Faces of Our CommUNAty: “BASUS tries to find the balance that sustainability calls for.”

Piotr: Sustainability is a scientific, economic and political concept that transcends different disciplines, different fields, different communities. First and foremost, it’s correlated with economic transformations that we go through as global community. For instance, we’ve reached the limits of the neoliberal economic model of the 1990s and now we’re trying to answer different needs – not only strictly economic ones, but also social and environmental. Sustainability tries to embrace all that.

The European Union aims to be a champion of this discussion. And therefore there's also a political reason why Una Europa, as a European Universities alliance, is working on the concept of sustainability from an educational perspective.

Lena: Something that intrigues me is the eternal challenge of translating the ideas of one discipline into the language of another. Many people – policymakers, judges, CEOs – are expected to make decisions that impact sustainability, but are not able to interpret the huge mass of information and the intricacies of the topic.

I’ve often observed that people who are very emotionally invested in sustainability aren’t always successful in conveying their ideas, or they don't always propose ideas that could function in the real world. I believe that if we can communicate better and we can gain more knowledge about what works, we can reach solutions that are truly sustainable, in the sense that they can be sustained over time and produce good results.

Piotr: What I have observed in discussions about environmental protection and sustainability is that we have a huge problem of communication between different fields and different disciplines. In order to provide practical solutions for our communities, we need communication, and we need new people. We need new generations of people who know how to combine skills coming from different disciplines. There’s a huge gap in the market.

For me, BASUS was challenging on an intellectual level: how to construct a programme that could provide such a combination of skills and competences. As people who work at a university, we think in terms of experiments. This is what motivates us to do something completely new and see how it works. This programme is a kind of an educational experiment. Like launching a new spaceship. We have gone through various tests, such as the accreditation process. Now we have a green light. We are ready.

Piotr: I must admit that when we had one of our first meetings as a Self-Steering Committee in Sustainability [one of the alliance’s academic bodies aligned to our six Focus Areas] and saw a BA in Sustainability among our tasks, I thought it was a typo – it should not be a BA but an MA! A bachelor’s degree is much more difficult to deliver due to differences at the regulatory level of different states. That's why, for example, certain universities decided not to be a degree-awarding partner.

At the same time, we know that we are part of a bigger political project to integrate European universities to a level which did not exist before. We know that Erasmus programme was fantastic and it's still fantastic, but it was developed 30 years ago, right? Now we need new tools of integration.

Creating new bachelor programmes for students in high school today sends a completely different message to European society. It's a message to parents that says ‘Listen, your children can now think about pursuing a truly European, international degree that did not exist before’. We know such programmes are icebreakers and that more will follow.

I have benefited so much from this cooperation. What are the mindsets of my colleagues? What kind of challenges are they struggling with? There are different struggles in Helsinki than in Madrid; different mindsets in Edinburgh than in Bologna. It has been an enriching experience for us all.

Lena: The biggest hurdles divide into three groups. The first is connected to the concept of sustainability itself. Sustainability is such a widespread buzzword and at the same time it's often presented in a very vague way. Even people who work on sustainability on a daily basis often struggle to explain what it really is, what it is not, and find common ground. We had to conceptualise sustainability to create a coherent study programme.

The second set of hurdles relates to how sustainability and how interdisciplinary education should be organised in general. For example, what should the percentage of interdisciplinary courses or transversal skills formation be relative to more traditional disciplinary education that we usually have at our universities. We tried find the balance that sustainability calls for, while being fully aware that interdisciplinary students still need to have some foundation in more problem-oriented or discipline-oriented matters in order to be effective on the job market.

And the third hurdle was the biggest one: when you encounter a new problem you have to multiply that problem by eight – the eight contexts of the participating universities. Trying to make it work despite the differences in legal systems, university cultures, and the ways that we are used to designing programmes.

But our passion and investment in interdisciplinary international education prevailed. We are so pleased to see the BASUS programme coming to fruition.

Piotr: At the beginning, we have a very interdisciplinary first year, where we bring the students all together to study three pillars of sustainability: economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability. We also have an experimental course called Sustainability Dilemmas. Our vision for this course is to invite experts from academic, business and politics, to explore problems related to sustainability. The intention is to create emotional engagement and provoke discussions among students to enable them to come to different conclusions and solutions on their own. Because in the future, the problems that they will have to solve will be different than problems we have now.

In their second year, students will follow academic tracks, each coordinated by a different university and co-taught by an international team of teachers. In Kraków, we'll have a track on law and politics. In Helsinki, sustainable chemistry and physics. In Madrid, environmental and life sciences. In Zürich, social sciences and humanities. In Brussels, economics, management and engineering. In Paris, economy and geography. Because these tracks are only three semesters long, they are not meant to be an equivalent of a disciplinary degree. Instead, they are designed to foster a different set of skills, which help address questions from the crossroads of sustainability and particular disciplines.

Lena: When you look at satellite pictures of the centre of Kraków, you will see that it's very green. Starting in the old town, you can practically walk out of the city through parks, meadows and forests. The city itself is very walkable, too. Within 20 minutes, either by walking or by public transportation, you can get everywhere you need to be.

Piotr: What people love about Kraków is that many university buildings are located in the historic centre of the city, which is an old town, but at the same time very vibrant and full of students. It's also quite an international city. It has excellent food. And a final argument is that students who visit Kraków say that the price of beer is more affordable than in other places of Europe. It's a very convincing argument!