Europe as opportunity: How Europeanisation changed Ghent University in the 1980s and 1990s

Historians as well as sociologists of higher education by now agree that European supranational policies and processes of European integration dramatically changed European universities during the last quarter of the 20th century—often calling this a process of “Europeanisation”. But how and when did this Europeanisation start, which ideas and ambitions for Europe did it entail, and what did the turn towards Europe do to universities, their priorities, self-image, personnel, and research activities? This article explores how new ideas about Europe changed Ghent University in the late 1980s and up to the mid-1990s, when enthusiasm for supranational European funding opportunities rapidly took hold within this Belgian university. It reveals that the “discursive Europeanisation” that took place at this institution from the start relied on an idea of intra-European competition and on practices of corporate branding. When in 1987, the European Commission launched the Erasmus programme, Ghent University’s administration immediately framed participation in European schemes as a unique opportunity to make the university more competitive in a European higher education landscape. During the following years, the university-wide actions that were built upon this future of competitiveness transformed both power relations within the university and its institutional mission. Europeanisation not only (a) strengthened, expanded, and professionalised the university’s central administration, but also (b) recast the university’s mission as preparing students for the European Single Market, and (c) positioned research within a European epistemic framework.