of the section (faculty) of Forest and wood sciences, Vice-Rector (2001-2003) and Rector (2003-2007) at BOKU-University.

Prof. Dürrstein received his PhD in forest sciences at the University of Munich, Germany in 1987; from 1989 to 1999 he was an international consultant in the field of forestry and land use planning in Switzerland.

Eva Egron-Polak

Eva Egron-Polak was educated in the Czech Republic, Canada and France. Having studied French Literature, Political Science and International Political Economy, her post-graduate research focused on early stages of European Union policy in higher education. For almost 20 years she served in various senior positions at the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) prior to becoming the Secretary General of IAU in 2002. Her last position at AUCC was as Vice-President, International. 

As Secretary General of IAU, an independent, global association of universities and associations of higher education institutions based at UNESCO in Paris, Eva Egron-Polak is engaged with many of the most pressing policy issues in higher education – internationalization and intercultural learning, quality of cross-border higher education, provision of equitable access to and success in higher education, changing nature of institutional autonomy and the contribution of higher education to sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals, among others. Since her appointment at IAU, she has focused on expanding the Association’s convening role, consolidating the Association’s capacity as a clearing house of information on the systems and institutions of higher education around the world. Under her leadership IAU launched regular and systematic global surveys on internationalization, created a LEADHER grants programme for professional development and North-South and South-South collaboration and developed an advisory service to review and assess institutional internationalization strategies (ISAS) using experts from around the world. Eva Egron-Polak is a member of many committees at UNESCO, the European Commission, OECD and others. She serves as a board member at Mykolas Romeris University in Lithuania. She has written and presented many papers on higher education topics.

Ulrich Grothus

Ulrich Grothus, who was born in 1952, is the Deputy Secretary-General and Director for Strategy and Projects of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He obtained a Master’s degree in Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1976. He then worked as a journalist before joining the International Division of the former West German Rectors Conference in 1982. He has been working for DAAD since 1988, first as spokesman and head of the president’s office. Starting in 1991, he has been consecutively director of all three DAAD program directorates. In between, he served as director of the Paris office from 1998 to 2000 and of the New York office from 2004 to 2008. Since 2010 he has been member of ACA’s Administrative Council.

Walter Grünzweig

Walter Grünzweig is Professor of American Literature and Culture at TU Dortmund University and currently Dortmund’s Associate Rector of Academic Affairs and International Student Exchange. He is adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Binghamton and Canisius College.

A native Austrian, he obtained his Bachelor Degree at Ohio University and his master and doctorate at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. At Graz, he also received his Habilitation in American Studies and Comparative Literature. Prior to coming to Dortmund, he was Professor of American Studies at TU Dresden University. He had guest professorships and lecturerships at universities in Austria, Germany, Italy, Senegal, Slovenia, and the United States.

Walter Grünzweig specializes in 19th century U.S. literature and culture, transatlantic relations and international education. He has initiated approximately 50 bilateral exchange programs with the U.S. at four European universities, directed international summer programs for 14 years and served as European resident director for many semester and year programs. In 2010, he received the Ars Legendi Prize for excellence in teaching in higher education awarded by the German Rectors Conference and the Stifterverband für die deutsche Wissenschaft.

Ellen Hazelkorn

Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Vice President Research and Enterprise, and Dean of the Graduate Research School, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland; she also leads the Higher Education Policy Research Unit. She is Consultant to the OECD Programme on Institutional Management of Higher Education (IMHE), and associated with the International Association of Universities (IAU).

