By Prof. Dr. Virginia Richter, Vice-Rector for Development

ENLIGHT brings together ten European universities to form a joint campus that excels through innovative and interdisciplinary teaching, physical, hybrid and virtual mobility, and by involving all those associated with the universities. Together with the social protagonists from the university cities, solutions are drawn up to meet today’s complex challenges and teaching methods are aligned with the requirements of the future.  

The content-based focal points of the alliance strongly overlap with the key areas of the University of Bern. This allows the University to showcase its research and teaching offerings in this circle of European partners. Ultimately, active participation in this alliance is a further step on a path to internationalization that establishes long-term international cooperative structures while also reinforcing its strong position locally.  

ENLIGHT is one of 50 European university alliances running at present, with a total of 430 universities involved. As a result, the European university landscape now finds itself at the beginning of a significant phase of transformation and modernization – one which the University of Bern will take an active role in thanks to its membership in ENLIGHT.  

As with all Swiss universities, the University of Bern is partially excluded from the major European research and education programs (Horizon Europe and Erasmus+). It is thus even more important to keep pace with these important developments through participation in an alliance, while also reinforcing its international visibility and appeal for students and researchers worldwide.  

Rapid integration on all levels 

The nine founder members of ENLIGHT – the Universities of Bordeaux, Groningen, Göttingen, Ghent, Galway, Tartu and Uppsala, the University of the Basque Country and Comenius University Bratislava – joined forces in 2019. Swiss universities were only offered a place in this EU initiative, which is funded via Erasmus+, three years later. 
After the University of Bern officially joined ENLIGHT at the end of 2022, work in 2023 initially focused on quickly getting up to speed with the ongoing discussions and bringing its expertise to the table in various activities. While our ENLIGHT partners submitted their funding requests as part of Erasmus+, the University of Bern submitted an application for partial funding at movetia. A requirement for this funding was a 40% contribution by the University. Approval of the funding was granted just before the end of the year, thus allowing us to play an active role on an equal footing with our partner universities.  

The University’s participation was established quickly and on various levels. Members of the University Executive Board were granted seats and votes in the governance structure and made an active contribution at the regular meetings. Experts from the University were assigned to the working groups and have already taken part in their first meetings in some cases, including the Digital Campus Group in charge of the joint course portfolio, the Mobility Taskforce and the Legal Expert Group. The University of Bern was also able to contribute at the Teaching & Learning conference. Staff capacities were created for the coordination and support of ENLIGHT activities. Students taking on a central role in ENLIGHT were actively integrated into the corresponding structures by the SUB from the outset. University members were informed about the cooperation possibilities within ENLIGHT as part of a kick-off event, faculty visits and a new online presence. 

Strength through good networks 

Initial experiences have shown that the University of Bern can enrich the alliance in a range of areas with its expertise, while the dynamics offered by the alliance also encourage it to set more ambitious goals and follow them more closely.  

The efforts made in the past year should begin to bear fruit in 2024. Existing cooperations will be further reinforced and expanded, with new ideas for cooperation with several ENLIGHT members put into practice. Students from Bern will be able to participate in ENLIGHT teaching activities in Uppsala, Bordeaux or Bratislava, for example.  
The University of Bern will take on the chair of ENLIGHT for six months in the coming summer, and will host the annual meeting in November 2024.