Abstract
Academic freedom is currently threatened not only in dictatorial or authoritarian regimes but in democracies as well. Thus, this analysis of the contemporary French experience, in which we observe a destructive climate maintained by intellectuals and political actors on both the right and the left. The extremization, intolerance, and radicalization of debates have increased since the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017. At the same time, university institutions often appear overwhelmed or powerless in the face of both internal and external dangers.
Academic freedom is almost always threatened in authoritarian or dictatorial regimes. Threats can occur when extreme economic liberalism, at the heart of democratic functioning, as was the case in Japan in the mid-2010s, seeks to eliminate entire sections of state-financed research and higher education by targeting the humanities and social sciences for the benefit of disciplines deemed useful—medical or veterinary studies, for example. Other times, a private university is subjected to a financial power that can make or approve decisions that curb freedom. But how are we to understand that such threats appear in a democracy where the public university’s autonomy has been respected for centuries, which is currently the case in France? To address this question, we must consider diverse social, political, cultural, and historical elements.
Charlie, Hyper casher, Bataclan: the terrorist attacks of January and November 2015 in Paris have led authorities to consider, then adopt, exceptional measures that are grounds for concern when viewed from the perspective of freedom: they restrict it in ways that could prove lasting and apply the measures to those other than supposed or actual “terrorists.” Additional steps were taken following the public health crisis in 2020 and, in the same way, and the executive strengthened itself to the detriment of the judiciary and legislature.
The erosion of academic freedom in France is located in this sequence of events, and thus in the general development of the State, institutions, and civil society to which this work is devoted. We will therefore now address higher education and research institutions. To specify: the word “university” will be used for the convenience of language, to designate institutions belonging to the group formed by universities, stricto sensu, but also Research and Higher Education Institutions (Grands établissements) or Institutes which are distinguished from them, all under the same system.
A harmful climate
Historically, universities, in the broadest sense, have been the scenes of protest, activism, and political confrontation. But for several years, a particular climate has developed, one of internal intolerance and liberticidal impulses linked to the broader movement of society.
The indictment of academic freedom, ad hominem intimidation, boycotts, and fierce pressure can be internal, come from outside the university, or can even be the work of activists inside or outside the establishment concerned. In particular, anything related to historical memory is likely to become the subject of tension and radicalism. This could be the work of an anti-Semitic or nationalist group, as was the case when a seminar at EHESS (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales) on the history of the Holocaust as it related to Polish anti-Semitism was interrupted by Polish nationalist extremists (February 21–22, 2019). It can also come from activists using unacceptable methods to promote a cause that is itself respectable. What happened with historian Gilles Veinstein is perhaps prescient from this point of view.
In the mid-1990s, the renowned and respected scholar, historian, and director of research at EHESS became the target of a group that was mobilized on behalf of the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. For months, his seminar was interrupted, and his election to the Collège de France (effective in 1998) was threatened. Activists for the Armenian cause reproached him for having defended Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islam, who in 1993 affirmed in Le Monde that the word “genocide” was not appropriate when referring to the massacres of Armenians in 1915. Any debate was impossible, as passion reigned, and violence loomed.
While history, collective memory, and culture provide some of the most central themes of contestation that pervade universities, social concerns persist. Since I have just mentioned the EHESS, how can we not point out the presence of a rather social protest, related to the prospects and work and living conditions of teacher-scholars and, especially students? These protests unite, according to the logical union sequence, positions close to the far-left and involve behaviors (occupation of spaces and destruction) that make one recall the pre-terrorist “autonomy” that reigned in Italian universities in the 1970s.
Cultural and social dimensions: intimidation, but also fanaticism, intolerance, and violence within institutions of higher education and research establishments correspond to a diversity of causes on behalf of which students or teachers, and others, possibly from the outside, demand and try to impose a boycott of a teacher or a ban on a conference given by an outside speaker. The freedom to teach and to learn, the debate of ideas and the desired exercise of critical thought are all affected. The case of the Institutes of Political Studies, IEPs, deserves consideration here, without being able to say to what extent its experience is generalizable and paradigmatic of other less publicized events.
