Building bridges towards a shared future

The Arqus European University Alliance brings together the universities of Granada, Graz, Leipzig, Lyon 1, Maynooth, Minho, Padua, Vilnius and Wroclaw, nine longstanding comprehensive research universities who share extensive experience in joint projects and a common profile as internationalized institutions with deep regional engagement in medium-sized cities.

The Alliance’s name stems from the Latin term arcus/arquus, for arch, representing the strong foundations the consortium has laid since 2018 to build bridges towards a shared future, to respond to the grand global societal challenges and to advance towards deeper European integration. 

The principal ambition of the Arqus Alliance is the design, testing and implementation of an innovative model for deep inter-university cooperation, which will serve as the basis for a truly European campus fulfilling all the missions of a university for the twenty-first century. It was born as part of the European University Initiative launched by the European Union in 2017.

About the European University Initiative

Higher Education in Europe is at a turning point. In 2017 The European Council called on Member States to:

"strengthen strategic partnerships between higher education institutions across the EU and promote the establishment by 2024 of 20 “European Universities”, which would be bottom-up networks of universities across the EU, enabling students to graduate by combining periods of study in several EU countries and contributing to the international competitiveness of European universities”.

In 2021 the Council has stressed how the European University will contribute decisively towards achieving:

"the ambitious vision of an innovative, globally competitive and attractive European Education and Research Area, in full synergy with the European Higher Education Area, by helping to boost the excellence dimension of higher education, research and innovation, while promoting gender equality, inclusiveness, and equity, allowing for seamless and ambitious transnational cooperation between higher education institutions in Europe, and inspiring the transformation of higher education." 

The answer to this call was the European University Initiative that, with the first 2019 Call, resulted in the creation of 41 university alliances. Following the success of the first phase the Initiative is now an integral part of the Erasmus+ 2022-2027 Call that increased the number of alliances with a goal of 60 total alliances by 2025.