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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

In his classic introduction to The History of the University in Europe since 1945, Swiss historian and sociologist Walter Rüegg (2010) predicted that, after the Bologna reforms of 1999 would officially come into effect in 2010, European universities would all

apply the Bologna process and elements of Europeanization as independently and thoughtfully to their own environment and the world around them as the predecessors of the top American universities did when they adopted European models (p. 30).

Fifteen years later, this prediction reads not only as naïve and Eurocentric in itself—it also comes about forty years too late. By 2010, many universities in Europe already had three to four decades of experience with European funding schemes and networking programmes. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, supranational (European) initiatives launched by the Commission of the European Communities, UNESCO, or the Conference of European Rectors (CRE) began to impact universities across the European continent and beyond.

Recent sociological and historical research indicates that this emergence of supranational European policies in research and higher education significantly shaped European universities from the late 20th century onward (see also the Introduction to this Special Issue). However, the initial period in which universities first encountered and helped form ideas of a European Higher Education or Research Area remains largely understudied. Institutional histories tend to mention European integration in the 1980s and 1990s only in passing (e.g., for Belgium, Coussement, 2023; Engberts, 2025), while sociologists of education often focus on top-down policies and on the late 1990s and 2000s. Consequently, the crucial decades of the eighties and early nineties—when university administrators, academics, research staff, and students first engaged with pan-European initiatives and began (co-)constructing an openness to Europe—remain insufficiently explored.

Just like the other articles in this Special Issue, this article addresses this gap in the literature on the early “Europeanisation” of universities by tracing how one institution—Ghent University (UGent) in Belgium—turned toward European ideas and supranational policy initiatives (Corbett, 2005). Drawing on previous studies of “discursive institutionalism” and “discursive Europeanisation” (Baltaru, 2018; Barbehön, 2016; Kazanoğlu, 2021; Schmidt, 2008, 2017), Europeanisation is here understood as a discursive process: the production, circulation, and institutionalisation of meanings about “Europe” and “European-ness”. Europeanisation occurs when references to “Europe” become increasingly central in how actors frame issues, justify decisions, and imagine the future of the university (regardless of how Europe is defined).

In this piece, I use this understanding of Europeanisation to ask three concrete research questions. (1) When, how and why did references to “Europe”, “European integration” and a “European future” increase at Ghent University? (2) Which ideas, meanings, and ambitions for the university were linked to these ideas of Europe? (3) What effects did this process of Europeanisation have on the university’s ambitions, personnel, and research activities—how, in other words, did discourse change the university? Together, these questions allow me to investigate the Europeanisation of universities not merely as “bottom-up” policy uptake or “top-down” disciplining. Rather, this paper conceptualises the Europeanisation of universities as a process of meaning-making through which university actors co-constituted “Europe” as a horizon and used their ideas about Europe as means to legitimate institutional change.

The article is based on archival research into ca. 650 boxes and folders from the Archives of Ghent University in Belgium. It draws in particular on a survey of ca. 160 documents from the Archives of the Internationalisation Services (containing letters, policy briefs, evaluations and other materials in relation to internationalisation actions), as well as seventeen documents about the communication strategy of the university, which together reveal how the university imagined its relationship to the European Communities and European competition, as well as how it projected its institutional mission and ambitions. In addition, I surveyed 50 speeches by rectors and students available in the Ghent University Year Reports and the repository of rectoral speeches, as well as 140 university magazines published by the University Communication Services between 1986 and 2000 to check how meanings and discourses pinned on Europe were articulated and embedded in everyday practices at UGent during the 1980s and 1990s.

Overall, this material reveals that what I call “discursive Europeanisation” enabled actors inside Ghent university not only to articulate particular visions of “Europe” and European integration, but also to promote new understandings of what the university should become. Inside Ghent University, the central administration’s projection of a future of intra-European institutional competition was used to (a) strengthen, expand, and professionalise the university’s central administration—thus increasingly taking control over internationalization and exchange processes. In similar vein, ideas about an unavoidable European unification facilitated (b) the recasting of the university’s mission as preparing students for the European Single Market, and (c) the positioning of research within a European epistemic framework.

Why Belgium, why Ghent?

Before outlining how and to what effects discourses on Europe and European competitiveness were articulated inside Ghent University in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I first want to explain why this Belgian institution provides an instructive case for studying the Europeanisation of universities more generally.

First and most importantly, the Ghent case offers a privileged vantage point for examining Europeanisation as a meaning-making process rather than a linear, top-down diffusion of supranational policy. Today, Ghent University (UGent) is one of Belgium’s and Flanders’ oldest and largest public, research-intensive, universities. The university counts approximately 50,000 students, over 4,000 international students, and around 9,000 staff members. In the 1980s, however, the institution faced a very different reality. Declining student enrolments between 1984 and 1990 worried university personnel, all while students protested against rising tuition fees (for an overview of student enrolment, see Danniau and Loockx, 2017; Dhondt, 2008 on foreign students at UGent). In 1986, the Belgian government of Wilfriend Martens moreover launched the so-called “Sint-Annaplan” to cut costs in higher education. Among other things, this plan included freezing the government funding of Ghent University the level of 1985 and reducing the science policy budget with 9%, which placed the university under considerable financial pressure and administrative strain (Deneckere, 2017). Since the university was largely dependent on government funding, this combination of pressures rendered the university’s future uncertain and opened a space of “problematisation”—a moment in which routines could be questioned and new institutional orientations could be imagined as possible and legitimate (cf. Bacchi, 2012; see on problematization also Foucault, 1997: 286). What makes the case of Ghent interesting is therefore that before participation in EU funding schemes later became obligatory because of government evaluations and performance-based funding systems (a development that happened in Belgium in the late 1990s and early 2000s; Beleidsdossier, 1993–1998; Cruz-Castro et al., 2016), European programmes already appeared as a solution.