The institutes of political studies
In April 2019, students at Sciences Po Paris attempted to prevent the academic Alain Finkielkraut from giving a lecture. Sciences Po Lille hosted a debate that invited France’s major political parties and elicited student opposition, denouncing on the institution’s walls: “Sciences Po collabo avec les fachos” (Sciences Po collaborates with fascists) because a representative of the National Rally was invited.
High tensions, which can border on intolerance, and are always related to cultural and identity issues, arose in the context of the Duhamel case. Frédéric Mion, director of Sciences Po Paris, was forced to resign for not having acted on the information available to him relating to the behavior of Olivier Duhamel, guilty of incest, and who had previously resigned from his presidency of the National Foundation of Political Science after his crime was revealed. Accusations of sexual harassment have since erupted, and the hashtag #SciencesPorcs (SciencePigs) has found great success. Controversy over Duhamel’s succession pitted the camps of two “in house” political scientists against one another, Pascal Perrineau and Nonna Mayer; the place or theme of “postcolonial” studies was not insignificant in this conflict, which was known to revert to ad hominem attacks and put research and teaching at stake.
In Grenoble, an “affair” made national headlines, in which accusations of “Islamophobia” and “fascism” were launched, relayed, and disseminated by the majority student union (Union syndicale) against two teachers and posted on walls and social media. A report commissioned by minister Vidal noted the lack of respect for the law on the part of the student unionists, who, in denouncing and insulting others, demanded the elimination of certain courses without respect for either the law or basic rules relative to the freedom of expression. The inadequacy of the Institute administration’s reaction, which failed to adopt a clear and firm position on the case, is also to blame.
At Sciences Po Bordeaux, the mood was heavy and lastingly tense surrounding the subject of sexual violence in the institution. Feminist activists spoke about the “violence of the administration” and denounced its insensitivity to the issue.
It is not insignificant that IEPs are thus caught up in a logic that poses real questions, and which is likely to jeopardize academic freedom. On the one hand, these Institutes form future elites and are suffused with the political themes of the moment, a significant cultural burden to which we will return; on the other hand, their governance has often aged poorly and is ill-adapted to ensuring rights and freedoms when they are threatened. The problem lies in the articulation of social and cultural issues that plague society. Here we find the general analysis of this book: on one side, the destruction of the State and public institutions, on the other, fragility and therefore also tendencies to radicalize among social and cultural actors who fail to make themselves heard at the institutional and political level. Together, this creates conditions highly conducive to the indictment of academic freedom.
The cultural and historical challenges of radicalization
Challenges to the freedom of debate and the freedom of speech cannot be reduced to occasional problems, localized in time and space, such as when the attendance of a speaker is sometimes prohibited. The issue tends, in fact, to be systemic and enduring. How can we ensure that the university is indeed a place where we study history, but where eventually living memory is welcomed without risking the violence of ideological clashes, as we saw with the Veinstein affair? How can we study history when intolerance reigns? And how can we also recognize the possible contribution of memory to history, how can we organize their debate, their meeting?
Here are three more examples. On 24 October 2019, a conference at Bordeaux-Montaigne University by Sylviane Agacinski, a philosopher known for her opposition to surrogacy, was canceled. LGBT + organizations asked students to “do everything possible so that this conference does not take place.” The university yielded to the threat, and Bernard Lachaise, professor of contemporary history at Bordeaux-Montaigne University and one of the conference organizers, explained that the cancellation was the result of security concerns: “We did not know what to expect, what the degree of the threat was. The lectures are held in an amphitheater, and the access staircase is quite narrow. We had a quarter of our audience coming from outside the university, including seniors.”
Also in October 2019, at the University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, Mohamed Sifaoui, a committed journalist, was forced to cancel a seminar entitled “Prevention of radicalization: understanding phenomena and detection of weak signals,” as a result of pressure from student unions and teachers. It should be noted neither a Muslim leader nor an organization made this request, on the contrary: Georges Haddad, president of the University, said he had received “no complaint from any Muslim group, or of course from the Paris Mosque, which requested this training and which has partnered with us for 20 years.”
Finally, associations and students targeted the performance of the play “The Suppliants” by Aeschylus, which was to be performed at the Sorbonne theater. The play was canceled due to pressure from activists opposing the “blackface” practice of painting the faces of white actors in black, which references the worst moments of slavery and racism in the United States.
