Special issue editorial: democratic decline and the changing state-university relationship in Europe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1990s, European higher education has been reshaped by neoliberal policies promoting internationalization and competitiveness. Yet this trajectory now collides with resurgent nationalism and illiberal governance. Across Europe, governments have sought to limit academic freedom, politicize universities, and reclaim control over knowledge production, often by reframing global engagement as a threat to national identity and sovereignty. Far-right movements instrumentalize neoliberal mechanisms – such as funding and evaluation – to reward ideological allies and marginalize dissent. The resulting tensions reveal how universities have become arenas where struggles over democracy, globalization, and cultural values intersect. Bringing together comparative and national case studies, this special issue examines how these dynamics transform higher education’s political and institutional role. It shows that neoliberal and nationalist agendas increasingly intertwine, challenging assumptions about autonomy and universality while redefining the place of the university in Europe’s shifting geopolitical landscape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".