Professor Hazelkorn has worked/is working with universities/university associations around the world, including New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Jamaica, Sweden and Serbia. Ellen is a member of the Irish National Digital Research Centre Management Board and the International Advisory Council of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. She was a member of the Committee for the Future Sustainability of the Dutch Higher Education System (2010), and the review teams for the state of Victoria, Australia (2009) and Catalonia, Spain (2010) and forthcoming for Wroclaw, Poland (2011) for the OECD Review of Higher Education and Regional/City Development. Ellen has been appointed chairperson of the first Teaching Evaluation Exercise, School of Art and Design, Aalto University. She was Rapporteur and lead author for the EU Expert Group, Assessing Europe’s University-based Research (2010), and a member of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Foresight Working Group [Ireland].  She is also a member of the Editorial Boards of Higher Education Management and Policy (OECD) and Higher Education Policy (IAU). She has been nominated to the Board of the United Nations University.

She was awarded a BA and PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Kent, Canterbury, respectively, and has been a visiting fellow at London Metropolitan University, OECD, and the University of Melbourne.

Ellen has authored/co-authored many articles, policy briefs, books and book chapters on politics, society and the cultural industries, and on higher education policy, including Developing Research in New Institutions (OECD, 2005), and Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education: The Battle for World-Class Excellence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Annette Julius

Dr Annette Julius is the Head of the Northern Hemisphere Department of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Bonn as well as of DAAD’s Berlin Office. She studied English and Russian Language and Literature at the University of Cologne, the University of Dundee in Scotland and the Pushkine Institute of Russian Language in Moscow. From 1992 to 1995 Annette Julius did a PhD in Slavonic Studies, with several research stays in Moscow. After completing her PhD, she worked six years for the Catholic German scholarship foundation Cusanuswerk.

In 2001, Annette Julius joined the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD in Bonn, where she was first the Head of Section for “Policy Planning and Coordination” and in 2005 became the Head of Division for “Strategy and Cross-Sectional Programmes”. Since November 2006 she has been responsible for the DAAD Office in Berlin, and since September 2007 for the Northern Hemisphere Department in Bonn.

Neil Kemp

Neil Kemp has contributed to a range of education and training projects in over twenty countries and has lived and worked for long periods in South and East Asia including eight years each in Indonesia and India. His career has involved several posts with the British Council: Country Director in Indonesia and Sri Lanka and in the UK as, Director of Science and Technology and Director of Education UK Marketing.

Neil is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London, and his research interests include national and institutional policies relating to the internationalisation of higher education; the role of the independent sector in higher education, particularly in developing countries; and international student mobility. He also manages his own international education consultancy and his clients have included UK and foreign universities, UK government, the Education UK Partnership; CIRIUS Denmark; the Swedish Institute; Arengufund, Estonia; UK-India Education and Research Initiative; UK HE International; and Education New Zealand.

He has a number of part-time posts including as a Member of the Advisory Board, London School of Commerce, the Council for Education in the Commonwealth and Board Director of Open University Worldwide. Over recent years he has been a member of the UK government’s Education and Training Export Group, the Higher Level Steering Group for the PMI, the Education UK Board and was a Trustee of the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.

Esko Koponen

Esko Koponen is International Education Adviser at the Rector’s Office of the University of Helsinki. His responsibilities include the development of programs in English and international joint and double degree programs. Previously, he has worked in the Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) with European and other educational cooperation programs and in the University of Kuopio with study-abroad and international student advising. He is the author of two wiki guides: one on the design of programs in English and the other on joint program agreements. He has chaired and facilitated numerous workshops and sessions on teaching and programs in English both nationally and abroad. Esko is a former SAFSA (Study-Abroad and Foreign Student Advisors) board member of the EAIE. He holds a Master of Arts degree in Translation Studies from the University of Joensuu, Finland.

Queenie Lam

Kwan Heung (Queenie) Lam joined ACA as a Project Officer in October 2010. Her immediate past position is that of research assistant at the International Center for Higher Education Research (INCHER) and the International Study Center (ISC) of the University of Kassel, where she was involved in research activities, partnership development and student services for international study programmes. Queenie holds a Master in Communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is due to complete an International Master’s degree in INCHER, Kassel in 2011 with a thesis looking at the “web-presentation” of universities. She also studied at Georgetown University in the United States as an exchange student. For four years, Queenie was Executive Officer within the Personnel Office of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she assisted with the international recruitment of academic staff, and later the Office of Academic Links where she supported the development of international academic partnerships and became interested in the growing ties between Chinese and European higher education institutions.