Recent events, through intolerance and the climate they create, heavy with intimidation, and sometimes violence, stand out from the tensions of the 1960s and early 1970s. While not devoid of violence, they were largely the result of clashes between leftism and the far-right, followed by a period of relative calm that is coming to an end. The climate that reigned in universities after May ‘68, for example, was sectarian and violent and prompted Paul Ricoeur to leave Paris-Nanterre University. In his resignation letter dated 18 March 1970, he explained: “The University has become the strategic location for actions that also target town halls, immigrant workers’ centers, police stations and other public establishments; the University is only the easiest place for crime to take place, because of the liberal constitution of the University; but crime has ceased to be a strictly academic affair; it has taken on a national dimension. And yet, today we see public authorities, public opinion and the press working to make university authorities shoulder the responsibility of solving, by appealing to force, a problem that the State proves incapable of resolving by strictly political means.” Thus “a more considerable contradiction” arises: “the armed groups pose a problem for society that requires extreme political skill; it is a matter of isolating them from revolutionary forces, which society needs in order not to sink into paralysis, and of rendering them powerless, without altering public freedoms. Society has not solved or perhaps, even understood, this problem.” This statement by Ricoeur deserves our attention: what he laments is that the general problems of society, not dealt with by the State, destroy academic freedom, even though society, according to him, has a need for revolutionary protests, but also for public freedoms.
If on the whole, passions and rage are currently heightened especially on cultural subjects, medically assisted procreation (assisted reproduction), surrogacy, historical memory, so-called ethno-racial questions, without the decline of other social issues, including the cost of studies, the precarity of the student condition, or the young teacher-researcher, it is because cultural issues, here as elsewhere, take precedence over social issues, without replacing them, and rather by merging with them. Political debate is particularly turbulent, and extremes thrive on issues related to identity and memory, Islam, the colonial past, decolonization and, secondarily, on life and death, surrogacy, and various issues raised by feminism.
The movement of ideas in universities has been influenced by their opening up to new student and teacher populations, black populations in the United States, children of immigrants in France, which is not exactly the same thing; these changes have not led to the massification of higher education, which would have modified the student environment’s social structure. This could have fueled the development of collective consciences, particularly in the event of failure or difficulties, frustrations, resentment, which, rightly or wrongly, reflect the discrimination, unacceptable looks, and prejudices, and in return, these groups could have reconstituted themselves as a collective actor. Such a development is positive when universities are pushed to improve, to better listen to students, to diversify their recruitment, to implement an inclusion policy and substantively open themselves to new questions and be interested in ideas and knowledge produced in other parts of the world. The result can also go in the opposite direction, contribute to weakening academic freedom, draw the debate towards particularism methodological nationalism, and make sectarian, intolerant, even violent drifts possible.
Social and cultural issues that plague society permeate universities and are the sources of tensions that can threaten academic freedom. France is not yet at the stage observed in the United States, or in Canada, but to a lesser degree, is going in the same direction. For this reason, it is worth taking a quick detour to North America.
On many American campuses, students and the teachers who encourage them, flag words, vocabulary, references, attitudes that they find unacceptable, racist, colonialist, or chauvinistic. They ensure the “correct speech,” they say they are awake, “woke,” and their demands lead to measures that make it difficult or impossible for others to exercise academic freedom. The ban on the freedom of speech of lecturers deemed conservative is a frequent occurrence, including at UC Berkeley, a hotbed of the free speech movement half a century ago. “Cancel culture” is unfolding, which calls for the erasure of facts or historical figures because they symbolize in one way or another slavery or racism, or the refusal of abortion—while also being a vehicle for conveying real questions. Demands for dismissal and other forms of harassment can lead to tragedies, such as the suicide in July 2020 of a law professor at the University of Wilmington (North Carolina) who was reproached for holding positions favorable to the death penalty or hostile to abortion. This is accompanied by virulent campaigns that extend outside of the university on social media.
The pressure here, which is neither anecdotal nor exceptional, is aimed at many targets, generally “dominant white men.”
In France, university authorities oscillate between excess and error, between strong positions against any challenge to academic freedom, which can have the effect of urging radicalness and eliciting support in its favor, and passivity, even submission.
