President Nanz,
Professor Weiler,
Cari amici del Istituto Universitario Europeo,
A dhaoine uaisle,
It is a real honour for an alumna to be asked to address your community as part of this series of events to mark the Institute’s 50th anniversary.
Let me start with two frank admissions, the first of which will, I hope, set this illustrious academic audience at ease.
Before accepting the invitation, I expressed concern about what I regarded as a mismatch between speaker and subject. Although academically trained (here) and still active, I don’t consider myself an academic.
How then to address a subject of such contemporary concern to a collective of which I am not a member?
Moreover, academic freedom, particularly if rights are offset with responsibilities, is a subject which can give rise to considerable debate and some division.
When presiding the European court, a good friend, who was then the Dean of a Law Faculty, remarked with mischief - but perspicacity - that the attachment of judges to their independence and autonomy is rivalled only by that of some academics to their own freedom and pursuit of the truth!
More seriously, both judicial independence and academic freedom are essential to the type of democratic societies in which we aspire to live. But the vital conditions for both to prosper can be difficult to explain to the public and even to politicians. In addition, both can be undermined if individual beneficiaries think only in present and individual terms and not in longer and institutional ones.
Given the provisions of the EUI Convention, the Institute’s history and the present trajectory of Europe, one can imagine that very different positions on what is referred to as the Institute’s “identity and purpose” were debated during the process leading up to the adoption of the EUI’s Strategy 2026-2031.
It is not my wish to trespass on the future path which your community has set for itself.
My second admission is of an entirely different nature but, finding myself in the Refectory for the first time in probably 34 years, I can’t resist it.
Thinking of the speakers yesterday, today and tomorrow, my bet is that none of them sang “The girl from Ipanema” as I did in this very room in 1991 (?) at a concert organized by researchers of my generation.
At that time, we had of course no social media, no mobile phones and, originally, no PCs. But we shared a collective will to work, invent and have fun and, on occasions - whether in the Bar Fiasco, transforming the June Ball into a charity event, playing soccer as the International Heroes and Heroines or in the concerts held in this room - we did all three at the same time.
Returning to the more serious subject of the keynote, I proceed on the basis that a perspective external to academia is sought, conscious that my own is that of a jurist and former judge, with all the limitations which that entails.
First, I want to touch briefly on the historical arc travelled by Europe between the establishment of the Institute in 1976 and this anniversary event.
The road travelled by Europe reminds us that moments of great promise – not least the fall of the Berlin Wall (which I experienced at the EUI as a first-year researcher) or the massive enlargement of the EU in the first decade of this century – have been followed by periods of protracted crisis.
During Europe’s poly-crisis – with its different financial, migratory, health, armed conflict, digital and defense dimensions - democracy at national and European level, the rule of law, European society’s commitment to pluralism, tolerance and the rights of minorities, as well as public trust in institutions and in scientific truth have all come under pressure.
This is the changed political, legal and social context in which you now pursue your academic work.
So, it is worth reflecting, secondly, on the nature and purpose of academic freedom and on how academics and policy-makers can best explain, respectand protect the power of knowledge.
Certain dimensions of academic freedom can be seen reflected in the limited case-law to date of the two European courts. But additional safeguards might be needed to better guarantee future European academic resilience.
And public support for that resilience might be enhanced by overt recognition of certain forms of academic responsibility, whether at individual or institutional levels.
Finally, turning back to the EUI and its future role in the reimagining of Europe, the professors here present are best placed to speak to the continued need for academic excellence, renewal and credibility. So I’ll leave that to them.
As an alumna I would like to speak instead to the subject of alumni involvement and EUI societal engagement.
Considering Europe’s historical arc (1976 – 2026)
Casting our minds back to 1976, the year the Institute opened its doors, what were the major issues confronting European society then?
I took some time to explore the archives of Le Monde and the Irish Times, one reflecting the news from a founding EU Member State; the other from a relatively poor State which had only recently joined the EEC.
The date of 15th January 1976 was randomly chosen. Then, in this year’s archives, I downloaded the front page of Le Monde from 22nd January 2026.
This was a less random choice.
I wanted the 2026 headline to land, 50 years on, in the middle of Davos and after the US extraction of Maduro from Venezuela, threats to the sovereignty of Greenland and to the survival of NATO, as well as further US withdrawal from multiple international organisations.
Of course, things have only gotten worse since then.
But writing keynotes is a perilous activity this year, as any of you who have tried will know.
The 1976 headlines give you a taste of life and politics in France and Ireland at a time when the EEC had only 9 Member States, limited competences and an Assembly which was not directly elected.
Aldo Moro, the Baider -Meinhof, Chirac, Mitterand and Trudeau (the father; not Katy Perry’s latest boyfriend) all feature in Le Monde. So too do strikes in Spain and trade union talks in France at a time of continuing economic crisis.
