EUA Experts Commended VMU’s Liberal Arts Philosophy
After two visits at VMU earlier this year by the Institutional Evaluation Program’s (IEP) team of international experts, the official final report of the university’s evaluation has been published, which commended VMU’s progress in supporting its vision as a liberal arts university, as well as expanding its student and lecturer mobility, and developing the decision-making culture.
The IEP is an independent membership service of the European University Association (EUA) that offers evaluations to support the participating institutions in the continuing development of their strategic management and internal quality culture.
IEP expert team visited VMU in April and September this year and attended meetings with faculty representatives, the rector, vicerectors, centre directors, lecturers, students, other members of the VMU community, and its partners. The meetings were a part of VMU’s voluntary participation in the external institutional evaluation of its activities.
VMU received EUA’s accreditation in 2005, becoming the first university in Lithuania to join the association. The new report appreciates the university’s progress achieved over those last nine years. It notes that VMU followed the evaluation team’s recommendations to more emphatically establish itself as a liberal arts university and disseminate this vision among VMU community and society at large.
“The team respects the pervasive awareness of the liberal arts philosophy at VMU. It is assured that university’s external partners are conscious of this unique feature and value it. The evaluation team recommends that VMU adapts the philosophy of “artes liberales” with a view to the changing external environment and to the diverse concepts in its internal community, in order to ensure, that this feature,which the team considers an asset, will be retained in future”, the report said.
The evaluation also underlined another positive: the effective participatory decision-making culture in spite of a comparatively large amount of organizational units.
Other recommendations by the experts included making use of good practices in student guidance in some faculties by sharing their experiences with other faculties, continuing to provide feedback on the outcome of quality evaluations and their results into strategic planning, focusing on selected collaborations with foreign partners, such as through ECOLAS, etc.
The members of the IEP expert team who evaluated VMU were Lothar Zechlin (Chair), Christina Ulenius, Hans Beunderman, Annakaisa Tikkinen, and Christina Rozsnyai (Team Coordinator).