This construction of Europe as a solution, or rather: as an “opportunity”, happened in Ghent between 1987 and 1994. While in the early 1980s, references to “Europe” and European institutions already circulated in the university, the university remained one of the least active Belgian universities in European Community programmes. In 1987, members of the academic community were surprised, even, to learn that other universities were already receiving substantial EU funding and had dedicated staff to monitor European opportunities (Nota Bezoek Luik, 1986; Nota Erasmusproject, 1987). By 1994, however, Ghent University had become Belgium’s top-scoring university for Erasmus mobility and one of the most EU-connected and EU-funded universities in the country, supported by privileged personal and administrative links to the European Commission (Brochure Erasmus, 1994). Within a short period, information flows about European funding, grant writing, and EU-oriented administrative practices were formalised and institutionalised.

What happened during this period was that actors inside the university actively made “Europe” into a strategic reference point, mobilising emerging ideas about European competition and funding schemes to justify a realignment of priorities. The university did not simply start to participate in European programmes because it had to; rather, “Europe” was discursively constructed as a solution to a crisis and as a horizon for institutional self-definition. By the early 1990s, this intentional pivot toward the European policymaking arena was moreover already celebrated internally as a “success story” (Letter De Meyer, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c), which allowed the central administration to further institutionalise the turn to European Commission funding. As such, the Ghent case reveals exactly how “Europe” shifted from a vague reference point into the institution’s proposed answer to its problems, and how that process changed the institution.

Secondly, the case is instructive because UGent’s location in Belgium placed it in close proximity to European institutions—most notably the European Commission and the European Parliament in Brussels—as well as influential higher education organisations such as the Conference of European Rectors (CRE). This geographical and institutional closeness meant that Ghent University professors, students, and administrators encountered European higher education ideas relatively early and were uniquely positioned to liaise directly with European policymakers. In addition, Belgium’s position as the symbolic “heart of Europe” shaped the country’s political culture: in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Belgian politics were marked a general optimism toward the European integration project, and creation of the Single Market was entirely “politically uncontentious” (De Witte et al., 2009: 408). In combination with the other case studies in this Special Issue, analysing a university located in a country with such strong ideological and political ties to the European Communities allows for meaningful comparisons across different national contexts (see Conclusion to this Special Issue).

In the three sections that follow, I describe in more detail how and by whom the idea of Europe as an institutional opportunity was constructed, and which ideas about the university, its mission, and practices it entailed. First, however, let me explain how ideas about Europe as a cultural sphere and positive references to European policies were already present in Ghent University’s internationalisation and science-industry policies before they became recontextualised and articulated as solutions to the pressing crisis of the 1980s.

Fragments of Europe

Discourses, which can be defined as “institutionalized structures of meaning that channel [. . .] thought and actions in certain directions” (Connolly, 1983; Schmidt, 2008: 315–316), never arise out of the blue. At Ghent University throughout the 1970s and 1980s, at least three sets of practices and concepts paved the way for the articulation of a new discourse about Europe and universities in the later 1980s. Both in cultural and science diplomacy, development programmes, and science-industry collaborations, students, professors and administrators grew accustomed to and optimistic about internationalisation and the political project of European integration.

The university as a European contact-zone

In the 1970s and 1980s, references to Europe, and more precisely to the idea of European cultural unity, appeared primarily in cultural and science diplomacy activities. Europe was at this time imagined as a space of collaboration and exchange; with the university being a crucial contact-zone where Europe, in this sense, materialised. At the Faculty of Arts, recurring University Lectures were, for example, organised and advertised within the framework of bilateral “cultural accords” which supposedly expressed the intimate relationship between two nations (Poster, 1972). Embassies would send letters to humanities scholars asking for and announcing visitors (Briefwisseling British Embassy, 1971–1979), and many individual professors were actively engaged in European scholarly societies, programmes and prize competitions. Throughout the 1980s, professors of both this Faculty and other faculties also regularly organised exhibitions that underscored European connectedness and which presented the university as a place for such connection. In 1982, the university for example organised an exhibition titled Europe in Space about the European Space Agency, and in 1985, the Faculty of Arts organised an exhibition on 1000 Spanish Books in the framework of the Brussels-based biannual Europalia festival focused on Spain. This festival, which today still exists, had the explicit goal of “bringing people and cultures closer together through art” (RvB, 1986).

On a central university level, too, so-called “links”, “interlinkages”, and “networks” between European countries and universities were a crucial part of internationalisation and science diplomacy policies. When in 1972, the Assistant Representative of the British Council wrote to the Rector of the University about possible visitors, she tellingly mentioned that

now that Britain is about to become member of the European Community, we are naturally interested in extending all existing cultural or educational links, and in creating further contacts beyond those which already exist (Letter Whitty, 1972).

In a similar spirit, the university during the 1970s and 1980s solidified intra-European “twinning” and “fraternisation” accords—for example with the University of Lille III in 1972, or the University of Granada in 1982 (Briefwisseling, 1971–1973; Verslaggeving FLW, 1982). Among staff and students, these accords shaped the idea of the university as an international and European contact-zone, and they gave rise to deep collaborations (including the exchange of doctoral theses between Ghent and Lille, as well as the production of “inter-university staff cards”, Letter Hulin, 1972; Letter De Meyer, 1987a).

Mundial engagement

In other policy spheres within the university realm, new development programmes reveal a second set of positive references to Europe. These were not so much focused on European connectedness but rather pinned on idea that European (and other) supranational governance actors would help university actors create a fairer, globalised, world. With new (de)colonial experiments in Congo and Rwanda emerging in the 1950s and 1960s (Eerdekens, 2009), both scholars and university personnel started to frame internationalisation and globalization as a crucial part of their social and political engagement, even, their “vocation” (Verbeke, 2017b). Especially in the earlier 1970s and first half of the 1980s, momentum for development aid confirmed the moral supremacy and desirability of internationalisation and globalisation over nationalism, and it made scholars and university staff enthusiastic about European-level institutions and the project of European integration.

