4. The ‘Academic Difference’: Reimagining Academic Freedom in European Liberal Democracies

Our paper aims to address the relationship between democracy and academic freedom (AF) starting from the transformations of higher education within liberal democracies, that is, within the socio-economic dynamics of late capitalism, which determine the change in the way AF has been conceived over the last thirty years. In Europe this concept was traditionally inspired by the Kantian-Humboldtian principle of the necessary distance of the university from society (‘freedom and isolation’). Yet in the new global scenario this model has increasingly been supplanted by the contrary neoliberal imperative of the ‘tuning’ between university and society. Under the justification of an alleged democratic ‘opening’ of the academy over and against an elitist ‘closure’, this principle has concealed the subjugation of the academy to the competitive market. Whereas the ‘Magna Charta Universitatum’ of 1988 still sought to maintain the modern European idea of the university while opening it up to a new horizon, the path taken by the EU has instead substantially liquidated that idea. Our proposal is to re-imagine the concept of AF in terms of ‘academic difference’, starting from a genealogical re-reading of the classical idea of ‘freedom and isolation’: a transformative, not restorative, re-reading that turns the dereferentialised condition of the contemporary university from a loss into an opportunity.