Il rettore John McCourt alla guida dell'Alleanza Europea ERUA

Lesbo (Grecia), 5 novembre 2025 - La leadership dell'European Reform University Alliance (Erua) prosegue nel suo percorso di rinnovamento dinamico. Nel corso dell'ERUA Summit 2025, in corso presso l’Università dell’Egeo sull'isola di Lesbo, si è tenuto questa mattina il passaggio di consegne ufficiale tra la rettrice della Mykolas Romeris University, Inga Zalenienė, e il rettore dell'Università di MacerataJohn McCourt, nuovo presidente del Consiglio dei rettori dell'Alleanza. Al fianco del nuovo presidente, in qualità di vicepresidente, sarà Eduard Mühle, rettore della European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder). Insieme guideranno Erua nella prossima fase di crescita, collaborazione e innovazione, con l'obiettivo di contribuire alla costruzione di un panorama universitario europeo sempre più aperto, inclusivo e creativo.

Nel suo intervento di insediamento, McCourt ha pronunciato un discorso intenso e programmatico, sottolineando lo spirito collegiale che caratterizza l'Alleanza.

It is both a great honour and a great responsibility for me to become, for the coming year, your ERUA Chair.
Allow me to begin by thanking Inga for her dedication and inspiring leadership over the past year. I will do my best to follow in her footsteps.

The role of Chair is to be primus inter pares — first among equals — and I will be relying on the wisdom and support of my seven fellow rectors, as well as on the energy and creativity of our wonderful ERUA community — our students, researchers, professors, and administrators — who together give life and meaning to this alliance.
I look forward to working closely with each and every one of you, and with Arnaud, whose leadership as Rector of our coordinating university remains is vitally important.

Our alliance seeks to grow and to strengthen itself in what are, undeniably, difficult times. Yet I believe that together we can respond with conviction and imagination to the challenges that face us.

In the coming year, our focus will be on laying the groundwork for the long-term future of our alliance — continuing to build the vision, the organizational structures, the relationships, and the shared sense of purpose that will sustain us.

ERUA is unique in its focus on the humanities and social sciences, in its desire to be a catalyst for reform and for change in each of the communities in which our single universities are located. It is unique also in its determination to turn its geography — our presence on the edges of Europe — into a competitive edge, into a strength.

In his poem The Second Coming, the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

Looking inwards from the edges, today we may worry that the centre is once again not holding — but we also believe that the centre can hold, and must hold, when the voices from the peripheries are heard and brought more fully into focus and into play.

What others might see as a weakness — our distance from the traditional centres of power — we must turn into a strength. Through our shared policies and through the mechanisms of our legal entity, we can and must transform the edge — in the sense of a distant periphery — into a cutting edge that can help carve a vision of our common European future.

And there could be no better place to reflect on that than here, in the Aegean — at once the edge of Europe and the place where Europe began. The Aegean reminds us that edges can be places of both meeting, exchange, and transformation — spaces of exchange, of learning, and of renewal.

As a scholar of James Joyce — who, in Ulysses, celebrated “the Greeks, and the Jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe” — I find it especially moving to assume the chair of this alliance here in Greece, a country whose literature, philosophy, and spirit were among Joyce’s deepest sources of inspiration.
He turned again and again to the Greek world for models of transformation and self-discovery. In one novel, Ulysses, written in exile between Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he combined elements from Dublin, Trieste, Austro-Hungary, Gibraltar, to form a cosmopolitan vision of Dublin that was as much a vision of the future as a portrait of the present. The same Joyce, arrived in Trieste in 1904, a penniless migrant only to be arrested and spend his first night in jail there. Episode 17, Ithaca: “Because at the critical turning point of human existence he desired to amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and international animosity. He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating these conditions?”

Joyce could well be the patron saint of Erua.

Like Joyce, we too seek to move between the ancient and the modern, the local and the global, between the edges and the centre — and to read our European world from its margins.
In many ways, that is what we in ERUA are doing: reading on the edge.

