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The University of Luxembourg hosted the fourth scientific conference on Multilingual Universities from the 4th to the 6th February 2010, in which a case study about Campus Europae was presented by Professors Estela Pereira, Gilliam Moreira and Wilfried Hartmann. Their presentation focused on the complex issue of “making plurilingual professionals in a monolingual setting” and started by taking in consideration the ramifications of Europe turning its multitude of languages into an asset and the underlying necessity that professionals of all fields will be able to communicate in at least 3 to 4 languages. In spite of the fact that most European countries are to some extent multilingual, most higher education institutions are monolingual with variable use of English as additional lingua franca. Transforming themselves into bi- or multilingual institutions poses major challenges to universities, not least those of preserving their cultural, linguistic and academic identity and maintaining high levels of educational achievement in an age of internationalisation. Meanwhile Campus Europae supports individual universities as they face these challenges by fostering the development of a multilingual/intercultural campus based on strong curricular articulation and the teaching / learning of its participant languages, in which students can flow easily within their study fields.  The presentation also showed how universities and students benefit from CE, how the project works in practice and how personal and institutional multilingualism are fostered.

The findings presented at the conference were based on questionnaires and interviews that collected data on the experience of about 500 exchange students between the 18 universities of the network during the last 4 years, spending at least 10 months at a foreign university and studying in a foreign language, and relating the subjective impression to the scientific and linguistic achievement. A more detailed study case focused on the students exchanged under the aegis of Education and Teacher Training subject committee: this is an area which is considered to be a typical national affair, often disregarding students with different linguistic backgrounds. The study also shows how even in the complex structures of teacher training it is possible to successfully study in a difficult language setting, to acquire not only a new language but to gain insight in knowledge useful for the future professional work in the home country, notably when multilingual skills will enable education professionals to cope with the increase of mobility within Europe as well as situations that steam from ever increasing migratory movements.

The study also shows some of the impacts which are felt within the institutions which participate in CE: student mobility rates rise and diversify; more and different languages are spoken, taught and learnt; strategies are found for dealing with the increasing diversity and to adjust bureaucratic systems. Bottom-up processes of change develop which play their part in the transformation of Europe’s institutions towards a multilingual/ multicultural paradigm. This is particularly pertinent at a time when institutions feel obliged to enhance their international and European dimensions in order to meet externally defined targets and benchmarks which identify institutions as more or less ‘successful’ in the international arena.