During these decades, the discourse of supranational actors such as the United Nations Social and Economic Council (UNESCO), the Council of Europe, and the European Commission was often positively connected to university initiatives. When an Interfaculty Study and Education Centre for Development Cooperation (°1967) and a new Postgraduate programme in Multicultural and Mundial Education (°1985) were set up, for example, the ambitions of these projects to prepare students as “global citizens” were connected to the European Commission’s policy priorities (Verslaggeving FLW, 1983) and activities (such as the organisation of the European Year of the Youth, see Verslaggeving FLW, 1985a). Professor Maurice Van Spaandonck, for example, who actively lobbied for the set-up of the Postgraduate programme, often referred to European institutions in his notes and speeches, thereby legitimating their activities and dreams for a future of “mundial education”. By connecting his projects and research to “the Como-conference held in July 1985, which was sponsored by the European Commission and the Rockefeller Foundation, and at which a network for Mundial Education was erected” (Verslaggeving FLW, 1985b), he e.g. managed to convince scholars in both the Faculty of Arts and at the rectoral level to support his ideas (Verbeke, 2017a). Together with university exhibitions about supranational institutions (e.g. a UNESCO-exhibit organised in 1981), these actions lay the basis for positive conceptions of European and other supranational institutions as allies in globalization policies.

Europe as institutional opportunity

In addition to discourse on Europe as a zone for contact or an ally in globalisation, competing ideas about Europe also appeared in relation to the university’s funding streams and its science-industry collaborations. Here, European funding programmes such as ESPRIT (The European Programme for Research and Development in Information Technologies, 1984–1988), FAST (Forecasting and Assessment in the field of Science and Technology, 1978–1983; 1983–1986), and Eureka (an intergovernmental programme for competitiveness, market integration, and R&D cooperation supported by the Commission, 1985–ongoing) were starting to be framed for the first time as crucial opportunities for the university (Reillon, 2017). Especially because in the 1970s and 1980s, Ghent University had to deal with decreasing student numbers and lower government funding (Deneckere, 2017), these extra streams of funding were depicted as highly valuable for the survival and growth of the institution.

The dream of Europe embedded in this discourse was not one of inter-cultural contact but instead pinned on the idea of Europe as an institutional opportunity: a chance presented by structures in society, there for academic entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial universities to either take or leave (Nota Werkgroep Uitstraling, 1988). When in 1982, the Rector of the university André Cottenie introduced a new central “Interface Office” to create and manage relationships between the university and the business sector (Verbelen, 2011), he for example explained that the office was set up not only because the university often “acted as a counsellor to businesses”, but also because the institution played “an increasingly important role in European funding programmes” which “made things possible” (RvB, 1981). In his speech, the rector thereby implicitly confirmed the rationale of European Commission higher education policies, which were at the time strongly pinned on connecting knowledge to society and industry (Grahl and Teague, 1988).

During the later 1980s, the Interface Office continued to spread and reproduce this message, and it tellingly also began to measure its own success by way of measuring the university’s success in European funding schemes (RvB, 1985, 1986, 1987). In 1986, for example, the director of the Interface office Yves Fassin reported that the amount of third-party funding gained by Ghent University had doubled over the course of five years, thereby “exceeding the total of 1 billion Belgian francs”, and that at least 4 million of that amount was coming from the FAST, ESPRIT, and EUREKA funding (RvB, 1986). In 1987, European science-industry activities were again included in the University’s report of the academic year—with the Interface Office’s participation in a European Conference on International Technology Transfer being firmly stressed. So even if European funding never constituted the main share of the third-stream money (which grew from 6% to 18% of the total budget between 1981 and 1988), the importance of European collaboration and funding as extra stream of income was consistently highlighted, as was the need for more personnel to better carry out the Interface Office’s work (Resignation letter Fassin, 1988).

It should therefore come as no surprise that, in 1988, the Interface Office was renamed the department for “Ghent Research and Development—Interface and European Research Projects”. At this moment, ambitions for research and development were both conceptually and administratively coupled to concrete European initiatives. Where “Europe” had initially been imagined as an external space of collaboration or a road towards globalisation, it was now primarily articulated as an internal organising principle for the university’s pursuit of new knowledge and applications. In “discursive institutionalist” terms, a new idea (“Europe as opportunity”) was being institutionalised into organisational structure. With four new staff members, one of which was specifically tasked with “taking a bite out of the 10 billion francs’ worth of cake the European Commission is distributing” (GU, 05/1988), a new Head of Department and a brand-new brochure, the promise of the new Ghent Research and Development department was to “extend European connections” in the “field of education and research” (Brochure Dienst Interface, s.d. [1988]). However, to fully understand where this sudden momentum for European projects came from, we need to take a closer look at the year 1987. This year profoundly changed the discourse on Europe inside Ghent University.

The articulation of a European opportunity

While for most of the 1980s, ideas about Europe travelled mostly in the background of internationalisation and tech-transfer policies, in the Fall of 1987, student representatives and university administrators explicitly pushed talk about Europe to the fore. Within three years, references to European cultural unity, partnerships with the European Commission, and European Communities funding became recontextualised in an overarching discourse about Ghent University needing to become, and then simply being a “European university”.

Since much of that recontextualisation played out on the rectoral level, where corporate branding was coming into being—and, significantly, also named as such—this process can be regarded as the articulation of a European “corporate identity” (on corporate identities in universities, see Flipse et al., 2024). After years of financial stress and diminishing student enrolments, the rectoral office of the liberal Assyriologist Leon De Meyer (1928–2006) in 1987 started to promote the university as a “business” that needed to successfully grasp European institutional opportunities and “play in a European league”. As had been the case already in the earlier 1980s, this discourse was clearly informed by new, neoliberal, ways of thinking about science and technology as needing to adapt to an internationalising market and to societal “innovation processes”, which were urgently needed in the so-called “knowledge-based economy” (Godin, 2006; Jamison, 1989). What was striking in Ghent University, however, was that these assumptions in the later 1980s became strongly connected to the “reality” of the European Single Market, which students-as-future-professionals would soon enter.

