Academic Freedom and European Knowledge Policy

The higher education reforms introduced in most European countries since the late 1980s reflected the ambition of public authorities to enhance the responsiveness of higher education and research in meeting society’s needs. These reforms focused especially on the governance and management, institutional autonomy, organization, and funding of higher education institutions, while the state of fundamental values and principles central to the mission of higher education, such as academic freedom was largely taken for granted. The impacts of the academic reforms have gradually brought a number of worries to the fore about the position of values and principles in the reformed academic systems and institutions. This concerns internal worries that have inspired various activities and debates within academia, and external worries among various higher education stakeholders. Strikingly, the external interest in the state of academic freedom in Europe emerged especially at the European level, that is, the EU Commission and European Parliament, the Bologna Follow Up Group and the EHEA, the ERA, and the Council of Europe. In this paper we will examine some of the main factors underlying the policy change at the European level that led to the political interest in academic freedom. This interest can be traced back to the case of the Central European University (CEU) in Hungary, and has culminated in parliamentary resolutions and new policy initiatives, such as the European Parliament Academic Freedom Monitor, the EHEA initiative to monitor the state of six fundamental values, and the Council of Europe project on “the democratic mission of higher education”. This European level policy change will be analysed from a number of alternative theoretical arguments, that is a ‘global scripts and hegemonic ideas’ argument, a ‘punctuated equilibriums and major transformations’ argument, a ‘path dependency’ argument, an ’intercurrence’ argument, and a ‘temporal sorting’ argument. These arguments contribute to a better understanding of how and to what extent sector specific filtering of global reform scripts has taken place at the European level. Furthermore they provide relevant insights into the conditions under which higher education is exempt from, invaded by or colliding with decision premises from outside its own institutional sphere, for example, from European concerns about international security risks.