INTRODUCTION

Professor Renaud Dehousse, President of the EUI

This is the story of a special place...

Since 1976, the European University Institute (EUI) has been a distinctly international postgraduate teaching and research institute, training social scientists and policymakers with a keen eye for interactions between disciplines, societies, and national and supranational systems.

The EUI is clear about its role in today’s world. In its first ever strategic plan, the Institute aims—among other prioriPresident of the EUI: ties—at reaffirming its position as a hub for Social Science and Professor Renaud Dehousse Humanities in Europe. This starts with attracting top scholars and early stage researchers to perform excellent research. With a total of 9 European Research Council grants under our roof, a relatively small faculty, and state of the art resources, the EUI is perfectly placed to generate new insights that help our societies move forward. A concrete and decisive step towards becoming such a hub was taken in 2019, when the EUI and seven other leading European higher education institutions in the social sciences co-founded CIVICA—The European University of Social Sciences. Together we aim to build the European campus of the future: grounded in excellent learning and teaching, offering seamless mobility, promoting an interdisciplinary approach, and bridging education and research across all regions of Europe. CIVICA was selected in 2019 by the European Commission as one of the pilot European Universities, funded under the Erasmus+ Programme. Within this project, the EUI is in charge of creating a European space for doctoral and postdoctoral researchers in the social sciences and humanities. This focus rests on one of the defining features of the EUI, and the first of its three pillars of activities: the training of early stage researchers.

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10 In 2019, 88 researchers obtained their Ph.D. degree in economics, history, law and political and social sciences. The EUI Library celebrated the EUI’s 3000th thesis in our Cadmus repository (both Ph.D.s and LL.Ms counted). We also trained more than 2800 policy-makers and experts in executive trainings on issues ranging from climate change to cyber diplomacy. Saying that the world is quickly changing rings like a truism. However, that doesn’t make the choices higher education institutions face less real. Job markets and student expectations change. The key policy issues on the international policy agenda evolve. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalisation in education and research. As part of its new strategy, the EUI reorganised its support to excellent and policy-relevant research and created new interdisciplinary research groups. These groups look at issues related to democracy in the 21st century; inequality, welfare and social justice; crisis of expert knowledge and authority and technological change and society— all issues which happen to be of great importance to make sense of the COVID-19 crisis. The second pillar of activity of the EUI is the production of policy-relevant research. In this regard, the Institute’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies has long been a dynamic hub linking academia and the world of practice. The Centre delivers concrete outputs across sectors, from banking to migration and from energy to trade. In 2019, the annual Media Pluralism Monitor produced by the Centre for Media Pluralism and Freedom (CMPF) was identified by the new Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as a major resource in relation to EU media policy and the rule of law. The Florence School of Regulation built its Global Knowledge Hub, and is driving innovation by exploring regulatory issues in new geographical areas: South Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Looking beyond Europe is an explicit new priority for the EUI, as the Institute has increased efforts to engage more with audiences and partners

globally. The EUI’s new School of Transnational Governance (STG) is a prime example. Created in 2017, the STG has already firmly established itself as a window on the world. The school trains leaders on the concepts, methods and practices of governance beyond the state, which makes it part of the EUI’s third pillar of activities: training current and future policymakers. The last round of applications for the STG Policy Leader Fellowships resulted in 741 applications from 118 countries worldwide. In 2019, Nobel

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE

Peace Prize Laureate and former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf delivered the first distinguished Giorgio La Pira lecture in Florence. Hundreds of lectures, seminars and workshop brought together thousands of experts from all over the world in 2019, another step in our efforts to bridge the worlds of policy-making and research. The 9th The State of the Union, the EUI’s annual flagship conference, looked at ‘21st Century Democracy in Europe’ and included a debate between the Spitzenkandidaten for the European elections. In sum, 2019 was more than ever the year in

which key conversations about Europe took place in Florence.

In 2019, the central steering capacity and the academic governance of the EUI were reinforced with the appointment of two new deans: Professor Federico Romero as the new Dean of Research, and Professor Bernard Hoekman as the new Dean of External Relations. Their first reports are included below, after the reports of the Dean of Graduate Studies and of the Dean of Postdoctoral Studies, the latter being the new title of the Director of the Max Weber Programme.

Professor Renaud Dehousse President, European University Institute

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