The World-Class Multiversity: Global commonalities and national characteristics

World-Class Universities (WCUs) are nationally embedded comprehensive higher education institutions (HEIs) that are closely engaged in the global knowledge system. The article reviews the conditions of possibility and evolution of WCUs. Three interpretations are used to explain worldwide higher education: neoliberal theory, institutional theory, and critical political economy, which give greater recognition than the other theories to the role of the state and variations between states. World higher education is evolving under conditions of globalization, organizational modernization (the New Public Management), and in some countries, marketization. These larger conditions have become manifest in higher education in three widespread tendencies: massification, the WCU movement, and organizational expansion. The last includes the strengthening of the role of the large multi-disciplinary multi-purpose HEIs ("multiversities"), in the form of both research-intensive WCUs with significant global presence, and other HEIs. The role of binary sector and specialist HEIs has declined. Elite WCUs gain status and strategic advantage in both quantity and quality: through growth and the expansion of scope, and through selectivity and research concentration. The balance between quantity and quality is now resolved at larger average size and broader scope than before. The final section of the article reviews WCUs in China and considers whether they might constitute a distinctive university model

Adoption of the\ua0SDGs as a\ua0Reporting Framework at\ua0the Alma Mater Studiorum (University of Bologna) in Italy

With 86,509 enrolled students, and personnel over 5500 units (University of Bologna 2018), the University of Bologna, one of the most ancient Western higher education institutions was established in 1088 A.D. (University of Bologna 2017a) and, located in a middle-sized town of Northern Italy, faces daily challenges in a constantly evolving society with continuously changing paradigms. At Alma Mater, a multi-campus structure with over 1,162,506 m2 of facilities only in Europe placing the University as the first European university for international mobility with 2787 outbound students and 1970 inbound students in 2018 (INDIRE 2019). This geographic spread and other factors require a broad and long-term vision of the governance strategy, which goes side by side with the central activities of researching and training in full respect of the freedoms of science and teaching, as it is stated at Art. 3.1 of the University Statute (Italian Republic 2011). The considerable human and physical of the University system lead to both the need and the duty to harmonize the relationship within people, between people and the environment\u2014that is, between the University and all its stakeholders. Recognizing its role in the society and willing to be a positive actor of change, combining innovation with the history that it has consolidated over time, the Alma Mater Studiorum is fully aware that its activities can produce a significant impact, both direct and indirect, on the community and in the regio