Gathering around 300 higher education representatives and stakeholders, the conference on "Diversities and Commonalities – the changing face of Europe’s universities” focused on identifying solutions for universities to better adjust to the changes and challenges of the last decade.

In her report, "Institutional Diversity in European Higher Education: Tensions and Challenges for Policy Makers and Institutional Leaders", Sybille Reichert (independent consultant based in Switzerland) noted that the European discussion of diversity in higher education is very different from the conversation in the United States, where the subject is often framed in terms of the racial and ethnic profiles of students and staffs. Related discussions of "internal diversity," are also on the agenda in Europe, but the "hotter political issue is external diversity," which she described as "the multitude of orientations that institutions want to pursue, given the multitude of demands that society puts on higher education."

The event was structured into working group sections on designing and implementing institutional strategies, diversity in excellence and strengths of European diversity in a global context.