CRUCH and UNIFI close the work week planning future collaborations

With a closing session at the offices of the Council of Rectors, the week of activities of the meeting between representatives of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH), their counterparts from the Universities of Finland (UNIFI) and the Estonian Rectors' Conference (ERC), called Forum II, Chile-Finland, came to an end.

The meeting—attended by the entire delegation of rectors and academics from the various higher education institutions in Finland and most of the representatives of the CRUCH universities who hosted the UNIFI representatives at their campuses—synthesized all possible projects, links, or networks that could be built between the CRUCH universities and the universities belonging to UNIFI.

Víctor Cubillos, rector of the Austral University and president of the CRUCH International Relations Committee, who was in charge of moderating the final session, expressed his satisfaction with the excellent opportunity to have shared experiences with his Finnish counterparts and is very motivated to see the shared interests translated into tangible projects.

“Personally, I am very happy and grateful, motivated and excited because it has been a very intense week. Now we have to be serious, the task has to be done, and not be too ambitious. We need to choose a couple of projects between both boards of rectors and finalize them, monitoring their continuity,” he explained.

For her part, one of her counterparts from Finland, Aino Sallinen, PhD in Philosophy and rector for more than 20 years of the University of Jyväskylä, expressed during the last meeting with CRUCH representatives, her pleasure at being able to gather in her visits to the different Chilean universities the interests of these institutions and with this the possibilities that Finnish students could access.

“The experience helped us to look at ourselves and realize that we both actually know very little about each other’s countries. This visit to Chile helps us realize the importance of fostering communication with this country, for example in the field of teacher training, which is a priority area for the University of Jyväskylä, and I realized how important this issue is here.”.

Collaboration mechanisms

To conclude, Rector Cubillos pointed out that as a result of the two forums that have been held, it has been possible to clearly understand how to reconcile the interests of both universities, and for that purpose it was decided to establish 4 major collaboration mechanisms - which will be established in a document - with the objective that they truly materialize.

“First: Collaborations should be established directly between universities, where a researcher or academic works directly with a colleague. It's worth noting, however, that some topics are cross-cutting, and in these cases, it's much better to work on them collaboratively between UNIFI and CRUCH. Second: Mobility should be facilitated across our institutions, for both faculty and students. Third: All research and applications for national funding should converge into large-scale projects that bring together the work of groups from Chilean and Finnish universities with shared interests, guided by the principle of not competing against each other. For example, Centers of Excellence could be established to focus on areas such as education, mining, astronomy, and so on. Finally, we should have an annual event: a seminar or a major national conference, perhaps held alternately in Finland and here, attracting people from around the world and creating a robust forum for discussion,” the President of International Relations for the Council of Rectors explained in detail.