Playing in a European League

The “articulation” (here used to indicate a clear and effective expressing of an idea in speech or writing) of the idea of Ghent University being a European University in a European Higher Education Market started in 1987. This date coincides with the European Commission’s launch of the Erasmus programme and the Bologna meeting of the Conference of European Rectors, which both took place in the Spring (Corbett, 2009; Lehmann, 2021). As the other articles of this Special Issue reveal, the Magna Charta Document that was prepared during this meeting mentioned that there would be “a definite abolition of boundaries between the countries of the European Community” and that a “university is the trustee of the European humanist tradition” (European Rector’s Conference, 1988). Across European universities, the meeting brought attention to European integration, while positioning universities as traditional carriers of that process and beacons for a supranational future.

While this momentous occasion very likely changed perceptions of the future of Europe integration in Ghent (the rector of the university was active in the Conference of European Rectors), an intensified focus on “Europe” already appeared in Ghent before the Fall of 1987. Indeed, the archives of the Ghent University’s Rectoral and International Offices reveal that when the Interface Office planned a meeting to discuss the European Commission’s new Erasmus programme on 12 June, 1987, the officials in attendance did more than take note. They explicitly worried that Ghent University was “seriously outperformed by other Belgian universities in its participation in the European Commission’s Erasmus pilot programme” (Nota Erasmusproject, 1987). Staff from Ghent University had, according to an anonymous note-taker, “sadly” only been part of one pilot project, whereas teams from KU Leuven, the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the Université Catholique de Louvain had taken part in 14, 14, and 17 projects, respectively. Even “Ghent’s French counterpart university in Liège had managed to participate in 14 projects”, which was deemed especially worrisome because in the 1987–1988 round of Erasmus funding, institutions that had already participated in pilot actions would come first in line. Already before the summer of 1987, the rectoral services therefore developed new strategies to initiate more European funding applications. An Office for European Educational Projects was being prepared, and rector Leon De Meyer, together with the Interface Office, sent university-wide “sensibilisation” letters in July and August of 1987 (Letter De Meyer, 1987b, 1987c). In his correspondence, the rector scolded professors for “showing very little interest, certainly in comparison to other Belgian universities” and encouraged them to apply for Erasmus and COMETT funding so that “our university can take the place in Europe which she deserves” (Letter De Meyer, 1987c). De Meyer, who had been unexpectedly elected as rector in 1985, saw it has his personal task to steer the university through the difficult times of financial crisis, and to make sure student enrolments would rise again.

The issue of student enrolment was indeed also discursively connected to the university becoming “European”. The archives reveal that Ghent University’s turn towards Europe was in fact initiated not by the university administration, but by generally elected student representatives who expressed worry about their professional futures and who asked the university to compete on the “European level”. In September of 1987, the Student Representative on the Board of the University, Geert Mareels, started to publicly lament the university’s low participation in European educational schemes—thus connecting student ambitions, European higher education policies, and the future of the university. Mareels’ speech at the opening of the 1987–1988 academic year (which was attended not just by the Rector, but also by the Flemish Minister for Education and Administrative Affairs) moreover for the first time introduced the image of a “league”. It was cited three times in the November 1987 edition of the university magazine (GU, 10/1987: 11, 18) and quoted explicitly in the rectoral circular that followed the opening of the academic year in November of 1987 (Letter De Meyer, 1987c).

So, what did Mareels, who spoke on behalf of the student body, ask? First, it is necessary to stress that Mareels was an ambitious political scientist and student representative who had written his master’s thesis on the topic of The Higher Education Policy of the European Communities (Mareels, 1987), and that he had therefore been thinking (much) more about the long-term consequences of non-participation in the European Communities’ funding schemes than his peers. His later career as a political advisor to four different Flemish Ministers and chief of cabinet also positions him as an active socialist, but at the time he was elected via the general student election—not by affiliation to a party. Yet even if he was a somewhat atypical student, it is fair to assume that his enthusiasm for Europe was shared by many ambitious Belgian students at the time, as they were being informed about “Europe” through festivals like Europalia or the European Salon of the Student. The title he picked for the traditional student representative speech was therefore as much about stating an issue as it was about launching a new and shared ambition: “Towards a University in the European League” (RvB, 1987).

In this speech, Mareels took a few interesting discursive detours before launching a call for European ambition and institutional entrepreneurship. In good rhetorical tradition, he of course commenced his speech by underscoring that Ghent University was “a solid university, in some respects even the best”; at once launching a captatio benevolentiae and stating a “fact” that could immediately be destabilised. In the international higher education landscape, so the young political scientist indeed went on, there would “however soon be a split between ‘centres of excellence’ and provincial universities,” all of which would be “fighting for their place under the financial sun”. Because of its severe “lack of dynamism” in relation to the “opportunities” created by the European Commission, Ghent University hence risked becoming a provincial and poor university, which would have to “prostitute itself with industrials” rather than participate in European third-party funding schemes (RvB, 1987).

As if this nightmarish scenario was not yet enough to awaken the senior scholars, politicians, and administrators present in the room, Mareels in his speech went on to further dramatise the situation. In the competitive higher education market, so he claimed, a loss of autonomy and reputation would not just be bad for the university (which he confirmed was competing with Leuven, Antwerp, or Brussels), but it be especially problematic for students who were already worried about future jobs. Their degrees, so he argued, risked devaluation, and as individuals they would miss out on opportunities to achieve a “higher international consciousness” and help “combat xenophobia” through intra-European mobility schemes. In order to avoid such a scenario, “everyone involved in Ghent University” therefore needed to use the university’s “European momentum” in the Fall of 1987, when both the Conference of European Rectors and a “European Student Meeting” would take place in Ghent (even it is somewhat unclear what the latter event entailed). Experts needed to be enlisted and contacts needed to be established with European Communities administrators. More importantly, professors needed to “step it up”. While up to then the faculty had “shown little enthusiasm towards the activities from the rectoral office to do something about the poor position of Ghent University”, professors would have to start “making an effort” and write European funding applications “even if those were more complex than [Belgian] BTK-applications”. Otherwise, so Mareels closed his speech,

The students will hold you [Professors] personally responsible. [. . .] And they will do so in the simplest way possible: by going elsewhere. Which would leave you with the mummy’s boys from Ghent and its region, who do not like to take the train to Leuven or Brussels, let alone to France or England (RvB, 1987).