In Ottawa Canada, an academic who used the n-word to illustrate a discursive process that she criticized found herself the object of a violent campaign despite her apologies—she was told that a white woman never had the right to use that word. Colleagues supported her, requesting that racism and the role of professors not be confused, the latter of which is to “nourish reflection, develop critical thinking,” but university authorities pronounced and upheld her suspension.
Such events, fewer in number and above all less substantial in the French case, cast blame on the actors, but more specifically those who run the university: they are often heavy-handed in their application of the rules, standards, and norms allowing for academic freedom whose very real crisis, which had been brewing for several years, became evident in 2019–2020.
The turning point of the 2020s
An escalation of the crisis was made possible under the presidency of Emmanuel Macron as a result of two catalysts.
The first comes from intellectuals, in the broad sense, public or academic, belonging to a movement preoccupied with defending a Republic then conceived in a rigid way. This movement is threatened above all by Islamism, even by Islam, while at the same time frequently revealing unconditional support for the policies of the Israeli government, however right-wing it may be. An important step was taken when one hundred journalists, public intellectuals and professors or researchers, many of them retired, demanded political control over academics who refused to comply with the republican model in an online forum (Le Monde, 31 October 2020). They concluded their remarks by calling for “detection measures” and the establishment of a “body responsible for tracing cases of violation of Republican principles and academic freedom.” The neo-McCarthyist temptation was expressed, the idea of the need to supervise the internal life of the University and to impose thought police and criteria in accordance with externally defined requirements—which is not very different from the “free speech” law requested in the United Kingdom by the government of Boris Johnson in May 2021.
In February 2021, two members of the government headed by Prime Minister Jean Castex, the ministers of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, and of Higher Education and Research, Frédérique Vidal, intervened to denounce the “Islamo-leftism” that “plagues” the University. In fact, their denunciation was aimed at a wider group, amalgamating currents both in and outside the university related to Islamism but also “post-colonialism,” “decolonialism,” and even the concept of “intersectionality.” Their remarks also took aim at the way in which the idea of “race” was defined by actors, in particular trade unions (the UNEF, and in 2018, Sud-Education), for promoting discussion groups reserved for “racialized” individuals.
The entrance of political leaders into the fray is part of a general climate wherein a significant part of the political class, including the right and the far-right, as well as “republicanist” sectors of the old left, actively mobilize against Islamist terrorism, but also, more broadly, against what the Head of State called “separatism,” a way of designating entire sections of Islam, and, for some, Islam as a whole. The otherwise confused expression of Islamo-leftism is used here as a standard for the disqualification of the university, which would be used as a place of promotion. It involves regulating all that relates to this nebula supposedly composed of Islamo-leftism, de- and post-colonialism, radical feminism, or supporters of intersectionality, whether they are activists who eventually stray off course, or serious and respectable researchers and teachers. The two ministers in charge of education stand alongside, in particular, the Minister of the Interior, Gérard Darmanin, who thinks and speaks like them, in terms that are not far removed from the discourse of the National Rally. They accuse their targets of destroying academic freedom, which, as we have seen, is not entirely incorrect, but which unfairly and blindly harms genuine scientists. And to counter them, they call for measures that precisely weaken this same freedom. They group together activists, those who fall into the category of the destruction of universal values, and academics who produce and disseminate knowledge.
What places the human and social sciences on the front line: these disciplines have a stake in the problems that interest us here, quite simply because they are critical, which also means that they can be infiltrated by ideologies and can be more or less agitating.
Thus, the threat to academic freedoms comes from the alliance of intellectual and media circles radicalized in the name of the republican ideal perverted in an abstract and outraged republicanism, and political actors some in business, others in opposition, converging in their adoption of the theses of the far-right on Islam, secularism, or national identity.
