Ruperto Carola Ringvorlesung Contemporary threats to academic freedom

In a context when academic freedom is menaced and academics are banned in many places, it is urgent to have a collective and international reflection on this principle which is fundamental to intellectual practice. Restrictions imposed on academic freedom have been shaping public spaces and academic institutions across the world, in liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes as well as in the so-called illiberal democracies. Comparative and transcultural study of these restrictions has barely begun, despite their proliferation. After briefly tracing back the origins of academic freedom and how it has been defined, this lecture will reflect on these contemporary challenges and threats to suggest a comparative framework of understanding of how governments, security establishments, and big economic interests have moved to restrict academic freedom using a wide array of constitutional, legal, political and financial tools. 

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Gisèle Sapiro is Professor of Sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Senior researcher at the CNRS (Silver Medal 2021), member of Academia Europeae. Her areas of interest are the sociology of culture, literature, intellectuals, translation, publishing, law, and the history of the social sciences. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (1999; Engl.: French Writers’ War, 2014), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain (2011), La Sociologie de la littérature (2014 ; Engl.: The Sociology of Literature, 2023), Les Ecrivains et la politique en France (2018), Peut-on dissocier l’œuvre de l’auteur ? (2020), Des mots qui tuent (2020), et Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur mondial? (2024). Among the books she (co)edited: Ideas on the move in the Social Sciences and Humanities (2020), Dictionnaire international Bourdieu (2020), The Routledge Handbook of the History and Sociology of Ideas(Routledge). She was awarded the Humboldt research prize for life-time achievement in 2023. 

Manfred Berg is the Curt Engelhorn Professor of American History at Heidelberg University. His work focuses on the history of the African-American civil rights movement, race relations, popular violence, and U.S. political history.  He is the author and editor of twenty books, including The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (2005); Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (2011). His new book Das gespaltene Haus: Eine Geschichte der Vereinigten Staaten von 1950 bis heute (A House Divided: A History of the United States from 1950 until Today) was published in June 2024 and traces the history of polarization in America from the post-war years to the present. In 2006 Berg received the David Thelen Award from the Organization of American Historians and in 2016 the Distinguished Historian’s Award from the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. Since 2019, Manfred Berg is a member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. He is also a regular contributor to the weekly DIE ZEIT.