We understand that the periphery is not only a physical location but also a cultural vantage point — a place from which to observe, question, and critique a globalised world that too often takes its own centre for granted.

Coming myself from Ireland — once seen as an outpost on Europe’s western fringe but now, thanks to European cooperation, very much at its heart — I know from experience the transformative potential of the European project.
Much of Europe’s vitality lies precisely in its regions — in the smaller cities and territories where our universities are rooted. It is there, in the peripheries, that growth, sustainability, reform, experiment, and inclusion can and must take shape most powerfully.

But if we as Erua are to achieve these aims, we must become more concrete.
It has not been easy to get to where we are — to create a functioning structure, a true working alliance. We should be proud of what we have achieved but also very aware of how much we still have to do. What matters now is delivery — tangible results, visible progress, and measurable impact.

We need to accelerate, to make ERUA more operational, more visible, and more cohesive.
Our work must be measured in the opportunities we create for and with students, in the partnerships we forge, and in the innovations we deliver together.
Only by turning our ambitions into realities will we ensure the sustainability of this alliance.

This also means reforming our governance.
We need clarity of structure and function — between the Board of Rectors, the Steering Committee, and our Management and Vice-Rectors’ Committees.
Our new Secretary General must be given the back-up not just of a Project Manager but also of a small dedicated secretariat, focussed on the alliance and providing coordination, continuity, and internal communication. This would help us to act faster and with greater coherence.

We must also think beyond the life of the current project: sustainability cannot and will not depend solely on EU funding. We need to map our strengths and align them with external funding opportunities while leveraging our shared identity to attract new partners.

ERUA must also be a catalyst for social change, helping each of our universities to engage more deeply with their local realities, linking universities and wider social communities. This is how we demonstrate real impact.

We will advance our joint degrees, such as the one on migration — a theme that combines research, ethics, and pedagogy with direct social relevance. We will work to reinforce our research clusters, and promote social entrepreneurship, ensuring that ERUA’s initiatives translate into concrete, transferable outputs for all our universities.

We, like all the other alliances, must prove our distinct value. That means showing clear outcomes for students, staff, and regions. We must demonstrate how ERUA contributes to employability, innovation, and social cohesion through the humanities and social sciences. Yes, we will do it to satisfy the European commission but more than anything we will do it for the benefit of our University communities and the territories that are our homes.

We will also work more strategically across the alliances network: forming partnerships, sharing best practices, and pooling expertise — including with STEM alliances and the world of work.

That means: collaborating on interdisciplinary research in sustainability, digital ethics, and AI governance; developing joint courses and micro-credentials linking data, technology, and society;
and building partnerships with employers, public institutions, and cultural organisations that prepare our graduates to combine technical literacy with critical, creative, and ethical thinking.

We are in a time of huge technological change — some, rather hyperbolically, refer to it the age of Artificial Intelligence — that challenges higher education to rethink its role. Employers’ expectations are clear: AI literacy is now a core skill; critical thinking must be redefined for the AI era; ethics and responsible use of technology must be embedded across curricula; and, more than ever, we must nurture human-centred abilities — communication, creativity, collaboration, empathy, what some people call “the relationship edge”.

ERUA’s humanistic and social orientation positions us to explore how the digital and the human can evolve together — not in opposition, but in partnership.

In this spirit, I was struck recently by a book by my colleague Arianna Fermani, Aristotele Manager. Her message is both timely and timeless: leadership — whether in business, government, or academia — demands phronesis, practical wisdom — the capacity to unite thought and action, reflection and decision, in the service of meaningful praxis.
That, too, is our challenge in ERUA: to move from vision to practice, from ideals to implementation, from philosophical purpose to managerial clarity.

Our future depends on our capacity to cooperate, to govern effectively, to deliver results, and to remain faithful to our shared European values — academic freedom, inclusion, and democracy.

Together, let us ensure that ERUA continues to be a space where ideas cross borders, where edges meet and enrich the centre, and where we help shape a truly human, European future.