Tracking a Remarkable Intellectual and Policy Journey: Building a European Higher Education Area Furthering the Fundamental Values of Higher Education

This chapter identifies and discusses a remarkable dimension of the process of building the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), which concerns the fundamental values of higher education. From their very start, the Bologna Process and the EHEA have included references to values. The chapter tracks how these references evolved over 25 years from being unsystematic and not very central from a policy point of view to becoming a well-articulated and solid intellectual and policy framework for the entire Process. In 2018, members of the EHEA adopted a defined list of six EHEA “fundamental values of higher education”. They are now completing a process of adopting shared EHEA definitions for each fundamental value, have made explicit commitments about how they are expected to further in practice these values as jointly defined (“protect” “and “promote” the fundamental values), and have agreed in principle to implement a monitoring mechanism to assess how these commitments are implemented in all systems. In order to track and interpret the milestones and overall trajectory of this development, the chapter relies on an analysis of the Bologna Ministerial Communiqués. Other official documents are also considered, along with relevant contributions from the scholarship of the Bologna Process and EHEA.