PHOTO CAPTION: Sonia Lehman-Frisch getting emotional after a speech given to her during her last EDUC Steering Committe meeting, in Drammen, June 2024. (Photo: Knut Jul Meland / USN)
Sonia Lehman-Frisch is leaving the pilot cabin of EDUC after completing her second term as Vice-President. But not before sharing her first-person account of the origin of the ambitious collective project that made EDUC accredited by the European Commission November 6, 2019, as one of the first European university alliances.
As a Professor of geography of Université Paris Nanterre (UPN), Sonia Lehman-Frisch was appointed Vice-President for International Affairs in September 2016 by UPN’s President of the time, Jean-François Balaudé. She started 4 months after the beginning of his second term because she wanted to finish the first draft of a book she was working on before taking on this new mission.
“I suspected that time for research might be scarce on this job, and I must say that the following years proved me right,” she says as she now is stepping down from EDUC and returning to the life of science at UPN.
Lehman-Frisch remembers the first year of her term as very busy:
“It was all about understanding the state of the international domain at UPN at the time, getting to know the internal and external stakeholders, mapping and meeting our international partners, and planning the development of our international office, of which I was also the director, fortunately supported by a great executive director,” she says
The timing was simply perfect for her when the French President Emmanuel Macron laid out his visions for av stronger and more unified Europe in his speech at La Sorbonne September 2017, and when the European Council, a few months later, asked the European Commission to start working on a very specific initiative to promote the making of half a dozen European Universities.
“You have to imagine the unique, bustling atmosphere that this speech sparked throughout all higher education institutions in Europe. While every single university had been striving to move away from a quantitative to a more qualitative approach of international relations by developing a small number of privileged partners for many years, the announced call for proposals by the European Commission suddenly pushed all universities to start talking with each other with the explicit shared purpose of doing just that,” she recalls.
Making friends
The race to become European “best friends” started at the beginning of 2018. In France in particular, it quickly became one of the main focuses of the Vice-Presidents (VP) for International Affairs Network, which was coordinated at the time by Pierre Van de Weghe, from University of Rennes 1.
Lehman-Frisch has a vivid memory of one particular meeting organized for VPs in Brussels in September 2018, where several members of the European Commission and their Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture were invited to present an update on the upcoming Erasmus+ call, which was expected to come out in the following weeks: “The discussions and questions raised by all the VPs attending the event made it clear that many French universities took this opportunity very seriously, in a quite cooperative spirit, I believe,” Lehman-Frisch says.
This was also the first time she met Sébastien Le Picard, who was also attending as Rennes 1’s VP for European Programmes, and who would become his university’s representative for EDUC when Pierre would leave his job a few months later. At that time, UPN had made the decision to embark on this European adventure for several months already. After many discussions with the President, his team of VPs, and the university’s bodies, the first contact to several partners was made: UPN’s President wrote to the Rectors of Potsdam, Germany, (on March 9th, 2018) and of Masaryk, Czech Republic, (on March 23rd) in addition to a few more to explicitly offer to discuss a potential reinforced collaboration in the Erasmus+ framework. He soon received positive letters from both.
“In parallel, we had several intense phone and face-to-face discussions with Rennes 1’s President, David Alis, and his Vice-President for International relations, Pierre Van de Weghe, to assess the opportunity for two French universities to be on the same European alliance. We soon agreed it would be an asset, as our institutions were complementary in many aspects; one predominantly Social Sciences and Humanities and the other predominantly hard/experimental sciences; one within and the other outside the capital region, et cetera, and that we had a common interest for the universities of Potsdam and Masaryk,” Lehman-Frisch says.
On May 29 the Rector of Potsdam University accompanied by his Vice-Rector for Internationalization, Florian Schweigert, as well as the Director of International Office, Regina Neum-Flux, and a Professor involved in UPN’s joint degree in French law-German law, came to visit for the first time.
“I remember vividly this meeting in the large I room on the 8th floor of our Administration Building, the hosts sitting across the table from our guests to let them enjoy the panoramic windows on the Northern neighborhoods of Nanterre and beyond, all of us a little cautious and formal as this was our first encounter – how could we imagine that we would soon get to know each other so well,” Lehman-Frisch recalls.
Crystallisation
That day, however, things were not so clearly settled yet: “We mentioned our wish to include University of Rennes 1 and possibly Masaryk University, and Potsdam confessed they had been talking with another French university and wished to associate their Polish partner. We parted, hopeful that this would take us somewhere,” she remembers.
The summer months were dedicated to thorough reflection, multiple bilateral discussions by phone or by video-call, and UPN’s President took the opportunity of a long-planned official trip to the Czech Republic on June 29 to talk face-to-face with Masaryk’s Rector, Mikuláš Bek, whom Lehman-Frisch was to meet online soon later, along with his Vice-Rector Ivan Maly and the Director of the International cooperation centre, Jan Pavlik.
The Alliance started to crystallise on July 26, when the Vice-Presidents of Potsdam, Rennes 1 and Lehman-Frisch met physically in Nanterre, with the Polish Vice-Rector planning to join online.
“That day is still fresh in my mind. I remember it was the very last day before our university closed for the three-week summer break, a French practice that Florian Schweigert was to joke about a lot in the next few years,” she says.
A terrible heatwave had been hitting Europe and the UPN campus was already yellow and dry: “The rooms we had booked were so suffocatingly hot that we could hardly move and we were sweating our minds out. Florian’s white shirt had a red square on its back at the end of the day, you see the UPN’s red chairs we were sitting on left an irrevocable imprint on him – a good omen, I thought,” she recalls.
