Conference Program

In times characterized by professional dynamism and daily “platformization”, European higher education is undergoing a profound transformation through cooperative programmes such as the European University Alliances, promoted within the “European Education Area”. Given that these programmes have been planned to foster inclusion, digitalization and transnational collaboration, this intertwined vision appears to be inspired by a more complex convergence of cooperation and control, creativity and standardization, that reshapes the very idea of the university as a democratic environment.

In this view, this paper explores the rhetorical and metaphorical solutions inspiring the discourse on collaboration, creativity, and control within the official factsheets of the European University Alliances involving Italian public universities. The paper analyzes these declarations with the aim to probe the most frequent programmatic patterns inspiring such academic alliances. As a result, the shared systemic challenges emphasize the joint relationship between institutional discourse and digital transformation, in a time universities are expected to lean on interculturality, cooperation, and social impact.

More specifically, the paper will focus on the role played by some Italian Universities within the international Alliances in which they are involved: University of Cagliari (EDUC Alliance), University of Naples Parthenope (SEA-EU Alliance), Sapienza University of Rome (CIVIS Alliance), University of Catania (EUNICE Alliance), University of Macerata (ERUA Alliance), University of Bergamo (BAUHAUS4EU). The qualitative analysis of the official declarations will help investigate the keywords of such cooperative strategies highlighted through shared rhetorical solutions and theoretical sociological patterns.

Through the theoretical analysis provided by Nicolas Dirks, Frank Furedi, Paul Virilio, Paul Bourdieu, and Jurgen Habermas, these alliances will be framed within the broader debate on the neo-liberal academia, the deification of safety, and the “weaponization” of emotions that Furedi interprets as a real academic drawback. These rhetorical patterns often reproduce the ambivalences of contemporary higher education: while promising open collaboration and creative exchange, they also embed mechanisms of bureaucratic control and normative convergence. In particular, the use of performative keywords (excellence, innovation, impact, quality) reveals the effort to pursue the goals of efficiency and accountability.

Given the theoretical lenses of the “social university” (Ferrarotti) and “civic university” (Dobson and Ferrari), the paper discusses how these alliances perform a communicative redefinition of the academic space, transforming universities into systems capable of developing a digital and intercultural ecosystem.

This transformation entails a potential loss of autonomy and local distinctiveness to achieve harmonization and shared governance, just to foster a reticular model of university.