The past two decades have seen dramatic changes in the higher education landscape.

International mobility and connectivity have intensified at a historically unprecedented pace. Relatedly, a clearly dominant new policy paradigm has emerged in European and international arenas, with actors such as the OECD and the European Commission assuming leading roles in a bid to reshape the nature and purposes of higher education.

This paradigm, nevertheless, remains deeply contested – its emphasis on competitiveness and an attendant managerial culture standing at odds with more traditional academic values.

Robert Harmsen, in his inaugural lecture, reconstructs these debates as a wider problem of public policy – arguing for a stronger recognition of the specificities of the university around a ‘connected core’ of teaching and research, as well as for the more general development of forms of ‘deliberative accountability’ in relation to public institutions.

The inaugural lecture takes place on Wednesday, 23 January 2013 at 18h00.

Robert Harmsen. 1984 BA (Honours) in Political Science, University of Alberta. 1984-85 Killam Exchange Student, Strasbourg. 1988 PhD in Politics and Government, University of Kent (UK) as a Commonwealth Scholar. 1988-1990 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Post-doctoral Fellow, Département de Science politique, Université de Montréal. 1991, Faculty Lecturer, Department of Political Science, McGill University. 1991-93 Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Laurentian University (Sudbury, Canada). 1993- 2001 Lecturer and 2001-08 Senior Lecturer in European Studies, Queen’s University Belfast. From November 2008, Professor of Political Science at the University of Luxembourg.

Professor Harmsen is the founding director of the Master in European Governance (since 2010) and further coordinates the public policy research axis within the European Governance research programme. His current research focuses on European and international public policy (with particular reference to higher education) and on questions of constitutionalism and fundamental rights in Europe and North America.