Charting Academic Freedom in Europe

Liviu Matei

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-56316-5_28

Abstract

AbstractThe paper argues that the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) is currently experiencing a crisis of academic freedom and discusses the need to chart a course out of this crisis. The paper claims that the crisis, with its two dimensions (intellectual and empiric), is specific to Europe/EHEA; it is not a global or national crisis, although there are challenges to academic freedom in all other parts of the world and also within individual national higher education systems in Europe. Efforts have been started recently to address key challenges to academic freedom in the EHEA and eventually plot a course out of this crisis. The paper outlines how a comparative and applied interdisciplinary study of these efforts helps reveal their nature and scope, identify the actors/stakeholders involved as well as those, astoundingly, absent; it also allows to discuss and assess early on the chances of success and identify challenges and gaps in these efforts. The paper concludes that charting a course for academic freedom at present in the EHEA is an intergovernmental process. Higher education institutions and academics are not part of this process.

Highlights

The paper discusses the need to chart a course for academic freedom in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA)
This crisis is specific to Europe/EHEA1; it is not a global or national crisis, there are challenges to academic freedom in all other parts of the world and within individual national higher education systems in Europe
Together with Julia Iwinska, we have argued that a specific concept and regulatory model for institutional autonomy, understood in the sense of a set of freedoms for higher education institutions as institutions, have been developed in the EHEA—but nothing similar has been done for the notion of academic freedom, understood to refer to specific freedoms of the individuals working in higher education institutions (Matei and Iwinska 2018)