I spent part of October in Bucharest at the Bologna Future of Higher Education conference, trying, as I always do at these things, to get my head around what is happening in European higher education.

Part of the problem of trying to follow the Bologna Process is that there are many Bolognas that exist side by side. There is the “formal” Bologna – which is actually a crashing bore, unless you’re really into diploma supplements and qualifications frameworks and quality assurance processes – and the “informal” Bologna of student-centred learning, social dimensions and the Tuning process (basically, all the stuff Cliff Adelman writes about), which is all pretty groovy and gets most of the attention.

There is the Bologna of the Communiqués, the strong declarations about progress made and future challenges to be met, and the much messier Bologna of the Trenches, where the high phrases meet the cold reality of institutional reality. The latter, believe me, is a heck of a lot messier than anyone lets on.

There is European Bologna, which is what everyone agrees to, and there are the many Local Bolognas. Pretty much every country has its own, independent Bologna process because – being a process rather than a set of objectives or legal obligations – most national governments have been able to slip all sorts of local reforms (sometimes petty and irritating, sometimes decades overdue) over on higher education systems. As a result, the Bologna process has proceeded differently in different countries.

Finally, there is the Bologna of the Politicians (and sometimes Rectors, too), who deal in high politics, and the Bologna of the Education Policy Nerds (my peeps!), who have managed to use the brief policy opening offered by the initial flood of Bologna-mania to initiate and sustain a number of continent-wide discussions about a variety of pedagogical, curricular and managerial modernizations.

It is kind of amazing how all of these different Bolognas manage to co-exist side by side. We Canadians sometimes like to think of ourselves as flexible and pragmatic compared to those stuffy and inflexible continentals, but I’m pretty sure we’d have a nervous breakdown trying to deal with what Europeans take in their stride.

How do they do it? Basically, they don’t get hung up on small ideas like unanimity and full compliance. They get a critical mass of institutions or countries together with a bunch of stakeholders and start moving in one direction on an issue. If the others don’t join or don’t catch up, that’s their problem.

We could do that, too, on files like learning outcomes or credit transfer, if we really tried, and someone were willing to start the ball rolling. But it’s an approach so foreign to our psyche, my guess is it will never happen.