Abstract
As the effects of climate change on today’s society make the headlines across the globe, urging all stakeholders to join forces to act and to create a sustainable world, universities have started engaging in the process of building a sustainable future for the generations to come. The sustainable university has thus emerged, a pro-active and collaborative university that performs in several domains. Since the university’s strategic plan is an instance of official and public communication on the future institutional development, its investigation reveals the university’s position towards sustainability. This study highlights the explicit use of the concept of sustainability in the strategic plans for 2020–2024 of the twelve Romanian top universities and points to the sustainable domains associated with it. Moreover, to determine the direction towards which the Romanian top universities are heading, in terms of sustainability, the article draws a comparison with previous research conducted on the strategic plans for 2016–2020. The main conclusion reached is that although there is an increasing tendency to use the concept in the latest strategic plans, building sustainable universities in Romania is still a goal to be achieved in the future.
Highlights
Higher education institutions have changed in time due to the social, economic and technological progress, so that the role they played in forming educated people able to bring their contribution to the overall development of society has undergone alterations to fit the needs of the community
The present study has focused on a very important topic for today’s society, namely, sustainability and its role in higher education institutions
It has carried out a linguistic analysis on the use of the concept of sustainability in the top Romanian universities’ strategic plans
Summary
Higher education institutions have changed in time due to the social, economic and technological progress, so that the role they played in forming educated people able to bring their contribution to the overall development of society has undergone alterations to fit the needs of the community. At the beginning, universities were perceived as ivory towers, accessible only to the chosen ones and responsible with students’ acquisition of general knowledge, little by little, they turned into open and versatile institutions, actively engaged in society through the relationship established with the economic environment, the socially responsible citizens they educate and the society as a whole. The entire industrialization and, more recently, the digitalization of the society contributed to its development and to the improvement of the living standards, they have affected the environment for centuries [14,16,17,18].
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