President and Rector, University of Vienna. The Gala Dinner at Barcelona’s the Casa Lotja de Mar, hosted by the Generalitat and open to all participants, will be presided over by Minister of Innovation, Universities and Enterprise, Josep Huguet. The Closing Ceremony on Saturday 29 will include an address by Ángel Gabilondo, President of the Conference of Spanish Rectors (CRUE) and Rector of the Autonomous University of Madrid.

The Conference is jointly organised by the EUA and the University of Barcelona, with the support of the Conference of Spanish Rectors and of the universities comprising the Catalan university system, and is to be held in the UB’s Historic Building, which overlooks the square la Plaça de la Universitat. The UB was proposed to the European University Association as the Spanish seat for the Conference of Spanish Rectors.

All the Conference’s academic activities will be conducted in the Historic Building, located in central Barcelona: the plenary sessions are to be held in the Paranymph Hall—recently refurbished to mark the occasion—and the various work group sessions and preparatory meetings will take place in the Aula Magna, the Ramón y Cajal Room, the Philology Lecture Hall (l'aulari de Filologia) on the street carrer Aribau, and in the lobby of the Historic Building, which shall serve as the Conference’s reception area and meeting point.

This year’s edition of the Conference will address the task of providing a sharper focus for the ideas that have emerged in the course of previous EUA sessions on such areas as the revision of human resource policy and new systems of university finance. Together, the ideas in these areas constitute a new vision of what the European university means at the beginning of the twenty-first century and together they are also characterised by a keen appreciation of the importance of globalised knowledge and of the marked role universities play in the social and economic development of states and regions.

EUA is the result of a merger between the Conference of European Universities (CRE) and the Confederation of European Union Rectors' Conferences, formalised in Salamanca on March 31, 2001, during the period in which former UB Rector Dr. Bricall presided over the CRE. To date, the Association has gained the membership of higher education teaching and research institutions in 46 countries, as well as that of national rectors’ conferences and other bodies in the field of higher education. It now comprises 800 members.