Innovative Ideas and Academic Realpolitik: Building Global Competence Development into a European University Alliance

This work-in-progress innovative paper outlines the development of a recently adopted policy on multilingualism and multiculturalism to enhance global competence in engineering education within one of the first European University Alliances (EUA), comprising nine universities from nine European Union countries. The policy represents a creative and ambitious response to not only the call to embed such competencies in curricula but also to invite all stakeholders in the alliance to become agents of change in order to leverage existing linguistic and cultural assets in all their work. In terms of content, the policy builds on and extends a rich foundation of established scholarship on the development of intercultural, plurilingual, and global competence in engineering education and fills a gap in current educational practice by operationalizing these concepts in the context of a EUA. Applying complex systems theory, the paper describes how the policy's development, endorsement, and planned implementation reveal the complex interactions among multiple stakeholders within the EUA's organizational ecosystem and its constituent institutions. By highlighting the policy's potential to catalyze adaptive change and foster resilience within the system, as well as to inspire actors outside the Alliance, the policy not only addresses immediate educational needs but also anticipates the challenges of engineering education and practice in a world characterized by cultural and linguistic diversity, and confronts a reality in which such diversity is not universally celebrated as a beneficial resource, despite the European Union's motto of “united in diversity.” The policy is further supported by an innovative guide for implementation, offering practical activities for individual growth, collaborative engagement, and community enhancement, embodying the policy's comprehensive approach to fostering global competence through multilingualism and multiculturalism. While the content of the policy is well aligned with the explicit goals of the Alliance and the broader European Union project ethos of which the EUAs are a part, the policy is deliberately general in its description of its agenda to allow for flexibility in responding to the different local contexts, challenges, resources, and priorities of the Alliance's partner universities, none of which have a policy as ambitious as that of the Alliance. While the policy is closely linked to and must be seen in the context of the emergence and partly unpredictable future development of the Alliance, the built-in non-linearity of its implementation makes it vulnerable to factors at play within the Alliance that could effectively nullify the implementation of the policy or reinforce negative feedback loops that serve to maintain the status quo at partner universities. While the trajectory of the policy demonstrates the importance of initiatives at both the individual and group levels, the realization of the policy and its prescribed practices ultimately depends on political decisions within the Alliance and within the educational leadership of the European Union, where an agreed vision for the future of EUAs has yet to crystallize.