Commercialisation of Academia, EU Law and Art. 13 of the EU Charter

This contribution will analyse areas of EU law and policy action that potentially contribute to or otherwise relate to the ‘commercialisation of academia’ through the EU fundamental rights lens based on the standard contained in Art. 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The notion ‘commercialisation of academia’ will be understood broadly (based on the AFITE project) to mean first, that higher education institutions adopt market and market-like behaviours; second that they are organised according to corporate management principles; and third, that they follow the rationality of other systems of society rather than its own rationality. This contribution will examine the nexus of ‘commercialisation’ and the EU’s activities in the European Higher Education Area, the European Education Area and the European Research Area, as well as its internal market law mechanisms that have an impact on national law and policy in the field of higher education. Subsequently, these activities and mechanisms will be analysed through the lens of Art. 13 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The content of this EU fundamental right has so far been subject to judicial elaboration by the Court of Justice of the EU in only one case C-66/18 Commission v. Hungary. At the same time, EU institutional proposals for the legislative elaboration of one element of this Charter right, namely freedom of scientific research, are well underway. For the above examination, however, the authors will need a more detailed standard of analysis. They will therefore employ a novel standard relying on the content of Art. 13 CFR as resulting from the work conducted in the AFITE project. In that, the contribution addresses the need for a closer attention to academic freedom in the EU’s own actions, as opposed to those of the Member States, and does so from a unique legal perspective and in relationship to one of the fastest emerging types of academic freedom threats.