On Thursday, 14 January 2021 Prof. Stéphane Pallage, Rector of the University of Luxembourg addressed his New Year wishes to the members of the University community.
The Rector stressed that 2020 was a highly successful year for the University of Luxembourg, who managed to maintain its activities and perform its missions despite the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring that the mission of education could be performed at a high level of quality and rigour and that the students could move forward in their studies during the global health crisis.
Experts and researchers at the University of Luxembourg have been highly active in response to the pandemic, within the national COVID-19 taskforce, in hospitals, as advisors to the government, in the Large Scale Testing campaign.
The Rector highlighted that with the pandemic strongly affecting public finances, the University needs to be prepared for scenarios in which the public funding in the University’s next four-year contract will not continue to grow at the same speed as in the past. The University has therefore chosen to slow down the growth of spending in 2020 and 2021 to build a buffer that will allow the University to keep growing even in years in which the public endowment might not. Slow-down is however not equivalent to budget cuts, stated Prof. Stéphane Pallage, who indicated that the University’s entities will continue to grow at a certain speed in 2021.