The intellectuals involved are the natural products of political currents or forces, but the political alliance is muddled. It operates at the intersection of the ruined shreds of the old socialist left, which have above all become champions of a pure and strong Republic, right-wing sectors currently in power, and far-right actors. Finally, the emerging neo-McCarthyism occasionally takes on ad hominem radical, outraged forms in a dishonest manner that makes one sick. It becomes an Islamophobic obsession in the name of anti-racism that tends to suppress the exercise of free thought and free speech and to purge scientific and intellectual life of everything that fails to conform to its own orientations. The reader can read my response to an expression of these drifts published on Marianne’s site in May 2021. 1
Who would have thought that in contemporary France it would be necessary to contemplate the question of academic freedom not only for dictatorial or authoritarian regimes—the “hard authoritarianism” of which Eric Kaufmann speaks 2 —or for illiberal democracies like those of Central Europe with their “soft authoritarianism,” starting with Hungary? It is necessary not only to discuss the reception that France reserves for researchers banned from working and forced to quit their jobs in their home countries, but the liberticidal threats that hover over university life! The “Pause” program for the emergency reception of academics in exile launched on 16 January 2017, at the Collège de France, is a national system that mobilizes higher education and research establishments, the State, sponsorship, and public generosity. But it does not exempt us from examining the problems of academic freedom which affect France internally.
Before going any further in examining the French situation hic et nunc, let us look at the experience of Hungary—if only because, with authoritarianism progressing in France, it could be on the horizon for our country. Academic freedom, admittedly at stake under all kinds of political regimes, particularly deserves our attention since this is a country where an identitarian, nationalist, and populist movement is in power. The Hungarian government, in tune with a large segment of public opinion, is taking measures to restrict freedoms, by manipulating strong anti-intellectual, or even anti-Semitic or racist feelings, within the population.
Thus, the Central European University founded ex nihilo in Budapest in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet era was forced to close its doors and move to Vienna Austria in 2019. This occurred against a backdrop in which the political power rejected political science and political philosophy, and therefore more broadly the human and social sciences and the criticisms inherent to them—and what this university embodies. Those in power have also played on an anti-Semitism whose virulent campaigns target George Soros, the Jewish billionaire who finances the university.
Liviu Mattei, founder of the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom, correctly points out that the restriction of academic freedom is always a question of knowledge as a “public good.” He notes in his blog (Mediapart—23 March 2021) that the Hungarian government has removed the protection of academic freedoms from the Constitution and has refused to accredit certain research and teaching programs, including gender studies. The Hungarian Parliament, controlled by Fidesh, the party in power, voted for a reform of the universities which, through the creation of foundations, allows the diversion of European stimulus funds and the siphoning of public assets for the benefit of private institutions that are more or less opaque. Soldiers, or other figures without scientific or teaching skills, are placed at the head of university institutions in order to control them.
France is not at this point, of course. But it is particularly worrying to see intellectuals and politicians pave the way for the far-right, in academia as in other fields.
The evolution of universities
Academic freedom involves the right of universities to pursue the search for truth, and that of each academic, teacher, researcher, student, to benefit from this right. This concept holds historical weight and can be traced to the birth of universities in Europe in the 11th (Bologna), 12th and 13th centuries, when it involved protecting these institutions from the Catholic Church’s control, without breaking with it, and/or from political power, and therefore from the police. In its medieval period, the University had its independence, its justice system, and its “corporate bodies” where teachers and students coexisted. At the Sorbonne, university power was held by teachers.
Since the 18th century, a debate has recurred as to whether research is first, second, or undesirable, and whether teaching should not be privileged. In recruiting academics, is it not appropriate to consider only the knowledge that they will have to disseminate and their pedagogical qualities? For example, is it more important to publish textbooks and courses, or scientific papers? Should we bring together research and teaching as advocated in Prussia by Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the University of Berlin in 1810? From his perspective, the academic must do both. When it comes to science, there must be favorable conditions, the first being the freedom that scientists have to conduct research without worrying about its usefulness. It is up to them to decide their research direction and not blindly follow the instructions given to them or financial incentives. Another condition is providing learning spaces that are not limited to lectures: seminars, where people exchange and progress, research laboratories, institutes, chairs. Research training will come later.
The university can prove to be conservative, including in scientific matters. Thomas Kuhn has shown the difficulties that new ideas, innovative paradigms, and the questioning of established theories, 3 can encounter. Indeed, the university is a place where resistance to scientific progress can be decisive. Knowledge, in fact, progresses more easily on the periphery of universities than within them, and if the indictment of academic freedom proves catastrophic, it occurs first in institutions located at the margins of established institutions, whether new or created to operate outside the system.
It is not by chance that, in this text, while we discuss the University of Central Europe, the Institutes of Political Sciences, the EHESS, the Collège de France, we could also have mentioned the EPHE (L’École pratique des hautes études) or the CNAM (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers): these are forms that are incongruous or clash with conventional university methods, where conformism, acquired positions, and resistance to change can be decisive.