As both this longer quote and the quotes above show, Mareels’ speech invoked dramatic images, projected students as critical clients and soon-to-be workers, and was very sharp in tone towards the professorial body. I have cited it at length here not only because it was re-cited so often in the rector’s letters, but also because it reveals the discursive backbone of all the communication in the years 1987 to 1995. Its force clearly lay in the way it linked crisis to solution: Europe was framed as the only path to avoid decline, making European competition appear both urgent and self-evident. Amplifying fears that had already been present in the central administration, the student endorsement of Europe-as-opportunity moreover appears to have been the essential discursive element the rectoral office needed to further spread and “institutionalise” the European gospel.

Spreading the gospel

In late 1987, a concerted campaign to articulate a new European corporate identity in fact followed, with letters being sent again in October and November (Letter De Meyer, 1987c, 1987d). Since student numbers and the university’s budget kept dropping in the later 1980s, the University Board in early 1988 decided to create a “Steering Committee for the University’s Appearance”. The members of this new Committee were mostly part of the central services, which included the Office for Communication and the Ghent Centre for Research and Development, and they explicitly decided to establish a “European profile” in their communication and branding campaigns to attract more students (Handwritten note, 1989). Doing so, they based themselves on marketing research from the Ghent-based Vlerick School of Management, which had highlighted the potential of using international and European “opportunities” (the word indeed appearing again) for Ghent University’s corporate branding (De Maegd et al., 1990).

The articulation of a new, Europe-centred, way of talking about Ghent University would continue over the course of 1988–1990. Rector Leon De Meyer sent out more circulars about Ghent having to be part of the European project, which established a rhythm for the information flow for the years to come (Letter De Meyer, 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c). In these letters, which were supposed to be reaching all university personnel, the Rector emphasised that support for the Erasmus project equalled “support for the future of our university” and that participation was essential in view of the coming “Europe of 1992”, a concept often promoted in the discourse of the Delors Commission. This “Europe of 1992” was always presented as an unavoidable economic reality, to which the university needed to adapt. Students would soon enter the Single European Market, and the university, De Meyer argued, had the responsibility to prepare them for a 21st century world in which borders “would cease to exist at all” (Letter De Meyer, 1987d, similar expressions in Letter De Meyer, 1989c and GU, 04/1988). By projecting this inevitable European future, the rector legitimised the European branding of the university, and the need to compete for European funds in the present. As such, he also positioned Europe as the university’s competitive horizon. Other European universities were no longer imagined as partners in internationalisation, but as rivals for funding, visibility, and prestige. After a while, the letters thus no longer rested primarily on the idea that the university needing funding, but rather on the assumption that Europe would become the scale at which success or failure would be judged.

The idea that Europe was the arena to conquer also explains why, from 1988 onwards, the rectoral campaign to promote Ghent University as strongly committed to Europe increasingly relied on quantification rhetoric—shown by discourse analysts to be effective in reinforcing arguments (herein often building on Foucault, 2007; e.g. Jarvis, 2023). The rectoral letters for example included statistics on Ghent’s participation and success rates, as well as compliments to those who had engaged in European projects. In October 1988, the rector even mentioned that “a European profile is in the making”, since “31 of 78 of all submitted projects were crowned with subsidies” (Letter De Meyer, 1988b). By January of 1989, Ghent University was presented as “an important link in the European University Network” (Letter De Meyer, 1989a), and by August 1989 the “number of Erasmus proposals submitted to the European Commission had grown by 38%”, making of the university a real early adopter (Letter De Meyer, 1989b). In this last letter, the rector again thanked those who were making the “European profile of Ghent University”, and added an extra instruction letter with application details from the Research and Development Service.

In addition to the circular campaign, the university magazine was during the years 1987–1995 consciously used to promote Ghent University as a European-committed institution, invested in Erasmus and European science(-industry) projects. The magazine was written mostly by the staff at the Office for Communication, but also always contained an editorial by the rector. The audience of the magazine was slightly broader than that of the circulars, as it was read by students, university staff, alumni, and the general Flemish public. In this magazine in particular, the elements of pro-European sentiments that already circulated in the 1970s and earlier 1980s were being brought together. In a rectoral editorial published in the monthly magazine in October 1987, Leon De Meyer for example paraphrased Mareels’ point that “universities participating in the Erasmus programme will gain a competitive advantage”, while adding, almost as an afterthought, that they were also “building the Europe of tomorrow” (GU, 10/1987). In April of 1988, another editorial read that “in the Europe of 1992, there will no longer be borders” and that students and staff should therefore contribute to “help to extend and, even, clear away the borders of humanitarian thinking” by participating in mobility schemes (GU, 04/1988). In many of these and other pieces (see e.g. GU, 05/1988), references to cultural unity were seemingly used to spice up the dominant discourse about intra-European competition, and the university magazines also regularly mentioned the activities of the Ghent Research and Development Office in securing more third-party funding.

The campaign that had started in 1987 with the problematisation of low EC funding submission rates and a student’s public round-up of his master’s thesis findings, had by the end of 1988 thus grown into a well-articulated communication strategy. In February 1989, this culminated in a university magazine titled “Dossier 1992” that was entirely dedicated to Ghent’s activities as a European institution. The university, so the magazine reported, had just become part of the European network of universities called the “Santander Group” (GU, 02/1989). Together, the concerned universities saw themselves as paving the way for European integration in the higher education sector (SGroup, 2025). On the cover of the issue, two male figures were depicted as happily jumping over borders (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Cover of University magazine “Dossier 1992”.

