Message of the President, December 5th, 2018

Dear friends and colleagues,

So, I am back, as promised. Within this letter I would like to give you an updated information on the exceptional Annual General Meeting (AGM).
First of all, after a careful preparation, and assurance of the presence of a notary at the meeting, we have to move the date of the meeting to a weekday (as far as the lawyers do not work during weekends), so therefore we decided to move the exceptional AGM to Monday, January 14, 2019.

I apologize for the change but let me encourage you on behalf of all members of the Board of Directors (BoD) to be active in the coming weeks. We are getting to a key moment for the future of ECBE, which is connected with our ENQA membership and registration to the EQAR register.
In order to be able to succeed with this process, we have to adjust our Statutes to the ENQA requirements. The BoD members have been working on preparation of the new statutes for quite a long time. The discussions have started already after the AGM in Amsterdam in 2016 mainly thanks to the efforts of Robert Rietbroek, but as the situation developed, and as we (mostly thanks to Bob Johnson, Polona Tominc, and Jan Vanherck) gained more experience and more “insights” from ENQA and its meetings, we gradually learned more and more things to consider and adjust. The key changes represent the necessity to separate evaluations from decision making on accreditations. Therefore, the proposal of Statutes includes firewalls between the decision making, evaluation, and also governance of ECBE making the procedures more transparent and avoiding potential biases.

As far as we have already applied for evaluation by ENQA, we have to adjust the statutes in January, so that we can proceed with the next steps. Therefore we urgently need your assistance. If you are not able to come to Brussels, please, give proxies (form attached) either to one of the board members, or to the member, who will be coming, so that we can discuss and approve the statutes. That is the most urgent issue. If you have any comments to the proposal of Statutes, you can, of course send it to any of the board members, and they will be certainly considered. If you send the comments to me (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) or Jan Vanherck (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) on or before December 15, 2018) we will also publish a Q&A session at our website, which should hopefully be “back in operation” by that time.

If we do not have sufficient participation at the exceptional AGM, it would be necessary to postpone the “ENQA process”, which will also cause a bad impression of ECBE even before we are actually evaluated. Approval of the Statutes will enable the upcoming visits from January on to be “in-line” with the ENQA requirements and will enable us having enough documentation to be reviewed within ENQA evaluation. Hope you understand it and will act accordingly.

The standard AGM in May can then serve as a continuation of preparatory processes, and, hopefully, can also represent an important milestone in ECBE history through “re-activating” ECBE as a member-driven organization. You know the date and place (May 23-25, Brussels), and hope you are looking forward to this event with the same enthusiasm as the current board members. It is a very good sign for me, that all of them (Maja Fosner, Dmitry Kuzin, Teresa Shafer, Polona Tominc, Alkis Tsiklis) are willing to continue to serve ECBE, if they gain your support, as well as (the currently only ones regularly elected) Jan Vanherck and myself, and, of course, as well as our honorable commissioners (Bob Johnson, Vladimir Kureshov, and Robert Rietbroek).

On behalf of all the Board members I would like to thank you for your cooperation and wish you a hopefully relaxed advent season. We will keep in touch.

Pavel Žufan
President

December 5th, 2018