Member Spotlight: CEUCE

How did CEUCE start?

Joseph Jupille, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Faculty Research Associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder, began the program in 2008. He actually established this center through a grant from the EU Delegation in Washington, D.C. supported by the EU Commission. Back in those days, there were only about eight centers who received these awards across the United States. It is a very competitive call for proposals

What is CEUCE's purpose?

Our mandate is to provide a platform for education and knowledge on the EU and to build transatlantic bridges between the EU and the Mountain West region of the United States. We do this through supporting teaching research and outreach activities. For example: this summer we are hosting a five-week intensive for students who will be living in Brussels and studying policymaking. PhD level instructors will be teaching about the history of the EU and how it came about and challenging the students to write a policy memo that could be entertained as a policy to present to the Parliament and the Council. The program hosts in-service staff from the European Commission who are working on real time issues like COVID-19 and Brexit into program classes, and they talk about what they're working on. This provides an amazing opportunity for the students to get face time and network with people with whom you can establish a relationship that might serve your professional career.

We conduct on-site visits to EU institutions to receive a more in depth understanding from representatives there on how the institution functions, how it relates with the other institutions, and then student questions are fielded to provide for a full learning experience. Then, of course, living in Brussels for five weeks, traveling to Luxembourg to go to the Court of Justice, the Court of Auditors and the Central Bank are extraordinary experiential learning opportunities.

Immersion in the culture is also something that lasts a lifetime, because it's visceral. You feel it much differently than sitting in a classroom in the United States. For research we help fund professors and students who are studying different aspects of the EU, and we are honored to say that we have an amazing scholarship that was established by Frieda Sanidas Leason and Bernard V. Leason that gives students the opportunity to get $2500 worth of scholarship to go study in the EU.

As far as outreach activities, the Swedish-American Chamber membership is a perfect example of that. We try to support organizations that have that international aspect, particularly those who are representing EU member states. We've worked with the Governor's Office, the Mayor's Office, the Office of Economic Development and International Trade, World Trade Center, all amazing organizations. We are working to help bring more information on the EU to greater audiences.

I'm going to take this moment to give you another example, because I think it's important for people to understand the possibilities. Don Smith, who's a professor at Sturm College of Law, and his colleague Anita Roan at the University of Copenhagen had put together a class where they were each teaching their own class, but periodically they would share their lectures so they would go between both classrooms. This was before Zoom, well before the pandemic. I was speaking with Don about this collaboration and thought: Why don't we make this formal? Why don't we bring some funding to the table and write a grant proposal that includes the United States and the two EU member states Denmark and Norway? (Norway is a member of different EU partnerships).

So we wrote a proposal between the University of Oslo, University of Copenhagen, and the University of Denver, and we formed this collaboration called TUCCCEL (Transatlantic University Collaboration on Climate Change and Energy Law) which was awarded a grant from the EU. We just expanded on what Don and Anita were already doing with shared lectures. In this remarkable collaboration, students got to know about U.S., Norway, Denmark, and EU law throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, the students gathered at one location for a conference. Their final project, a student team authored paper to present and compete with fellow classmates for best paper. The winning paper would be published in a law journal, which the professors made possible And to round up the immersion for that week of conference, we also did a field trip to some energy related projects. In Copenhagen, we went to the island of Samsø, an island with 100 percent renewable energy. The students enjoyed visiting with each other. We hope that program participants will take advantage of the opportunity to form lifelong career relationships.

Why did you join CEUCE?

Well, honestly, I needed a job, and I really do love the office management aspect of it. I'm an organizer. I love to organize. But as time went on I became really interested in the whole EU experiment. I really admired the model, the governance, the 27 member states coming together, making decisions, and really working through the process of deliberation. It was and still is to this day, quite awesome to me. I find it amazing. So this aspect of collaboration and partnership became the model for organizing the center and a strategic cornerstone for the longevity of CEUCE.

What would you say are CEUCE's ambitions for the future?

More of the same! I feel like we're doing a good job fulfilling our mandate and our commitment to share information about the EU, to educate folks about the EU. Our focus these past three years has been more on community colleges, more on smaller schools in rural areas, bringing in the organizations there, bringing speakers that we are fortunate enough to bring to the University of Colorado. We invite renown researchers and experts from the Commission or from the Delegation of the EU to the U.S., and we propose to take them to meet people who wouldn't normally have an opportunity to learn about the EU. We find that that is very welcome, so we look to partner more with community colleges, parent groups, civic groups, NGOs and whoever wants to bring an EU aspect of knowledge to their members.

Could you pinpoint the one thing CEUCE has done that you feel is its biggest accomplishment?

To do that would be hard because we have done some things that I thought were absolutely impossible. In 2015, we brought together several organizations, including the acting ambassador to the European Union from Washington, D.C., David O'Sullivan, to keynote an event called a “Global Town Hall”. We discussed important issues of the day, like climate change and energy law, and we were going into a different administration in the US at that time. Things were getting kind of wobbly as far as our membership to the WHO and to NATO and to the Paris Climate Accord and all those sorts of things, so we brought in all these experts and invited the whole community in the state of Colorado and the Mountain West. It wouldn't have been as productive or positive without the collaboration of these worldwide NGOs that had so much knowledge to share. There are several things that we have just been very lucky and honored to participate in.

How would you say the relationship is today between Colorado and the European Union?

Well, very good, because I think that CEUCE has brought attention to Colorado. For many years this area was just a flyover place. It was the East Coast and the West Coast, there really wasn't much in between. Everybody knew that there needed to be much more information, education, and knowledge brought here. And as Colorado's economy has grown so has  trade between Colorado and the EU. The World Trade Center will have all of those metrics, facts, and figures for you and we are co-dependent on each other in many ways for our economies. We have hosted EU country contingencies in Colorado to speak municipality and state government leaders, to explore ways to strengthen the ties between the EU and Colorado. Maintaining a strong transatlantic bridge between Colorado and the EU is a win win.

What's the main reason CEUCE decided to join SACC-CO?

This goes back to building partnerships and forming collaborations, knowing that we are stronger together than individually. Your mission is to build trade, right? To build relationships and to educate people about what it is to be Swedish and what Sweden does? What goes on there, how is their economy? You know, there may be many questions. We would like to support SACC Colorado to spread that information, to provide a platform for the EU and its member states to educate and inform as many people as is possible.

What do you want to get out of your SACC-CO membership?

Friendship. Collaboration. Partnership. You know, you guys have wonderful networking events. Those wonderful cocktail parties you arranged online have been nice. It's the camaraderie. It's the fellowship. I've got to say, the treasure of this job has to do with the people that I meet, that we collaborate with, just like this interview!