After several months of intensive collaborative work, the AcrossEU members submitted their new 2024 proposal last january.  We are now confidently waiting for the results from the Commission to be delivered at the end of June.

In our Mission Statement we stress our role in implementing the future of higher education for our communities and their surroundings.

United by the conviction that complex challenges require a robust, collaborative approach, we aim to foresee tomorrow’s challenges from a holistic, multifaceted perspective. As crucial local actors, we are proud of our role in educating the next generation, upskilling our communities, producing cutting-edge research and enabling the smart specialisation strategies of our regions.
As a collective, AcrossEU embodies the archetype of European universities: strategically positioned in medium-sized cities and facing similar regional issues. Our institutions boast complementary strengths in both education and research. Together, we amplify our potential and impact on global and local levels.

AcrossEU is deeply aware of the profound societal and environmental challenges ahead of us. The accelerating pace of technological innovation, epitomised by the advancements in artificial intelligence, intersects with pressing environmental issues like climate change. The situation becomes even more intricate due to the resurgence of geopolitical tensions in Europe and its surroundings, massive human displacements, and ongoing public health crises. Such a complex context, which mirrors the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, demands a holistic and interconnected
understanding.
To address these challenges, our universities must play an active role. They need to be aware of the major trends transforming education, research and innovation and cultivate their capacity to foresee emerging needs of the European regions we represent. Through a series of collaborative workshops and dialogue with our university communities, we acknowledge that our traditional approaches must be reassessed to embrace global
complexity and foster collaborative innovation.

This implies that we need to:

• Educate our students to become critical thinkers and agents of change in a rapidly evolving socio-economic environment and changing global educational standards requires the evolution of our curricula and teaching methods.
• Conduct research and find innovative solutions to emerging complex challenges, and ensure that our discoveries and breakthroughs create significant and lasting positive change, we need not only move beyond the boundaries of traditional academic fields within the rigid confines of our academic structures, but also engage with regional stakeholders which are pivotal in influencing them.
• Keep the pace and remain connected to global transitions, our universities, located in the peripheries of Europe, need to make an additional effort to surmount geographical, socio-economic and cultural barriers of talent attraction and inclusive internationalisation.