Lunch Lecture - Karsten Schubert

Two Concepts of Academic Freedom. The Contested Relationship between Academia and Politics in the Debate on Academic Freedom.

The Network for Academic Freedom (Netzwerk Wissenschaftsfreiheit) diagnoses the politicization of scholarship by critical theories as a central danger to academic freedom. Politicization is one-sidedly attributed to the representatives of critical approaches, while the own position is presented as "purely scientific" and politically neutral. The lecture criticizes this liberal and negative understanding of academic freedom as the absence of politics and proposes a new, critical understanding of academic freedom. Based on the analysis that rigid structures of power and privilege are the central obstacle to collaborative work on scholarly objectivity, the critical notion of academic freedom concerns the reflection and transformation of the relationship of academia and politics. It focuses on the diversification of access opportunities and viewpoints within the academy - that is, the redistribution of power and privilege. The lecture develops this understanding from a discussion of the relationship between academia and politics in two different justifications of academic freedom and discusses the danger that the diversity politics demanded by the critical understanding of academic freedom may limit academic plurality. The strength of a critical understanding of academic freedom, as opposed to the traditional apolitical understanding, lies in thinking of the relationship between academia and politics as fraught with tension, thus drawing a realistic analysis of the winners and losers of different academic policy practices.