The news from Ireland – reflecting its size and still developing independence from its then imposing neighbour - featured strikes, price increases, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, judicial appointments and a fisheries war between Iceland and Britain.
Fifty years later, the Le Monde headlines look, at first sight, strikingly different. They express, if not rupture (which is my bet for one of the OED words of 2026), then certainly key features of Europe’s present reimagining.
The transatlantic alliance is fractured, Trump’s tariffs have shaken the world economy and the President of the French Republic, replete with his blue aviator sunglasses, denounces a lawless world in which international law is flouted.
I had expected to find very different headlines, reflecting the very different world in which the EUI is now operating, both as an academic and as an intergovernmental institution.
And at one level I did.
But look a little closer and one discovers that the 1976 editions also contain some striking similarities to the type of headlines we pull up on our screens in Europe today.
The Irish Times led in 1976 with an article on Arab States at the UN seeking a complete withdrawal of Israel from all occupied Arab territories and recognition of the “inalienable national rights” of the Palestinian people.
On the front page of Le Monde in 1976 is an article entitled “Pour une défense européenne », written by a former French Minister. He wrote of Europe’s weakness, given that its security depends on an organization – NATO - which it does not master. He also raised the spectre of what would happen were the US to cease to consider Europe as a privileged interlocutor and a priority concern.
These extracts from press archives contextualise the work done by EUI researchers then and now. But the headlines, particularly the European defence article, also speak to the Power of Knowledge theme of your anniversary conference, something to which I will return later in my address.
The January 2026 headline also demonstrates that the reimagining of Europe is already quite advanced and that it will be shaped to a very great extent by recent, seemingly unstoppable geopolitical fractures and political shifts rather than working groups, research projects and academic conferences.
One of the main questions for you today and in the coming years is what role this and other academic institutions can and must play in this reimagining, providing reliable knowledge, in-depth research, substance, rigour and, where necessary, much needed dissent, criticism and debate.
Academic freedom and the power of knowledge
It would be foolhardy, in my view, to address academic freedom and the power of knowledge without first engaging with Europe’s recent experiences of democratic erosion and fatigue.
Our experience largely predates the constitutional crisis which has rapidly unfolded in the US, where academic institutions have not just been in the crosshairs of the administration, but where they were earmarked in advance as the enemy.
Over the last two decades, several common factors have played out across different European States:
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attempts, often successful, to centralize power in the hands of the executive, with the sidelining or collapse of the legislature;
But even in States which have not experienced autocratic legalism and similar forms or degrees of democratic and rule of law decline, the liberal epistemic order– a political system which places trust in essential custodians of factual authority, including academia, science, journalism, the public administration and justice systems1 - has been weakened. In some cases by the impact of events and in other cases by design.
In an article published last year in the New York Review of Books, David Cole, the former director of the ACLU, wrote that:
“For much of the last fifty years, academic freedom had been, you might say, academic. Its central principle – that politicians have no authority to censor the teaching, research and writing of professors in the nation’s universities – was so well accepted that it was rarely even tested”.
How quickly things can change.
As we have witnessed, the US administration, at Federal and State level, has sought to control fundamental academic decisions about curricula content, free speech on campus and foreign student and scholar access via executive orders, cuts in federal funding for individual academic institutions as well as material restrictions on research in certain fields (not least studies relating to climate change, vaccines, women and minorities).
Given that Atlantic headwinds do generally reach Europe in some form or another, it is certainly timely to reflect on the nature of academic freedom and what purpose or purposes it serves, before looking at the sufficiency of some of the protections in place to safeguard that freedom in Europe.
The two principal justifications for academic freedom are often presented by academics as uncomfortable and, for some, very unwelcome bedfellows.
Writing on the freedom and power of European constitutional scholarship, for example, Jan Komarek referenced, approvingly, the pursuit and value of knowledge for its own sake.
Another purpose of academic freedom, which Komarek viewed more critically, was the support provided by scientific inquiry for societal values such as freedom and democracy and other societal interests, whether economic or civic.
However, does the second, more instrumental or functional justification, sit so uncomfortably with, or undermine, the first?
In my view it doesn’t.
And at a time when universities are being advised to actively and better defend their public mission – not least by the former Rector of the CEU who knows of what he speaks -4 not to invoke the second justification may be to potentially weaken the academic case.
The practical operation of liberal democracy – we do need to find a better qualifier - requires a shared epistemic foundation.
That foundation has traditionally been provided by a number of different knowledge institutions, including the courts, but mainly universities, independent media, schools, some independent government agencies and civil society, all of which contribute to the public space of reasons.
As we know, university research provides a crucial source of evidence and information for democratic deliberation and policy-making.
University teaching seeks to instill trained critical thinking and historical perspective; both of which can be lost or lacking amongst policy and decision-makers at critical junctures.
In the words of one commentator:
“The epistemic practices exemplified in research and taught in universities serve as an engine of dissent [and] dissent is vital in democracy both before and after policies are adopted, because it is through dissent that diversity opinions and minority viewpoints can be heard.”