Building on this self-representation, it comes to no surprise that the Year Report of the academic year 1989–1990 concluded that the university had managed to firmly establish itself as a “European University”. It had some so, first, by articulating a clear narrative about the need for European profile in a European higher education “league”, then by engaging in optimistic institutional talk about having such a profile, and subsequently by becoming part of larger networks, bringing in Erasmus students and winning European funding. As a result, the “European record of Ghent University” was considered “rich” (RvB, 1990). When in 1991, the Communication Office sent out press releases that were picked up by the local media, these articles enthusiastically repeated the idea that Ghent University was “on the Erasmus train” and was “well underway to become a European university” (Persbericht Erasmus/Lingua, 1991; Persberichten en persartikels 1988–1995). With an above-average success rate of 84% for European Erasmus funding, journalists concluded that in “only four years (. . .) Ghent University has become one of the most active participants in the European Communities” and “leader in the Flemish higher education landscape” (Ibid.). In many respects, this was a fight won, a mission succeeded. In hindsight, however, the Europeanisation of the university had only just begun.

Institutionalising Europeanisation

Where up to 1990, the activities of the central administration had mostly been pinned on gaining a larger share of European funds while also participating in Erasmus exchanges, the early 1990s reveal a twofold institutionalisation of Europeanisation in Ghent. On the one hand, the university’s ambition to make higher education “European” was itself turned into a site of administrative expertise. This moved the management of contracts and administrative expertise around internationalisation activities from the faculty to the central level, and thus reshuffled relations of power inside the university. On the other hand, of relevance in particular to historians of knowledge who wonder how research and higher education policies impact knowledge production, Europeanisation processes now extended to what Pfister (2015b) called the “epistemic dimension” of European integration: European ideas and policy frameworks began to influence the production and valuation of knowledge.

Institutionalisation via administration

To illustrate how the becoming of a “European university” itself was turned into a site of administrative expertise, and how this shifted power to the central level, it is useful to look at the administrators who actively promoted and thus institutionalised Ghent University’s involvement in European scientific programmes. Though not so many archival records from the Research and Development Service survive, a rough calculation of the share of European funding in all Ghent University’s third-party funding between 1980 and 1998 indicates that these administrators were highly active in encouraging and assisting applications to European programmes. Figure 2 attached to this article reveals that the share of third-party funding from the European Communities (and later, EU) kept rising throughout the beginning of the 1990s—peaking, even, in 1994. In university magazines, successful EU projects were consequently highlighted, with the launch of the International Scheldt Faculty co-sponsored by the European Commission in the mid-1990s standing out as an important example (Drewe, 1998). Internal papers from the internationalisation staff moreover reveal that administrators were quickly gaining knowledge on grantsmanship (stating for example that there was a “redactional difference” between “proposing the concept” and “how to execute the exchange”) and that they were actively teaching faculty how to make those differences (Socrates voorbereiding, 1995b).

Figure 2.

Share of European Communities funding in all Ghent University third-party funding (rough estimation, 1968–2000).

The real work of institutionalising a European dimension in Ghent University, however, appears to have happened inside the Office for European Educational Projects. In 1992, this office split from the Ghent Research and Development Office into a self-standing unit, and especially the Head of the Office, Lieve Bracke, was a driving force for the deepening of “Europeanisation expertise” and the growing power of the central administration. Already in 1990, Bracke had received an Erasmus Prize by the European Commission for “being an excellent example of what an Erasmus coordinator at a major university should be” since she had “made a major contribution” to Ghent University being “among the five most active institutions in the whole of Erasmus” in 1990 (Dossiers Erasmusprijs, 1990). Up to sometime in the early 1990s, she was married to Flemish politician Luc Van den Bossche from the Socialist Party, who in 1988 served as State Secretary for Education and later became the Flemish Minister for Education and Administrative Affairs (1992–1998) and President of the European Council of Education Ministers (1993). Via her partner, Bracke thus gained insight into the newest developments in European higher education policy. The archives of the university furthermore show that she embodied a managerial-entrepreneurial style, actively sending out letters, coordinating a publicity campaign in secondary schools, managing contacts with faculties and students (she for example collected student feedback on Erasmus visits), and taking stock of past and future activities.

Throughout the 1990s, Bracke continued to do the work she had been doing from 1987 onwards, when she was first hired by the university. Her outreach to prospective Erasmus students kept building on the core assumptions that already steered the campaign of 1987–1990, which she had helped design. In a 1994 brochure for prospective students, she framed going on Erasmus as getting “second university degree”, which would help a CEO when “he needs to choose between two candidates of which only one has Erasmus experience”. In the same year but in another interview, she also explicitly mentioned that it would be Erasmus students who would “make it in politics, business, and the economic world” (Brochure Erasmus, s.d. [1990])—again revealing much about how she imagined Erasmus students as well as their (gendered) futures. The university was continuously depicted and promoted to prospective students primarily as an organisation preparing them for the labour market, which was again explicitly framed as European (see also GU, 12/1994). By regularly contacting faculty members who were managing Erasmus schemes, and gaining an overview of Erasmus contracts and other international activities via newly set up Faculty-level commissions for Internationalisation, Bracke moreover made sure that this information flow about “Erasmus opportunities” reached all corners of the university.

Over the course of the early 1990s, however, both her ambitions and those of rector Leon De Meyer evolved and grew. Especially once the European Commission started preparing the next Erasmus programme for the period of 1995–1999 (called Socrates), Bracke and De Meyer took this as an opportunity to position Ghent University as an exemplary institution for the management of European projects. Also on their agenda: to turn UGent into a leading stakeholder in new policy development, and to further centralise all internationalisation activities.

