Lezing 'Academic Freedom and the Contingency of Its Boundaries: Fragments on Repression'

Academic freedoms represent the foundation of the ethics of the university community and a strong cohesive factor, because they connect universal and individual ethical principles. The experience of the strengthening of autocratic tendencies in Serbia shows that any external limitation of academic freedom echoes through the community of students, researchers and professors, encouraging both resistance and reflexive reaction.

Three fragments of repression show the mechanisms that the regime applies in an effort to nullify the idea of ​​public education in Serbia. This danger is real. In circumstances in which both civil and academic freedoms are simultaneously exposed to the pressure of totalitarian uniformity, and social and institutional frameworks are increasingly subordinated to the government, intellectual, individual and collective capacities are activated to oppose various forms of single-mindedness, lethargy and conformity.