The project Academic Profession and Societal Expectations: Challenges for University Civic Mission is a part of a EUROCORES/ EUROHESC Programme of the European Science Foundation (ESF), implemented in Croatia with the financial support of the National Foundation for Science, Higher Education and Technological Development of the Republic of Croatia.

The European Science Foundation, an association of 80 member organisations devoted to scientific research in 30 European countries, has launched the Higher Education and Social Change Programme (EuroHESC) within the EUROCORES (European Collaborative Research) Scheme. The EuroHESC Programme is a programme of interdisciplinary comparative research implemented into the changing relationship between higher education and society. Its aim is to develop theories and hypotheses about the relationship between the two important stakeholders and the factors which influence their mutual cooperation.

In the framework of the EuroHESC programme, four Collaborative Research Projects are being implemented, one of them being The Academic Profession in Europe: responses to societal challenges. Croatia is participating in it with its Individual Project The Academic Profession and Societal Expectations: Challenges for University Civic Mission. Project leader of this collaborative project is the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) from the University of Kassel in Germany, and along with Croatia, there are participants from research and scientific centres from Austria, Ireland, Romania, Switzerland, Poland and Finland.

The main research objective of the Croatian project is analysing two key elements in the development of the academic profession, namely: examining the prerequisites for civic mission integration through the academic profession on the national and institutional level and the readiness and possibilities of the academic profession to contribute to the processes of sustainable development, regarded as a part of the university civic mission.