Tying it all together. Excellence, mobility, funding and the social dimension in higher education

By Bernd Wächter, Queenie (K.H.) Lam and Irina Ferencz (eds.). Bonn: Lemmens, 2012. ISBN 978-3-86856-006-0. Internationalisation and international mobility, inclusiveness, excellence and funding are themes high on the higher education agenda. There is no shortage of literature on them, and there are conferences galore devoted to them. But they are usually dealt with in isolation, which leads to a distorting ‘single issue’ view of higher education. This book – and the conference it emerged from – tried to avoid this mistake.
The book looks at the ‘inter-relationships’ between the four themes. Can a socially inclusive and responsible university also achieve academic excellence? Can only rich universities be truly international, or do universities become rich through internationalisation? Is excellence possible without strong funding, or does it presuppose it? These are only some of questions which this volume addresses. The ten contributions developed out of presentations given at the 2012 Annual Conference of the Academic Cooperation Association (ACA). The production of this book, as well as the above-mentioned conference, represent the outputs of the project The European university in the 21st century. Reconciling the social dimension, excellence, internationalisation and sustainable funding (EUSEIF), supported by the European Commission in the framework of its Lifelong Learning Programme.