Bjørn Stensaker

Collegiality is a cornerstone principle of academic life, widely understood as a mode of governance and a social practice within higher education institutions (Sahlin and Eriksson-Zetterquist 2024)...

Student involvement in quality assurance is an important but under-studied part of higher education (see, e.g., Klemencic, 2018; Harvey & Stensaker, 2022). Existing studies have demonstrated that t...

The European universities initiative (EUI) has been presented by some as a disruptive policy initiative within the Europe of Knowledge given its speed, scale and scope of changes. In this article, a multi‐level governance (MLG) perspective is used to investigate the most important similarities and differences regarding the national policy responses to the EUI in Germany and Norway. The applied MLG perspective focuses on three dimensions: center‐periphery, state‐society, and international‐domestic. Although Norway and Germany can be considered to be most different systems from the perspective of our research questions, we found interesting similarities between the countries, particularly regarding the strong interest in participating in a European alliance. At the same time, the role of the state and in particular that of the political leadership in the form of the responsible sectoral ministries, has been strikingly different, reflecting the differences in the countries' relationship with the EU.