UP at the T4EU Week in Kaunas: Renaissance of Liberal Arts and the Diversity of Experiences
From 20 to 24 October, the Transform4Europe held its T4EU Week “TransformEd: Renaissance of Liberal Arts” at Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), one of our European University partners. For five days, Kaunas became a space for European cooperation, creativity, and civic imagination, where the liberal arts tradition met contemporary transformations in science, technology, and society, and participants created, debated, and questioned the boundaries between disciplines. The week’s programme was divided into four tracks aimed at students, doctoral candidates, management and research, as well as additional cultural, recreational, and other activities. The student-focused programme complemented a broad academic offering of nine courses with a wide range of cultural and leisure experiences.
In the academic programme, each student could choose one of nine week-long courses - topics included communication, philosophy, heritage, music, environmental studies, and more. There were 13 UP students taking part of the courses and at the end of the week they expressed great satisfaction not only with the knowledge gained, but also with networking and establishing new connections with colleagues from other partner universities, as an important part of international integration. As beyond the intensive and engaging lectures, students could join a variety of daily social activities and strengthen the bond. One of important events, taking place at every T4EU week is the inclusion and diversity event – this time it was focusing on “University for All: Building LGBTQ+ Inclusion” and it featured many students, sharing their thoughts.
The programme also featured the T4EU Strategic Conference on the importance of resilience in today’s world, with opening speech from the President of the Republic of Lithuania, Gitanas Nausėda. In frame of the conference, UP is especially proud and happy to announce that UP professor Martina Paradiž (UP FHŠ) was awarded T4EU Alliance Champion Award, a symbolic recognition given to one of the participants in the T4EU Chair program, one of great flagship results of the alliance. The conference and rectors meeting also brought an important milestone in alliance development as there was an official ceremony, that marked the establishment of the Alliance as a legal entity, celebrated with solemn signing of the document by the rectors of the T4EU partner universities.
Management stream of T4EU week featured meetings of different steering and governance teams, featuring 20 UP employees and representatives of UP Student Council. The later also participated at a Student Forum with the President of the European Students’ Union. Employees attended the above-mentioned conference and meetings, tackling different topics about tasks in work packages, governance and project management meetings and sharing of cases of implementation of good practices. Among many important and successful outcomes, this time the meeting of Joint Grants Office, one of first important steps of establishing one, was of particular importance.
Open Science meeting and seminar featured Ana Slavec from UP. She had a presentation in frame of European Open Science Cloud – “vision for the Future and Challenges”, where she presented national practices and politics in Slovenia. She also moderated the “Building capacity for data stewardship and governance” that also featured Uroš Marušič (UP FAMNIT) as one of panellists. At the T4EU Innovation Agora one of UP projects was presented – the BIKE HEI project, featuring T4EU universities (along UP also University of Alicante, University of Saarland and Mariupol University).
UP is looking forward to the next T4EU week in May 2026, in Lisbon at Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
