Looking at the past policies proposed by the Bologna Process, one can see that structural reforms have been the most successful policy area of the EHEA. Even so, implementation is uneven, and some countries are far from fulfilling their commitments in one or more areas of structural reforms. This puts the credibility of the EHEA in jeopardy as a framework within which national qualifications are compatible, are issued within comparable qualifications structures, are quality assured according to agreed standards and guidelines and are described in easily understandable formats. Nevertheless, EHEA was successful in promoting structural reforms but less so at explaining the rationale and the principles behind them. The fundamental values on which the EHEA builds-in particular academic freedom, institutional autonomy, student participation in higher education governance, and public responsibility for higher education-have not received the This text is based on the Conference Report-Future of Higher Education-Bologna Process Researchers' Conference, Bucharest, 27-29 November 2017, prepared by the General Rapporteur of the conference, Prof. Adrian Curaj, with feedback from the Editorial Board and participants to the five thematic sessions.

The allocation of public funding to higher education has been increasingly subject to debates and change in recent decades. The changes have often been linked to changing beliefs and conceptions about how the public sector should be steered and managed. The backdrop to this was the New Public Management (NPM) approach to governing public organizations (Ferlie et al. 1996) which argues that the public sector should be addressed with similar management tools as the private sector. Under NPM, the predominant steering approach in European higher education systems has emphasized decentralization, with higher education institutions (HEIs) enjoying a large autonomy and receiving a lump sum budget from their funding authorities. To a large extent, HEIs are autonomous in areas such as the provision of educational programmes, managing their research portfolio, their human resources and their asset and property portfolio. This governance approach may be characterized as "state supervision steering" (Van Vught 1989). The government limits itself to a restricted number of "framework steering" elements: setting the tuition fees and distributing student financial support; organizing quality assurance of

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We all know that evaluation is a sophisticated science. However, when we talk about celebrating 70 years of the International Association of Universities (IAU), the word “sophisticated” gets an even deeper meaning. How do we evaluate the activity of a global organization, founded in 1950 by UNESCO, whose mission it is to be the voice of universities worldwide and the main defender of the two fundamental academic values: (i) academic freedom and (ii) university autonomy? Naturally, an anniversary is always an occasion to look back, just as it is natural to look ahead.