Mission, Vision and Strategy
Mission
To form people, cultivate science, and transform the country and the world through the excellence of example.
Vision
To contribute to the strengthening of the Europe of knowledge, promoting excellence through teaching of a Christian humanist character and through research that transforms the lives of people and the planet.
To empower a new generation of leaders, focused on wisdom and on the flourishing of the person, serving communities, the country and humanity, with respect for their diversity.
2026-2030 Strategic Development Plan
The Studio University | Fostering wisdom for a new humanity
At a time of profound social, political and technological transformation, quality education focused on the flourishing of the person and grounded in robust and transformative research, constitutes the only guarantee of a future for humanity. Over the coming decade, higher education will undergo profound transformations that are already becoming apparent in the reality of our campi. Universities face a set of profound challenges that are distributed, in an interconnected way, across the social, technological and political domains, reflecting broader transformations in society. These challenges affect not only the functioning of higher education institutions, but also their role as spaces for the production of knowledge, education for citizenship and critical debate.
The development of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence models is changing the way the university organises, manages and plans its development, and above all the way in which its mission is defined. The modern university, evolving from a model centered on in-person interaction between groups of students and teachers, is now challenged by the adoption of generative artificial intelligence models, by the integration of technology-based teaching and learning practices, favouring self-learning models based, for example, on gamification, at the expense of traditional active methodologies grounded in dialogue. The rapid digitalization of teaching and research has nonetheless brought significant opportunities, such as broader access to information and new learning methodologies. The university, and above all a Catholic university, is called to integrate technology in a critical and ethical manner, avoiding both a certain algorithmic tyranny, on one hand, resistance to progress, on the other, ensuring that innovation serves broader educational and social objectives.
Likewise, the broadening of access to information requires the university to enhance its capacity to transform information into knowledge. Beyond the technological challenge, which constitutes a genuine paradigm shift, demographic change and political and geostrategic tensions affect the positioning of the university as a space of critical openness to the world and encounter between people from different ethnic, social, economic and cultural backgrounds. Indeed, they alter its role in promoting a cultural diakonia, as Pope Leo XIV notes.
In the same way, sustainability asserts itself as a cross-cutting and unavoidable challenge. As spaces for the production of knowledge, universities have a crucial role in research and education for sustainable development, contributing to innovative solutions that respond to global environmental crises. They are thus called to adopt environmentally responsible practices, reducing their ecological footprint, promoting energy efficiency and the sustainable management of resources. In addition, sustainability also involves an economic and social dimension: ensuring the long-term financial viability of institutions and educating citizens who are aware of climate and environmental challenges.
Finally, the university is a bold space for the creation of new solutions oriented towards sustainable economic growth, working with the industrial and innovation business ecosystem to contribute to an added value economy. In sum, the social, technological, political and sustainability challenges are deeply interconnected and demand integrated and strategic responses. The ability of universities to meet these challenges will determine their future and their relevance as institutions fundamental to the construction of a more just, democratic and sustainable society.
It is under these circumstances that Universidade Católica Portuguesa presents its Strategic Development Plan (SDP), articulated around the idea of the Studio University as a space for the promotion of wisdom. This plan (SDP) brings together a work of joint reflection with society’s stakeholders, its academic units and staff, students and the surrounding community, organisations and employers, alumni and entrepreneurs. The idea of the studio university draws inspiration from the concept of studium, a term that etymologically underlies study, understood as a reflective, introspective and disciplined practice of learning and research. However, the Latin term is also at the origin of the expression studio, atelier, a place of artistic practice, associated with creative freedom and even with transgression. In turn, the new SDP clearly adopts a strategy anchored in fostering human development, in which the instrumental dimension of the production of knowledge is elevated into a cross-cutting path towards the pursuit of wisdom. If the former secures the competences to earn a living, the latter structures the true possibility of having a life — an integral life, one of solidarity, aware of the universal fraternity that guarantees a sustainable future for humanity.
A university that is a studio develops its action around creative singularity. It does not work to be the same but gives priority to difference. This is manifested from the outset in its matrix identity, but also in the strategic choices it makes and in its positioning. In a studio-university, the richness of diversity is cultivated and transformed into creation, knowledge, and social, cultural, ethical and economic values. The studio is an ambitious and courageous workspace, where the horizon to come is explored.
Isabel Capeloa Gil
President of Universidade Católica Portuguesa