Irina Lungu

Irina Lungu is Policy Officer at the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). At ACA, she is currently coordinating the ENPMOB study, which researches national and European-level policies on student and staff mobility and the elements of convergence and/or divergence between the two levels. Irina is also presently involved in the IMPI project, which aims to build a toolkit of indicators for mapping and profiling the internationalisation strategies and processes of European HEIs. Her past activities at ACA include her contributions to the study “Mapping mobility in European higher education” (previously referred to as EURODATA II) as co-editor and the co-authorship of ACA’s Handbook of International Associations in Higher Education (2009). Irina, who is a Romanian national, studied International Relations and European Studies at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and obtained a Masters degree in European Politics and Policies at the Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Kassel, Germany.

Wolfgang Lutz

Wolfgang Lutz is Founder and Director of the newly established Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, a collaboration between IIASA (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis where he leads the World Population Program), the Austrian Academy of Sciences (where he is director of the Vienna Institute of Demography) and the WU-Vienna University of Economics and Business (where he is Professor of Applied Statistics). He is also Professorial Research Fellow at Oxford University (Oxford Institute of Ageing, James Martin School) and Affiliated Professor at the College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok). Between 1998-2001, he served as Secretary General of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP).

His main interests are in population forecasting, modeling of human capital formation and population-development-environment interactions. Prof. Lutz studied philosophy, statistics and demography at the Universities of Munich, Vienna, Helsinki and Pennsylvania. He holds a PhD in demography from the University of Pennsylvania and a second doctorate (Habilitation) from the University of Vienna. In 2008 he won the European Research Council’s Advanced Investigator Grant to carry out a study on ‘Forecasting Societies’ Adaptive Capacities to Climate Change’. In 2009 he won the Mattei Dogan Award of the IUSSP (International Union for the Scientific Study of Population) and in 2010 the Wittgenstein Prize, the highest science prize in Austria (awarded to a social scientist for the first time).

He has published 21 books and over 200 refereed articles and book chapters (including seven contributions to Science and Nature, and 21 to Population and Development Review). He is Editor of the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research and Editorial Board Member of: Asian Population StudiesEuropean Population StudiesCanadian Studies in PopulationDemographic Research, and Journal of Population Ageing. He is corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Member of the Committee on Population of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Wolfgang Mackiewicz

Wolfgang Mackiewicz is director of the Language Centre and Honorary Professor of English Philology at Freie Universität Berlin (FUB). He is the president of the Conseil européen pour les langues / European Language Council (CEL/ELC). He was chair of the SIGMA Scientific Committee on Languages (1994-5), and went on to coordinate a total of eight EU development and network projects, among them five thematic and dissemination network projects in the area of languages (Socrates-Erasmus Programme; 1996-2007), and the DIALANG project for the development of diagnostic tests in 14 European languages on the Internet (Phases 2 & 3, 1999-2003). He is currently coordinator of an LLP/KA2 network for enhancing motivation for language learning. He has been involved in the implementation of Bologna reforms at all levels. Over the past 15 years, he has been advisor to both the European Commission and the Council of Europe in a number of capacities. He chaired the expert groups on the Humanities in FP7 (2006-7), and on Assessment of University-Based Research (2008-9), launched by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research, and he is the chair of the Expert Advisory Group on Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities in FP7. He was rapporteur of the European Commission’s High Level Group on Multilingualism (2006-7), and is chair of the Business Platform for Multilingualism, launched by the Directorate-General for Education and Culture in September 2009, and sits as a Commission expert on the OMC working group “Languages for Jobs”.

