With three campuses – one in each of the historical territories that make up the modern-day Comunidad Autónoma of the Basque Country – and with 31 faculties and schools, the Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU) makes a decisive contribution to Basque society. In fact, Basque society today would be hard to imagine without the active participation of the university and without the intense intellectual debate that this institution promotes. The UPV/EHU is responsible today for more than 90% of the research carried out in the Basque Country. At the same time, it offers more than 100 undergraduate degrees, a wide range of its own degrees, and master’s and doctoral programs. The University has around 44,000 students, 5,000 lecturers and 1,600 administrative and services staff. But the most important characteristic of the institution is its commitment to its values: the values that correspond to a public university, firmly rooted in Basque culture, but open to the outside, a university which fully supports research, which believes in excellence and in personal development, but which also promotes the values of harmony, a critical spirit, equality, solidarity, and social responsibility.

The UPV is heir to a long historical tradition which dates back to the Universidad de Oñate, founded in the sixteenth century, and the Universidad Vasca, created in 1936, under the new Statute of Autonomy. The UPV/EHU came into being in 1980, after the change of name of the Universidad de Bilbao, founded in 1968, and the incorporation of new teaching centres. The University has a wide range of faculties and schools: from the School of Nautical Science and Naval Machinery, which dates back to the eighteenth century, to the centres that emerged over the following years and decades, and to the Faculty of Physical Activity and Sports Sciences, a recent incorporation. The creation of the new UPV/EHU was a response to the challenges of modern society and to the need to provide the best possible tools for teaching and research.

The UPV/EHU offers 100 undergraduate degrees bearing ECTS credits and adapted to the requirements of the European Higher Education Area. It also has a well established range of official university master’s programs, which, in most cases, qualify successful students for doctoral studies. More than 50% of the UPV’s doctoral studies have been awarded the mención de calidad by the Spanish Ministry for Education in acknowledgement of their quality. The UPV/EHU has embarked on an ambitious Multi-lingual Plan in which its courses will be offered in a variety of languages. More than 40% of students study in Basque, but almost all the centres offer teaching in English and other international languages. Under the plan, English is being gradually introduced into teaching and in fact more than a hundred subjects are already taught in this language. Some of the official master’s degrees are taught entirely in English. The University’s postgraduate courses are closely linked to the needs of society, and the master’s courses are organized in cooperation with firms, associations and technological centres. Many are interuniversity master’s courses organized jointly with other institutions either in Spain or abroad. The master’s programs represent the taught component of the doctorate, with the possibility of carrying out research with the groups at the UPV/EHU or in cooperation with universities and centres elsewhere in Europe leading to the presentation of the PhD thesis.

The UPV/EHU is responsible for more than 90% of the research carried out in the Basque Country. It has 195 research groups currently engaged on more than 350 research projects in experimental sciences, technology, health sciences, social and legal sciences, and the humanities. Each year at the UPV/EHU more than 250 PhD theses are presented (a quarter of them in Basque or in English) and around thirty patents are applied for. Research at the University benefits from the work of support facilities such as the Ikertu On-line system, a computing platform for automating management processes in research, and the UPV/EHU’s general research services unit (SGIKER) which makes large-scale investments in the latest scientific and technological equipment and provides technical personnel to help members of the university community carry out their research projects. All this activity leads to the publication of around 5,000 scientific articles per year and technology transfer contracts worth around 15 million euros.

The UPV/EHU is involved in many extra-mural activities, some at local level and some international. The San Sebastián summer courses were held this year for the twenty-eighth time, while the specialized Bilbao Art and Culture Meetings have been running for a decade. These two events form the nucleus of the summer activities organized by the UPV/EHU. The University also has numerous extramural activities promoting projects that are mutually beneficial to the institution and to society at large: for example, the Miguel Sánchez Mazas Chair, which promotes reflection on science, technology and innovation, and others that focus on international studies, sustainable development, environmental education, the world’s linguistic heritage and the family firm, and the interuniversity chair on law and the human genome. In parallel, the University offers a wide range of cultural and artistic activities and new projects like the university shop ehudenda, which advertises the University’s trademark in the commercial centre of the new Bilbao.

In consonance with its motto “Eman ta zabal zazu” (“Give and distribute [the fruit]”) the UPV has a long history in the area of international relations. The motto was taken from a song by a Basque-speaking poet of the nineteenth century, Iparragirre. Under the Erasmus student mobility program, 400 agreements have been signed with European universities, and more than 1,000 students move either to or from the Basque Country each year. Other programs, such as UPV/EHU-AL, which promotes exchanges with Latin America, and the program “Otros Destinos” (“other destinations”) supervise exchanges of hundreds of students on a yearly basis. International projects are also run by many bodies inside the UPV. An example is the program of in-company placements in foreign firms, organized by the Vice-rectorates. Cooperation for development is another important area inside the University’s international activity. Together with the action for education for development and calls for financial support for projects of university cooperation, the UPV also organizes a placement program in various countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia, in which around 100 students from different faculties and schools take part.

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