ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a personal perspective on the general issue of academic freedom based on reflections triggered by recent attempts to discipline academic freedom in France—some highly conspicuous and some less visible than others. It starts by recounting a rather blatant and conspicuous governmental assault on academic freedom that occurred in 2020 and 2021 when executive leaders suggested that a current of “Islamo-leftism” had come to “gangrene” French universities and warranted inquiry. It then recounts in the first person the ways in which the author’s findings in the framework of a collaborative research project on the standards of judicial review over administrative orders taken during the 2015–17 antiterrorist state of emergency led to tensions with the Conseil d’Etat—the highest administrative court. These tensions eventually led to a redrafting of the legal agreement that the Conseil d’Etat requires researchers who claim access to its internal databases to sign, with the agreement now containing a number of provisions that are questionable with respect to academic freedom. It reads stories through the lens of both an institutional and political culture of unease with external intellectual critique.