Wolfgang Mackiewicz studied English and German at FUB and at the University of Leeds, and wrote his PhD thesis on Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”. His research focuses on European language policy and European language education policy. He holds three honorary doctorates (Babeş-Bolyai – Cluj Napoca; Université Charles de Gaulle – Lille 3; Vrije Universiteit Brussel). In 1997, he was awarded the order of merit by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Arthur Mettinger

Arthur Mettinger is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Vienna, and this university’s Vice President for Educational Programme Development and Internationalisation. His latter mandate covers issues such as the Bologna reforms, new media in higher education, institutional didactic development, teacher education, and student and staff mobility. He obtained his Master and Ph.D. degrees in philology from the University of Vienna, where he also completed his Habilitation.

Arthur Mettinger is a member of the European Language Council’s European University Language Policy Group, he has served as an advisor in the framework of the SOCRATES I and II programmes, he is a past president of the UNICA network, and he is one of the founders of the UNICA Bologna Laboratory. He has also served several terms as a member of the UNICA Steering Committee. Arthur Mettinger has held several posts in the University of Vienna, including Deputy Head of International Relations and Director of the Centre for International Interdisciplinary Studies. His language skills include German, English, Russian, French, Spanish and Chinese.

Sijbolt Noorda

Sijbolt Noorda is currently president of the Association of Universities in the Netherlands and chair of the Dutch Foundation for Education. Until 2006 he was president of the University of Amsterdam. He is a graduate of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Universiteit Utrecht and Union Theological Seminary/Columbia University New York.

He serves (and has served) on various boards of institutions for health care, public broadcasting, fine arts and culture, information technology and publishing, university quality assessment and war memorials.

Sijbolt recently completed service as a Board Member of the European University Association (EUA), and in Germany he is a member of the Akkreditierungsrat. He is also an advisor to universities in Austria, Catalonia and Germany, and lectures on university strategies, international cooperation and educational policy.

Helga Nowotny

Helga Nowotny is President of the European Research Council, Europe’s most reputational funding organization for frontier research. She is also Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board University of Vienna, and member of the Holberg Prize Academic Committee, along with many other academic committees. Professor em. of ETH Zurich in Social Studies of Science, she was Director of the Collegium Helveticum and of “Society in Science: The Branco Weiss Fellowship”.

Helga Nowotny has published widely in Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS) and in time studies.

For more details you can visit Prof. Nowotnys Homepage: http://www.helga-nowotny.eu/

Laura Rumbley

Laura E. Rumbley is Deputy Director of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). She joined ACA from the Boston College (BC) Center for International Higher Education (CIHE) in the United States, where she was a research associate and an adjunct faculty member, teaching a graduate course on “International Policy and Practice in American Higher Education”. Laura holds degrees from Georgetown University, the SIT Graduate Institute and Boston College, all in the areas of international relations and international education. In addition to experience as a university administrator in international progamming, she has authored and co-authored a number of publications on topics ranging from academic salaries in comparative perspective, curricular issues in U.S. study abroad, and internationalization in Spanish higher education. Most notably, she co-authored (with Philip G. Altbach and Liz Reisberg) the foundational document for the 2009 UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, Trends in Global Higher Education: Tracking an Academic Revolution. A former U.S. Foreign Service Officer, Laura currently serves as a reviewer for the Journal of Studies in International Education and is active in EAIE.

Jamil Salmi

Jamil Salmi, a Moroccan education economist, is the World Bank’s tertiary education coordinator. He is the principal author of the Bank’s Tertiary Education Strategy entitled “Constructing Knowledge Societies:  New Challenges for Tertiary Education”.  In the past seventeen years, Mr. Salmi has provided policy advice on tertiary education reform to many governments and higher education institutions all over the world Mr. Salmi is a member of the Governing Board of the International Institute for Educational Planning, the International Advisory Network of the UK Leadership Foundation for Higher Education, and the Editorial Committee of OECD’s Journal of Higher Education Management and Policy.  Mr. Salmi’s latest book, published in February 2009, addresses the “Challenge of Establishing World-Class Universities”.

