Modern universities and their employees are facing increasing pressures to demonstrate that they are delivering value for the resources they are provided. Accreditations, evaluations and rankings are three features of this tendency. In terms of research there has been a growing focus on citations of researchers and impact factors of journals. All this has led to discussions regarding the effects on universities. A particular issue in that context have been the effects on creativity, which is crucial for the development of new knowledge. Against this backdrop a conference will take place at the Royal Palace of Herrenhausen (“Schloss Herrenhausen”) in Hanover on September 29-30, 2016 on the topic ‘University Governance: impeding or facilitating creativity?’. 

The conference, which will have between one and two hundred participants, is organized by the Academia Europaea expert group on Higher Education Research and Culture in European Societies (HERCulES) and the International Centre for Higher Education Research Kassel (INCHER-Kassel), University of Kassel, Germany, in collaboration with and with the generous support of the Volkswagen Foundation. 

The two day conference programme includes keynote speeches by the former Stanford President Gerhard Casper and the 2014 Chemistry Nobel Laureate Stefan Hell as well as presentations by a number of distinguished experts in the area of research on universities, science studies, and creativity. For more detailed information about the programme please visit the following website:

http://goto.uni-kassel.de/governance_creativity

A symposium in cooperation with the HERCulES Group of the Academia Europaea, the International Centre for Higher Education Research Kassel (INCHER-Kassel), and the Volkswagen Foundation.

For questions, please contact Professor Georg Krücken at kruecken@incher.uni-kassel.de; Professor Lars Engwall at lars.engwall@fek.uu.se; or Professor Erik De Corte at erik.decorte@ppw.kuleuven.be