The overarching theme of the 2000 symposia is globalization and its effects on institutions. (The term "university" should be understood as shorthand for the increasingly broad spectrum of higher education institutions.) The symposia have examined this phenomenon through the prism of the five Universities Projects topics:

For the April 2000 symposium, twenty-eight participants from nine flagship universities throughout the Russian Federation joined representatives of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation, nine faculty experts from Canada, Estonia, Finland, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, and observers from foundations and international organizations for a five-day symposium on Russian universities’ growing regional role in the context of globalization.