Rolf Tarrach

Dr. Rolf Tarrach is Rector of the University of Luxemburg and President of the Academic Cooperation Association.  Dr. Tarrach is professor of theoretical physics, and has served in that capacity at the universities of Valencia and Barcelona and is honorary professor at the University of Saint Petersburg. Many organizations have taken advantage of his breath of knowledge and his command of languages. He is a former president of the CSIC (the Spanish Scientific Research Council), and a former member of EURAB, EUROHORCS, ESOF2004 (and 2006, and 2008). The EU Commission has availed themselves of Dr. Tarrach’s services at various times. He is currently on the EUA Council and chairs the committee of international experts EU2015 (Spain).

Hanneke Teekens

Hanneke Teekens is member of the board of directors of Nuffic (the Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education). Nuffic is an independent, non-profit organization based in The Hague. Nuffic supports internationalization in higher education, research and professional education in the Netherlands and abroad, and helps to improve access to higher education world wide. Within Nuffic Hanneke Teekens is responsible for the directorate Communication, overseeing all aspects of communications, including the Netherlands education support offices (Neso’s).

Before joining Nuffic Hanneke Teekens worked at the Hogeschool and University of Amsterdam and the University of Twente. She held positions as a teacher and researcher, manager and consultant and worked in many parts of the world. Previously she was director of the Socrates National Agency and the  National Structure for Erasmus Mundus in the Netherlands. Hanneke Teekens has published on various aspects of international education. Her latest contributions have focused in particular on ‘Internationalization at Home’.

Currently Teekens is chair of the board of the Association for Studies in International Education (ASIE), a group of organizations whose mission is to encourage international education and research and who publishes the Journal of Studies in International Education.

Hanneke Teekens studied education and history and did her post-graduate studies at the University of Leyden. She was an exchange student to the US. 

Wesley Teter

As one of 15 Regional Educational Advising Coordinators worldwide, Mr. Teter represents the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. In partnership with the Educational Information and Resources Branch, his primary task is to provide leadership and expertise in educational advising and marketing issues to 40 EducationUSA advising centers, Public Affairs Sections and Consular Sections at U.S. embassies in over 20 countries in Europe.

Erich Thöni

Born in Innsbruck in 1946, Erich Thöni studied economics and social science at the London School of Economics and the University of York. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1973 and earned his Habilitation in 1982. Since 1987, he has been a full professor of economics at the University of Innsbruck.

Erich Thöni’s career has been marked by an international commitment. He has been a visiting Fulbright Professor at the University of New Orleans, he has held further visiting professorships in Italy and France, and he has lectured worldwide. He was a Vice-President of the Aus-trian Exchange Service from 1996 to 2009. He is the ASEA-Uninet Coordinator. He is the University of Innsbruck’s Representative for International Relations, and the coordinator of many of its academic exchange schemes.

Erich Thöni is a corresponding member of the Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung in Hannover (Germany). He has published more than 150 books, articles and other pieces of scholarly work.

Adam Tyson

Adam Tyson is Head of Higher Education and Erasmus at the Directorate General for Education and Culture at the European Commission. He is responsible for developing EU higher education policies, overseeing the implementation of the Erasmus strand of the Lifelong Learning Programme and preparing proposals for the future.

In his previous post as Head of Policy and Interinstitutional Coordination, he was responsible for overseeing the development of policy in all areas covered by DG Education and Culture and for ensuring good relations with the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the other EU Institutions.

In previous posts in the Commission, Adam has worked on issues such as combating poverty and social exclusion, fighting discrimination on a wide range of grounds and been responsible for Communication and Speechwriting for the Commissioners for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. Before moving to the Commission, Adam spent ten years in Brussels working for the UK Government in the fields of labour and social affairs.

