The Young Universities for the Future of Europe (YUFE) Alliance will integrate Sorbonne Nouvelle University (Paris, France) as a full partner. Sorbonne Nouvelle University will bring complementary strengths towards implementing the YUFE Vision 2030.
Sorbonne Nouvelle University (USN), like all YUFE universities, is a young and student-centred research-intensive university whose leading academic profile in Social Sciences and Humanities complements the other YUFE partners. USN, whose motto is “University of Cultures", is also strongly aligned with YUFE's core values of diversity and inclusion.
USN reached out to the YUFE Alliance on a possible partnership in December 2021. Following explorative and strategic exchanges throughout 2022, the YUFE Strategic Council, during the February 2023 YUFE Townhall in Rijeka, signed a letter of commitment indicating its intention to integrate USN as full partner into the Alliance, by making them a beneficiary of the Alliance's core Erasmus+ project. We are happy to share that the related amendment request has been submitted to the European Commission on 31 March 2023.
All the existing YUFE partners look forward to welcoming a new strong partner that shares and enriches YUFE's ambitious goals for internationalization and innovation in the field of European Higher Education, Research, and Innovation. Together with USN, they have shaped an incremental approach towards the integration of a new full YUFE partner to facilitate the engagement of USN along with its community and stakeholders in the pre-existing YUFE collaboration.
For YUFE, the addition of a new full university partner in our consortium is an exciting step. We understand the interest of other higher education institutions to join YUFE and to work with us as a positive signal showing that the European Universities model we develop is interesting for institutions beyond our own partners. With USN, we attracted a particularly strong new partner that shares our mission and values and compliments the existing expertise within the Alliance" Prof. Rianne Letschert, Maastricht University President, and YUFE President.
By integrating USN as a full partner in the Alliance, YUFE also officially kicks-off work on its expansion and capacity building strategy that will define concrete approaches to continuously develop the scalability and transferability of the YUFE European University model.