Work to these ends started in 1992, when Bracke prepared a hefty report titled “First Evaluation of five years Erasmus at Ghent University” (Nota Erasmus, 1992). When she updated this report again in 1994, she made sure the growing European Educational Projects Office sent it to university administrators across the continent, as well as the Flemish Erasmus Committee, the Director of the Academic Cooperation Association, the Deputy of the Erasmus Bureau, and the Flemish Inter-University Council—among many others (Letter Smallwood, 1994; Letter Smith, 1994; Letter Ten Thij, 1994; Letter Van der Perre, 1994). In the report were discussions about the problems of students in new countries, as well as recommendations about the administrative management of the programme. Also present—and telling—were recurrent comments on the need for more staff in the central administration. In return letters, Bracke was praised for her “professionalism” (Letter Ten Thij, 1994) and “the very concrete example of the impact Ghent has made” (Letter Smallwood, 1994). In addition, she was invited to act as an expert for the European Commission’s Task Force Human Resources, Education, Training and Youth which was preparing Socrates (Letter Lenarduzzi, 1994), and when in 1994 the Conference of Rectors organised a group called “Improving Academic Networking”, she became part of that group, too (Socrates voorbereiding, 1993–1994).

In a similar vein but via other channels, Leon De Meyer (still Rector of the university), was taking a European lead in “deepening the European dimension in rectoral offices” in 1993–1994. He did so, for example, by providing rectoral feedback on the Socrates proposal of the European Commission (Circular VLIR, 1993) and informally preparing Luc Van den Bossche—at that point Belgian Minister of Education—for the European Council of Educational Ministers held in Athens on 25 and 26 of February 1994 (Nota SOCRATES, 1994). But via other ways, too, De Meyer positioned Ghent as the exemplary university when it came to the central management of European projects. In 1994, for example, an honorary doctorate was awarded to José Maria Urena Frances, who was the founder of the Santander Group (GU, 04/1994). By actively engaging in the Conference of Rectors in Ghent University in 1993–1994, the rector likewise gave the signal that Ghent University remained committed to European integration in the “higher education sector”.

Together, Bracke, De Meyer and several of the faculty members who were engaged in the faculty-level internationalisation commissions they had set up hereby plead for both a stronger central administration and a stronger institutionalisation of Europeanisation—as if, indeed, these were one and the same. In doing so, they put a new layer of administration on internationalisation activities, which before had been mostly managed at departmental levels and by individual scholars. Realising this caused concern, they moreover actively countered wide-ranging fears about the overgrowth of the central administration and the creation of “bureaucratic mastodonts”, which were present both inside the university and in other Belgian universities and which had been reported to them (Report VLIR, 1994). In a note to the Rector on the 28th of April of 1994, Lieve Bracke for example wrote that the “fear of bureaucratisation was not real, certainly not for universities with a well-organised International Office like Ghent” (Nota VLIR, 1994). Private correspondence with administrators across Europe moreover revealed that she was optimistic about a “more institutionalised approach to internationalisation [. . .] which will require enormous sensitivity in the implementation if the real successes of the past few years are to be maintained” (Smith, 1994). Strongly convinced that administrators were better equipped to manage internationalisation agreements and mobility schemes than scholars, she was furthermore a strong proponent of the “institutional contract” method the European Commission wanted to implement in the Socrates programme. Where in the first Erasmus schemes, scholars themselves had had the responsibility to manage contracts, this work would from 1994 onwards be done by professionalised central administrators— individuals like Bracke, whom the Commission praised publicly, awarded Erasmus Prizes, and regularly invited to its seminars.

What happened in Ghent during this time can therefore in hindsight be described as a kind of “administrative Europeanisation”. Inside Ghent University, European futures were increasingly used to legitimise the expansion and professionalisation of the central administration—and not without effect. The later 1990s saw a significant growth in the number of staff responsible for European project management and internationalization in general, who in turn participated in European networking and training courses. From two administrators working in the Internationalisation Office in 1992, the office grew to six people in 1994, ten in 1995, and 12 in 1996 (preliminary data based on Year Reports). More archival research to figure out who was responsible exactly for European project management in this service (and in the similarly expanding Research Office) is urgently needed, as is work on Europeanisation and the expansion of central administrations more generally. So far historians and sociologists have indeed not paid much attention to the interplay between these dynamics, even though the European Commission in the 1990s consciously targeted administrators with prizes and mobility grants (e.g. Gornitzka and Larsen, 2004). ¹

Epistemic Europeanisation

The institutionalisation of the “European identity” of Ghent University, however, did not limit itself to the administrative level, nor to an abstract surge in European-funded projects. Both the European administrative presence and the surge in project funding also appears to have meant something for academic knowledge production.

For the faculty researchers and professors, the instalment of a European profile at the university, firstly, led to the creation of new courses for Erasmus students and an expansion of course contents for Belgian ones. These often focused on specific European regions or themes—thereby confirming the master narrative of “European culture” that was, in the 1990s, being articulated by the European Commission (Calligaro, 2014). In the Faculty of Arts, for example, a new Erasmus course on “Low Countries Studies” was being set up in 1994, which was supposed to welcome incoming students into the history of this European region, but there were likewise courses being offered on “The History of the Idea and Reality of Europe” (Dossier CDP, 1995–1998) or “Comparative Study of Knowledge Systems” (Verslaggeving FLW, 1994). The latter course may at first sight not seem connected to ideas about or narratives on Europe, but (as I have argued in previous work) comparative studies often reproduce the idea of transnational vantage points as both epistemically and politically superior to national ones (Verbergt, 2024). In 1998–2000, several historians from Ghent University also worked, together with scholars from Groningen, on an “Intensive Programme on the History of the Sea in Europe” (Dossier IPS, 1998–1999), and in other Faculties, too, publicly open courses on “What is Europe” started being organised (see the announcements in GU, 12/1995). In all, the introduction of European mobility schemes and larger context of European integration appears to have gone along with a certain Europeanisation of the curriculum—even if further research would be needed to refine this observation.