Dirk van Damme

Dirk Van Damme currently is Head of CERI (Centre for Educational Research and Innovation) in the Directorate for Education at the OECD in Paris.

He holds a PhD degree in educational sciences from Ghent University and is also professor of educational sciences in the same university (since 1995). He also was part-time professor in comparative education at the Free University of Brussels (1997-2000) and visiting professor of comparative education at Seton Hall University, NJ, USA (2001-2008). His main fields of study and research have included comparative education, lifelong education and higher education policy.

He has been professionally involved in educational policy development as deputy director of the cabinet of the Flemish Minister of education Luc Van den Bossche (1992-1998), as general director of the Flemish rectors’ conference VLIR (2000-2003), as expert for the implementation of the Bologna Declaration for Ms Marleen Vanderpoorten, Flemish Minister of education (2002-2003) and as director of the cabinet of Mr Frank Vandenbroucke, Flemish minister of education (2004-2008). In 2004 he served also as executive director of the RAGO, the organization of public schools in the Flemish Community of Belgium.

Besides that, he has served as an expert for several national and international organisations. In recent years he has served as board member of QANU (the quality assurance agency for the Dutch universities), as member of the scientific board of AQA (the Austrian Quality Agency in higher education), as expert member of the OECD review of schooling in Scotland, and as member of the Committee for the external evaluation of the University of Luxembourg.

His current interests focus on educational policy, innovation in education, comparative analyses of educational systems, new developments in the learning sciences and knowledge management in education.

Marijk van der Wende

Marijk van der Wende is the founding Dean of Amsterdam University College, an international liberal arts & science college established jointly by the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Universiteit van Amsterdam.

She is professor of higher education at the VU University Amsterdam, honorary professor at the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS), at the University of Twente and (vice) President of the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education of the OECD.

Marijk van der Wende obtained Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Science of Education from the University of Amsterdam, and a PhD from Utrecht University. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) and formerly held positions at Nuffic and ACA.

Bernd Wächter

Bernd Wächter is the Director of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA), a consortium of European and global agencies which support international cooperation in higher education. ACA is a think-tank which promotes innovation and internationalisation in higher education. Bernd was born in Giessen (Germany) and studied at the universities of Hull (UK), Giessen and Marburg (Germany).  He lives in Brussels (Belgium) and is married to Thora Magnusdottir, a delightful lady from Iceland.

Bernd’s career has been focused on international higher education. In his first post, at the University of Kassel (Germany), he devised international degree programmes in cooperation with universities abroad. He later joined the British Council, before becoming the Director of the international office of the Fachhochschule Darmstadt. Moving on to Germany’s internationalisation agency DAAD, he became the head of this organisation’s European section. He subsequently became Director of Higher Education in the Brussels Socrates Office, with overall responsibility for the Erasmus Programme in Europe. In 1998, he took up his present post as the director of ACA. Bernd has published widely on international matters in higher education, and he is a frequent speaker at European and international education conferences. He is the editor of the ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Higher Education.  He also works, as an expert advisor, for many international organisations.  

Georg Winckler

Prof. Georg Winckler studied economics at Princeton University and at the University of Vienna, PhD 1968. Since 1978 he has been Professor of Economics and since 1999 Rector of the University of Vienna (reelected 2003 and 2007). From 2000 to 2005 he was President of the Austrian Rectors’ Conference. From 2004 to 2007 he was a member of EURAB (European Union Research Advisory Board). Prof. Winckler was Vice President of the EUA (European University Association) from 2001-2005 and President of the EUA from 2005-2009. Since April 2008 he has been a member of ERAB (European Research Area Board) and, since February 2009, Member of the PEOPLE Advisory Group, European Commission, Brussels.

Venue

Universität Wien

Dr.-Karl-Lueger-Ring 1
1010 Wien
AUSTRIA

Partners

Co-organised by OeAD