Abstract:

French President Macron in his speech of 2107 presenting his vision of Europe beyond 2024 initiated a process of creating pilot initiative of European Universities. The main idea is to create international, inter-institutional powerful universities which would create new quality in world’s education and science. In two calls European Commission selected 41 alliances of 280 leading European universities. Each of consortia is supported by €5 million from Erasmus + programme and €2 million from Horizon 2020. During three years of the Alliances will build virtual campuses and will start joint education, initiate first steps in research and innovation together.

Each of the consortia defined their areas of interest in education, tools supporting education process, mobility and integration of students, academic and administrative staff of partner institutions. Awarded Alliances had to present their vision for the period of project realization and for three years after projects’ completion.

Co-teaching by several institutions seems to be a feasible, still difficult task. The real challenge, however, is to build effective governance structures for a virtual campus made up of the existing resources and structures of several large universities. A virtual university is to carry out in the future the same tasks as a full-time university in the field of student recruitment, service and education, research, development, innovation and perhaps investment.

An additional factor here will certainly be different academic and managerial traditions, different management models of partner universities, different legal models, language issue, various administrative tools and many others.

An extremely important issue will be the scope of the legal and financial autonomy of the new virtual university.

This article presents an overview of the philosophy and methodology of shaping governance strategies of pilot European Universities, with particular emphasis on the EURECA-PRO project. Paper presents proposed and tested structures’ schemes, entities, groups of stakeholders, relations with mother-institutions on predicted phases of European University campus construction process.

Keywords:

European University, Erasmus +, virtual campus, governance structure.