Romanian Higher Education: Grassroots Assessment of the Status of Europeanization

Abstract

This paper considers that the process of Europeanization through higher education is aided, sustained and undergirded by human exchanges, such as student and faculty mobility schemes, student exchanges endorsed through bilateral agreements or simply through personal relations forged in the context of individual studies abroad. While such transactions may occur through institutionally sanctioned programs, they have distinct and unintended consequences for the emergence of a European public space. The connections developed in these inter-human exchanges infuse European higher education with a mosaic of perspectives and practices circulating in a constant cycle of borrowing and localization. In turn, then, higher education serves as an aggregating and filtering system for the formation of a European intellectual realm premised upon the movement of ideas between students and faculty across the EU and Europe as a whole.