Despite this particular context, they managed to stay on point and were able to start laying out the common grounds and the next steps to build the joint application. And a few weeks later, on August 18, Masaryk finally announced that they would gladly join the group.
Once a month
At the end of August, there was formed a fine alliance of five, big enough to qualify to the expected Erasmus+ call, but deliberately few in numbers: “We wanted to start small in order to get stronger before getting bigger,” Lehman-Frisch says.
From then on, the group decided to meet physically at least once a month on a new campus: “We were convinced that we needed to build our alliance on mutual knowledge and trust,” she says.
The group consisted of Florian Schweigert and Cornelia Schmidt for Potsdam University, Pierre Van de Weghe and Elise Gautier for the University of Rennes 1, Ivan Maly and Jan Pavlik for Masaryk University, the Polish Vice-Rector, and Charlie Roullet and Lehman-Frisch for Université Paris Nanterre (this group was later complemented with Alessandra Carucci, Daniela Ghiani and Maria Elena Aloi for Cagliari University, and with József Betlehem, István Tarrósy and Péter Árvai from University of Pécs).
There were meetings in Potsdam (Germany) in October, Poland in November, Rennes (France) in December, Nanterre (France) again in January 2019, and Brno (Czech Republic) in February – with a couple of additional meetings, including the 100th Anniversary of Masaryk University on January 2019.
“In between each physical encounter, we organized a number of intermediate video calls on different topics; but remember this was before the tremendous improvement of digital tools and practices forced upon us by the COVID pandemic, and imagine all the delayed and interrupted discussions this implied at the time,” Lehman-Frisch says.
The alliance name came out of a collective brainstorm that started in the November meeting and continued throughout the month of December: “We all wanted a name explicitly referring to our truly European raison d’être – E; I suggested the play on words “UniverCity” – UC, an implicit reference to the Aristotelian ideal city to insist on the idea of a close academic community, but deliberately open to Europe; the term “Digital” – D – was the Rennes 1 team’s idea, which highlighted one of the strengths of our project with virtual mobility schemes for students in mind, and allowed to complete a four-letter acronym, which we immediately and enthusiastically adopted: EDUC”, Lehman-Frisch says.
In parallel they collectively decided to entrust the coordinator’s role to the University of Potsdam: “All the other partners were happy that they proposed whereas none of us felt we had the capacity to take it on at the time,” she says.
The bombshell
All the hard work provided by this small group, mostly composed of vice-presidents or vice-rectors and internal office directors or European project officers, seemed to proceed seamlessly into the writing of the application that was to be submitted February 28, 2019.
Then a bombshell hit unexpectedly: “In early December, we learned that our Polish partner was bailing out on us to join another alliance, putting us at great risk since five was the minimum number of partners for eligibility to the programme. We did not have time for panicking long, though, and the four remaining members immediately decided to look into our good partners,” she says.
The partners discussed their options while together in Rennes. Masaryk proposed the University of Pécs, Hungary, one of their old and close partners, and UPN proposed the University of Cagliari, Italy.
Lehman-Frisch remembers clearly the first phone call with Alessandra Carucci, the Vice-Rector for International Relations, right next to the group meeting room in Rennes’ international office: “I explained to her the big picture of our project, and she quickly convinced me that her university would make a wonderful partner and was ready to help as much as they could in the remaining time before submission of the application,” Lehman-Frisch says.
In the next few days, the result was an alliance of six partners, which officially was sealed on February 19 with the signature by the Presidents/Rectors of the first memorandum of understanding for the EDUC consortium in Brussels.
Bottom-up
One day before the official deadline, on February 27, the University of Potsdam uploaded the EDUC application on the European platform.
“It already was a wonderful victory in itself, and I can still feel the huge relief and happiness of completing on time this seminal step together,” she recalls.
In just a few months, the partners had managed to build an alliance of six universities from the West to the East and South of Europe, with a balanced and democratic approach.
“We had started to build trust between ourselves by meeting intensively and by systematically visiting each other’s campuses. But we were also acutely aware of the risks resulting from the top-down method used to build the project, which was imposed on us by the large scope and short time frame of the call: we knew that the challenge ahead was big and that we needed to implement our planned activities by developing a bottom-up approach to grow the alliance outside the international relations sector and into the general education, research and administration arenas of our universities,” Lehman-Frisch says.
Since the shared will was to develop the alliance whatever the results of the application, the partners continued to plan their meetings with no delay to visit the two new partners’ campuses and get ready to implement the first activities: in Cagliari May 16-17, in Nanterre again July 10, and in Pécs November 16.
Overwhelmed
The European Commission announced the results of the Erasmus+ call for European Universities June 26: “We were overwhelmed with joy when we learned that EDUC was among the 17 laureates, which we duly celebrated together in a Paris restaurant just before our Nanterre meeting”, she remembers.
But the real kick off took place on November 6 in Brussels. That day, EDUC was born as one of the pioneering European alliances supported by the European Commission.
“So much has happened in the years that followed. It has been a tremendous challenge to learn how to cooperate with one another in so many areas despite our many differences, while striving to get EDUC firmly rooted in each of our institutions. But I am convinced that it has been well worth the efforts for all our universities,” Lehman-Frisch says.
As she looks back on her eight years as a vice-president, there is no doubt that EDUC is one of the projects to which she contributed the largest share of time, energy, and passion, and also one of her favourite accomplishments: “I am sad to leave the pilots’ cabin of EDUC, sad to leave the large, fun and friendly EDUC family that I enjoyed so much to see again and work with at every steering committee meeting. But I am confident that our alliance has become mature enough to continue to grow in strength. And I firmly intend to closely follow its development and to participate in as many activities as I can as one of its faculty members,” she says.
