Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour Laurent Bordes

UNIVERSITÉ DE PAU ET DES PAYS DE L’ADOUR

Laurent Bordes

Rector Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Adour

With the accelerated growth of globalization, our universities are challenged to develop their education, research, and innovation missions in a fertile but complex multi-scale context driven by societal challenges, encompassing local, regional, national, and increasingly international levels.

For UPPA, facing societal challenges of energy and environmental transitions through the involvement of socio-economic partners and the international opening constitute the DNA of the university to be performant in education, research, and innovation. Increasing our international visibility allows us to attract talented students and staff, willing to train and develop professionally while at the same time enriching our academic ecosystem and our territory with new skills and fostering our cultural diversity. Moreover, offering an international experience to all our students and to our academic and administrative staff allows us to develop our spirit of openness, to enrich our representation of the world, to diffuse cultural diversity, and to exploit all the opportunities offered by the European citizenship or experiences lived outside the borders of Europe.

The internationalization process usually involves a first phase of discovery, naturally initiated by the desire of people from two different institutions to know each other, as well as to learn or work together. A positive result of this first experience generally leads to the formal establishment of a cooperation project between the two institutions. The formalization of an international cooperation represents a commitment to co-operate, to share resources and to

make efforts to achieve specific internationalization goals set by the two institutions.

Our European alliance UNITA goes far beyond the scope of cooperation and conducts us to the highly ambitious development of international collaboration, where global objectives and the means to achieve them are perfectly shared, as we are allied to build a common vision of our European university of the future.

For UPPA, the UNITA alliance represents an ecosystem of common trust, where we share our best practices for co-designing and codeveloping innovative solutions to increase our attractiveness and accelerate our internationalization. We share and are able to mobilize our skills and resources to respond with agility and seize the opportunities offered to implement our common policies ensuring our development in Europe as well as overseas.

What is more, we are all actively involved in this vibrant and transformational collaboration. It does not only concern the governance level of our institutions, but also our undergraduate and postgraduate students, our academic staff and researchers, our administrative services, and our partners, whether public or private, national, or international.

This is a profound transformation that we have collectively initiated within the UNITA alliance and that integrates our students and staff thanks to the sharing of values, principles, knowledge, and objectives, within the framework of a genuine international collaboration.

We are convinced that the values of multiculturalism and multilingualism carried by UNITA are powerful factors of enrichment at an individual and collective level lying at the very heart of each member university’s mission, as indeed of European citizenship.