Our 2030 Manifesto

The Global Academy of Liberal Arts (GALA) is different from other university networks. We are diverse, open, inclusive, collaborative, equitable, and global. As a dynamic, socially responsible, and ethical community of universities and colleges, drawn from across the world, we work together to make a transformative impact to people’s lives through teaching, research, and collaborations with local communities and partner organisations.  

We argue that the liberal arts – encompassing the creative arts, humanities, social sciences, and applied sciences – have a vital role in responding to a world facing environmental, political, and social crisis, and in challenging hostility to complexity, critical thinking, and creativity. We aim to redefine the liberal arts for the 21st century and to establish a new co-creative and intercultural model for collaboration in higher education to build a fairer, more equal, and less divided world.   

Our diversity is distinctive and provides an alternative model for international collaboration that cuts across many of higher education’s traditional structures and hierarchies. Our approach is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary; we bring perspectives from the Global South and Global North; and the universities and colleges to which we belong range widely in their size, focus, and history.  

Since our foundation in 2014, we have brokered individual and institutional connections and collaborations between our partners that have led to multiple funding applications and success, fellowship programmes, joint publications, student field-trips and residential courses, research visits, and guest lectures. We have also provided opportunities for partners to promote their own activities and opportunities, to share insights, good practice, and ideas, and to support their faculty and staff through a dedicated mentoring programme, bespoke training workshops, and annual conferences and seminars. 

Over the next five years, our faculty, staff, and students will develop innovative and interdisciplinary collaborations that demonstrate how the liberal arts can respond to the world’s most urgent challenges and opportunities, such as the climate emergency, technological disruption, conflict and violence, social and political division. We will work with communities and partner organisations, both locally and globally, to ensure that our work is meaningful, ethical, and equitable. We will grow to become a flourishing network of 25-30 partners from across the world, and we will be recognised internationally for our collaborative activities, achievements, and innovations.   

Our priorities

The GALA partners agree to

• support our diversity as partners and our distinctiveness as a community;
• foster active and intercultural dialogue between each other;
• facilitate collaborative opportunities for their faculty, staff, and students;
• host GALA events for faculty, staff, students and the wider public;
• always be open, positive, flexible, equitable, and adaptable in their approach to collaborative activities and opportunities;
• embed our aims and activities within their own institutional or faculty strategic plans;
• make meaningful connections with local communities and partner organisations in support of our collaborative activities
• maintain the highest standards of ethical and academic integrity in their collaborations;
• maintain an inclusive and equitable approach to the network’s governance and finance.

GALA’s Delegates

GALA is governed by a board of ‘Delegates’, each representing a specific partner. Their names are given below.

• Addis Ababa University: Fekadu Gashaw
• Bath Spa University: John Strachan
• Catholic University of Eastern Africa: Samuel Nyanchoga
• Columbia College Chicago: Steven H. Corey
• Claremont Graduate University: Joshua Goode
• Concordia University: Mark Sussman 
• Leuphana University Lüneburg: Andrew Brogan
• National Institute of Design: Sucharita Beniwal
• St Paul University, Ottawa: Patrick Leroux
• Södertörn University: Ingrid Forsler
• SWPS University: Olga Barbasiewicz
• Universidad de Antioquia: Ximena Alarcón Díaz
• Universidade Federal de Pelotas: Aline Castaman
• University of Namibia: Romanus Shivoro
• University of Parma: Diego Saglia
• University of Udine: Antonella Riem
• University of the Witwatersrand: Ruksana Osman
• Utrecht University: Frank Hakemulder

Contact us

You can contact us at gala@bathspa.ac.uk