The opening up and democratization of universities has not reached the Grandes écoles, and is spread unevenly—certain fields (law, medicine) have been able to manage better than others. By opening up to working-class circles without keeping their promises of progress and upward mobility, or even ensuring decent study conditions, universities have widened the spaces for individual or collective movements, dominated by resentment and frustration, while also influencing protests and conflicts on inequalities and injustices. When requests and expectations are not addressed, or badly handled, the path is cleared for unease, mental suffering, and an acute feeling of abandonment. All of these phenomena have been exacerbated by the brutal shock suffered by students and the indifference of powers to their fate throughout nearly a year of the pandemic.
The necessary openness of the University calls for inclusion policies that are largely the internal responsibilities of institutions. When they fail, if only partially, or when they are inadequate, a crisis arises, possibly exacerbated from the outside, as we have seen in connection with the neo-McCarthy attacks. Violence lurks.
From these remarks, we can now give a synopsis of our reasoning. We must combine three types of analyses to evaluate the threats to academic freedom in contemporary France, as in other major Western democracies. The first concerns the functioning of the universities themselves, their shortcomings, and their governance. The second concerns civil society’s cultural and social movements that lack a political outlet, which can eventually penetrate higher education and research institutions in radical ways that occasionally veer off course. Finally, we must examine the state power that finances and protects, but also seeks to guide and control the university system. State power is also penetrated by the right-wing impulses that plague the country and which its intellectuals express in their own way—paving the way for the National Rally.
When academic freedom appears to be called into question from outside the university, it is not enough to attribute it to power alone and to its restrictive decisions. If he thinks he is justified in questioning it, it is because he finds a certain legitimacy in it, and even because he wants to respond to popular expectations, the most decisive of which are the populist type. To understand what is at stake we must consider the intersection of the high and the low, the exercise of power and the expectations of certain population segments, without neglecting the universities themselves, their functioning, and their populations.
The indictment of academic freedom thus conceived must be analyzed within a framework that both includes and extends beyond institutions of higher education and research. This movement is part of general developments where other freedoms are at stake—we have already mentioned the impact of terrorism and the health crisis. Restrictions do not all occur at the same time: those that affect academic freedoms may come before, or after, other measures. But the overall evolution takes place in the same temporality; the historical sequence has been opened in recent years.
We also need to examine the factors that allow for the development of internal behaviors that affect university freedoms. To do so, we must question the governance and internal power systems in universities. The drifts and liberticidal tendencies find highly favorable conditions when a university president and his administration are unable to situate themselves in the face of certain misbehaviors, err on the side of repression or laxity or oscillate between one and the other, fail to recognize the importance of certain issues, and when the norms and rules, possibly codified in the form of a charter, are insufficient.
Conclusion
University freedoms in France are threatened on two fronts. On the one hand, they face internal threats as a result of activists, sympathizers, teachers, and students who are sometimes also researchers working on racism, anti-racism, anti-Semitism, Islam, gender issues, or on a particular collective memory–whose actions can slip into sectarianism, fanaticism, and intolerance. The so-called anti-racist or feminist struggle then takes the form of war: of races, “racialized” against whites or of the sexes. And on the other hand, externally more than internally, as a result the alliance of intellectuals and political leaders mobilized to put Islam in its place and resorting if necessary to ad hominem attacks and other behaviors that take the form of a pre-fascist climate. These drifts are favored by the security concerns exacerbated by the Islamist terrorist attacks, which continue to ravage the country, as well as COVID-19. In particular, they target disciplines most attentive to worldly and societal problems. Rather than attacking extremist ideologies they frequently target moderates, who advocate debate, critical thinking, and the independence of research.
In this situation, the leaders of university-type institutions should ensure the application of the principles that allow for the implementation of values to which academic freedom corresponds. But that cannot be enough, academics must also be willing to debate fundamental issues, respect differences in intellectual, scientific, and theoretical orientations, and mobilize against authoritarianism and sectarianism.
And yet, it is not always easy to see clearly: is it acceptable for fascists to express themselves in the university in the name of academic freedom? Who should set the limits? Clarification must also come from academics themselves. Translated by selene campion