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Founded around 1088 and still teaching almost a millennium later, the University of Bologna holds a distinction no rival can match. It never stopped operating, making it the longest-running university in the Western world. Its motto, Alma Mater Studiorum, “nourishing mother of studies”, befits an institution that has outlasted popes, empires and, more recently, several waves of digital disruption.

“The University of Bologna is renowned as the oldest university to have operated continuously��thanks to��its ability to focus on the challenges of each era and make use of advanced scientific and cultural tools,” said rector Giovanni Molari. “There is no tension between tradition and innovation.”

But��Molari explained that the university’s longevity does not mean it operates like an artefact in a museum, carefully preserved behind glass and shielded from change in the name of protecting its past.��“The university has a strong tradition, a strong relationship with the city. Ever since the beginning of our history, we’ve opened the university to the world.”��

After all, Bologna was founded by foreign students who banded together as a universitas scholarium to negotiate rights with the city and hire their own scholars on their own terms. It went on to produce scholars such as astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (famous for coming up with a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre), and in 1732 appointed Laura Bassi to a paid teaching post in physics, making her the first woman anywhere to earn a salary as a university academic.

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Today it is Italy’s highest-ranked institution in the ߣߣ��Ƶ World University Rankings, sitting at joint 111th globally in the 2027 edition and boasting a fifth consecutive year of improving its rank. It has been in the elite global top 200 since the 2019 edition.

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University of Bologna

Molari, who took on the role in 2021, pointed to investment as��key to the university’s success. Bologna has drawn on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Italy’s post-pandemic European Union-funded investment programme, to put roughly €80 million (£68 million) into laboratories, instruments and new buildings across agriculture, engineering, medicine and chemistry. It has also deepened ties with industry, running joint labs and research projects with private��firms across several fields, giving academics a direct route from the lab to commercial application and companies early access to Bologna’s research pipeline. It is a model Molari sees as central to staying competitive, and one reflected in the numbers – an industry score of 81.2 and a research quality score of 81.9, according to the latest WUR data.��

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Internationalisation��has been a major part of the��university’s��strategy.��Molari described it as central to Bologna’s civic mission. The institution’s share of new enrolments from abroad has risen from 8 per cent to 16 per cent over the past three years. International students��make up 13 per cent of the student body, a large proportion by Italian standards. Research partnerships extend to California, South Korea, Singapore and Japan, with dedicated funding to boost researcher mobility. Geopolitics has also played into Bologna’s hand. “Economic and sociopolitical challenges, such as Brexit, have made continental Europe, and Bologna specifically, relatively more attractive to students and staff,” Molari said.��

But money has remained a constraint that Bologna shares with the rest of Italian higher education. Unlike the US or UK, Italian universities operate with little philanthropic tradition. “In Italy it’s not easy to have donors but we are working to increase the number of donors,”��Molari��said. That makes state investment particularly important to Italian institutions’ ability to compete internationally.

Looking ahead, European universities face a slew of challenges, such as adapting to climate change, AI, the energy transition and quantum computing – the development of a new generation of computers that could eventually outperform today’s machines in areas such as drug discovery, Molari said. These were fields where serious progress required major capital, infrastructure and talent, resources that institutions in the US and China were often able to��get��more easily, backed by larger budgets and less regulation. “Maintaining Europe’s competitiveness while upholding its fundamental values will be one of the defining tasks of higher education in the years ahead,” Molari said. In “an increasingly fragmented world”, he added, universities had a duty to “provide credible models of leadership”, a role Bologna, perhaps more than any institution on the continent, has had centuries to practise.��

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com��

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