Secondly, after 1990, the Europeanisation of Ghent University also appears to have translated to research practices and topic choices. Even if it falls outside the scope of this article to trace the extent to which research topic choices across disciplines were conceptually and practically structured around participation in European schemes, previous research has already shown that high participation rates in European funding schemes do correlate to specific topic choices or research designs, and this appears to have been the case in Ghent, too (Kropp and Larsen, 2023; Verbergt, 2024). Anecdotally, it is for example interesting to see that in the Department of History those scholars who were active in the faculty’s internationalisation commissions also contributed to large European research projects—among other things on European university history, or on the history of European integration itself (Ridder-Symoens, 1992; Dossier ISP, 1993–1996). The year reports of the university (in which lists of all conferences are included) moreover reveal that scholars started to build more contacts with the European Commission throughout the 1990s. Staff members from various EC Directorates regularly participated in university seminars and discussions, thereby likely bringing a “European perspective” on topics that may have previously been discussed otherwise. In the university magazines of the later 1990s, the European relevance and context of highlighted research also continued to be stressed, in the sense that Europe was often seen as an important “benchmark” and that scholars actively tried to contextualise new policies from the European Union for the university audience (e.g. in articles about suicide or educational research in GU, 12/1993 and 03/1997; or about the euro, GU, 01/1998). Finally, scholars also actively supported European Commission policy work; even to the frustration of some high-level university administrators, since in 1997 the vice-rector for research of the university openly complained that “European funding rarely supports fundamental research”, which was nonetheless crucial for the university to thrive (GU, 11/1997).

While all these examples can already be seen as part of what Pfister (2015a, 2015b) has called the “epistemic dimension of European integration”, the knowledge-related effects of Europeanisation on universities are most visible in research projects dealing directly with the topic of European integration. Here, it is important to note that, in 1990, a European Institute was officially erected in Ghent under Professor Marc Maresceau. At that time, Maresceau had already for seven years been the Head of the Division of European Law at the Faculty of Law and Criminology, and there were several master and PhD students working under his supervision. The set-up of the European Institute, however, further solidified his division in the Department of Law in anticipation of “Europe 1992”, and it explicitly aimed to “orient itself towards businesses” who had questions about the contemporary policies of the European Communities (Stichtingsdocument, 1988). Launched under the patronage of Commission President Jacques Delors in May 1990, the set-up of this institute moreover appears to have accelerated Maresceau’s career, as he became Ghent University’s first “ad personam Jean Monnet Chair” in European Law in 1992. In 2005, the European Institute furthermore received official acknowledgment from the European Commission when the political science unit “Ghent Institute for International and European Studies” (with which it was by then affiliated) was recognised as a Jean Monnet “Centre of Excellence”. Crowning work that had started in the later 1980s, these honours once again confirmed Ghent University’s supposedly superior position in the European higher education landscape, which we today still imagine as a capricious vista with high mountain tops and provincial valleys.

Conclusion

By the time Ghent University received a Jean Monnet “Seal of Excellence” in 2005, of course, the Europeanisation of universities had left the early stage of the 1980s and 1990s and taken on an entirely different character. The recent investment of Ghent University in European prestige, which is visible in the set-up of a central “EU Cell” and the demand to newly hired professors to apply for European funds, indeed draws us far outside the moments of discursive fragmentation, discursive articulation and discursive institutionalisation which I described in this article.

Around the turn of the 21st century, the European Commission started to spend significantly more money on research funding to become the world’s “leading knowledge economy”, and the Belgian and Flemish governments developed EU-centred assessment schemes and policies, thus making university funding partly dependent on participation in EU schemes. Since Belgian and Flemish research investments also stabilised (esp. in relation to the creation of new positions), the nature of Europeanisation at Ghent University dramatically changed—structuring practices and meanings around “Europe” is no longer optional or a solution to an issue, but a requirement. This requirement to Europeanise is, however, today still rooted in the firm conviction that a European (Higher Education) Market will continue to be a reality, that students as prospective European labourers are “clients” universities should cater for, and that the future of universities is either “excellent” and European, or provincial and dire.

The early phases of discursive Europeanisation at Ghent University indeed reveal that the 1980s and 1990s were a crucial period in which new ideas about the university, its role in the “knowledge society”, and new ways of governing universities arose. Even though the institution of the university has never been stable, nor uncontested, the European “success story” of Ghent University appears to have gone along with dramatic shifts in university self-styling and governance mechanisms. In a context of serious financial stress inside the university and broader Belgian unemployment crisis, students demanded to be taken seriously as consumers of education. They threatened to go elsewhere if the university did not offer them European exchange opportunities, which they considered crucial for their careers. The university management, on its part, mirrored this discourse back at the students, thereby legitimating the idea that universities’ role was to prepare students as future European workforce. In addition, Ghent University’s top management saw in a “European profile” an opportunity to recast Ghent as a Europe-committed institution. They did so not only to keep students (and especially student numbers and government funding high), but also because the administration accepted the idea that the nature of inter-university competition would change. Together, these developments led to an impressive surge in the university’s participation in European funding schemes and a growing epistemic Europeanisation in research. In addition, Ghent University’s “European turn” enabled the expansion and professionalization of the administration, which moved power over international contacts, contracts and money from the faculty level to a central one.

Of course, this short story should be taken with a grain of salt and leaves much to unpack. Even though the word universitas is Latin for “whole”, a university never entirely appears into view. Inside certain faculties, at specific sub-departments, or among particular student associations, other voices could likely be found. Most of all, what needs further empirical and theoretical unpacking is the idea that this was Ghent University’s “success story”. To what extent did faculties, professors, and even students mind these changes in the balance of university influence and control? Who benefited (most) from university Europeanisation, and what where its social, epistemic, and financial costs? In this exercise of “mapping” Europeanisation, I have found that (scholar-)administrators particularly liked the “European Commission’s cake”. They even took it upon themselves to remind the Commission, to cite rector Leon De Meyer one last time, that in the development of a European strategy, “pennies take more from heaven than prayer” (Socrates seminarie, 1996).