Between 25 and 28 February, Public University of Navarra (UPNA) hosted in Pamplona UNITA Week 2025, the Alliance’s most important annual meeting and work event. More than 150 people, representing all the universities that make up UNITA, met for three intense days of work to assess the state of progress of the project and to establish future strategies for the consolidation of the Alliance.
New organisational structure
In the framework of the meetings and activities scheduled at UNITA Week, key issues for UNITA were addressed, such as a roadmap towards a UNITA blueprint, conformed by its fundamental strategies, the preliminary results of the project´s quality review, the progress in the impact observatory, new refinements in the sustainable financial model and the identification of the needs for digitalisation of the different tasks.
Other key issues concerning the structure, organisation and consolidation of the alliance were also addressed. These included the approval of a new organisational structure more aligned with the governance of universities, as well as the signing of the so-called Brescia Declaration, drawn up in October 2024 in Brescia, which is committed to an ambitious institutional model capable of carrying out, on a European scale, all the activities of a university. The UNITA Week also served as the setting for the change in the Presidency of the Alliance, a position now held by Ramón Gonzalo, Rector of UPNA, replacing Marilen Gabriel Pirtea, Rector of Universitatea de Vest in Timisoara.
The Pamplona meeting also set up a specific programme of meetings for the students who are part of the UNITA Student Assembly. These parallel meetings were mainly aimed at finalising the details of the upcoming Student Assembly elections and the creation of an alumni network for former students.
Values, training and sustainability
Among the parallel activities, the organization of Noche UNITA stood out, an outreach event in which talks by five researchers from UNITA universities were interspersed with songs performed by a children’s choir in five languages of the alliance. The goal: to remember and highlight the values that define and unite the university communities that are part of UNITA.
The programme also included a lecture on European joint degrees by Dorothy Kelly, coordinator of the ARQUS Alliance of universities and professor at the University of Granada, and a training session on Agile methodology for project management.
It is also noteworthy that the organisation of this meeting by the UPNA was carried out in accordance with one of UNITA’s fundamental values: sustainability. In this sense, criteria were followed to reduce the consumption of paper and plastic as much as possible, replacing it with other more ecological alternatives. The aim was to reduce as much as possible the ecological footprint of an event that brings together such a large number of people.