I have been told in no uncertain terms at NYU that academics don’t work for State and policy institutions; but your work can feed those institutions, in positive and necessary ways.
Truth has always been contested, but what is new to this era is that knowledge institutions like yours now operate in a digital space in which:
Of late, the digital gatekeepers appear to be either unconcerned about the impact of this brave new world or, in some cases, contemptuous of previousdemocratic restraints.
To illustrate the power of your knowledge, even in this radically altered information environment, let me touch briefly on two issues high on the European agenda at present - defence and climate change – both of which will feature in subsequent panel discussions.
The European Council website indicates that the EU is ramping up its defence readiness. SAFE, an EU instrument providing loans of up to €150 billion, seeks to help EU member states make rapid and significant increases in their defence investments through common procurement. The EU is now also allowing Member states additional budgetary flexibility for defence spending. Legislative simplification is to be rolled out in this sector and the EU is also mobilisingprivate investment via the European Investment Bank.
Thinking back to the Le Monde article from 1976, as historians you are well placed to explain why Europe’s first and subsequent attempts to develop a common defense failed and why the issues discussed before and after Davos had already been raised, and repeatedly ignored, for over 50 years. There are surely lessons to be learned by Europe’s policy and decision makers.
As lawyers, economists and political scientists you are well placed to provide the critical supports, assessment, pushback and, where necessary, dissent in relation to the different pillars of EU and Member State defence plans.
The EU likes to vaunt the centrality of its citizens to its own identity. But Europe’s persistent democratic deficit, which now takes different forms to those which would have been discussed in the EUI back in 1976, means that Europe’s citizens and its democratic processes desperately need the input and rigour of differentknowledge institutions such as yours.
As regards the other concrete example in relation to which the power of your knowledge will be critical, we live in a world where in 2025 the ICJ recognised “the urgent and existential threat posed by climate change”.
Yet in the course of one year the US has withdrawn from the international climate regime and repealed the endangerment finding, which was the scientific determination underpinning national legal authority to combat climate change.
In Europe, while the reception of climate science and norms is certainly better, it can hardly be described as optimal. The EU, previously in the climate legislative vanguard, is regarded by some as backtracking on its previous role, having also missed the opportunity over the last two decades to manufacture within Europe that which a successful green deal requires.
The result is that national, European and international courts are faced with novel climate change litigation at a time when the relevant science is ever clearer, but the political context in which they work is ever more fraught.
History has taught us that when the gap grows between what legal norms provide and what politics permit, increased litigation usually results. And this of course places courts in difficult and sometimes unwinnable situations.
These are just two fields in which your academic skills and expertise, along with the power of your knowledge, which you spend a lifetime honing, will be crucial in the years ahead.
According to a 2025 TUI Foundation survey of young people (16-26), there is a large gap between desire and (expected) reality when it comes to Europe and EU integration. 42% of young Europeans desire stronger integration, but only 27% believe that it will actually happen in the next five years. Almost 40 % of those surveyed considered that the EU was not particularly democratic and almost 50 % could not explain how it works.
Perhaps the most worrying statistics relate to the future of democracy itself. The survey pointed to very low levels of confidence in national democracies and a striking percentage of young people in several of the larger and founding EU Member States who would accept or even prefer authoritarian forms of government.
Civil and rational debate and dissent, based on evidence, inquiry, assessment and re-evaluation – what academics do best – has been vital in Europe on its journey from 1976 to 2026. In the political climate I have just described, it will be even more so.
Academic resilience and academic responsibilities
Turning to the subject of academic resilience, currently pending before the ECtHR is an application by almost 50 university professors dismissed from their posts on the basis of emergency legislation passed by the Turkish Government following the attempted coup d’État in 2016.
In several previous Turkish cases involving academics, the Strasbourg court had found violations of Article 10 ECHR on freedom of expression; the Convention fallback in the absence of an explicit article on academic freedom.
Article 13 of the EU Charter provides, in contrast, that the arts and scientific research shall be free of constraint and that “academic freedom shall be respected”.
As you may know, in Commission v. Hungary, decided in 2020, the CJEU found the law targeting the CEU to be incompatible with EU law. The Luxembourg judgment - which invoked academic freedom in Article 13 of the Charter for the first time - highlighted both the individual and institutional dimensions of academic freedom, as well as an obligation on States to protect higher education institutions from threats to their autonomy coming from any source.
In its reasoning, the CJEU referred to relatively old recommendations of the Council of Europe’s PACE and UNESCO, dating from 2006 and 1997 respectively.
But should Article 13 of the EU Charter act merely as a retroactive basis for sanctioning restrictions of academic freedom? And should the EU continue to rely on dated soft law recommendations such as those just mentioned? Let’s not forget that, by the time the Luxembourg judgment was handed down, the CEU had already relocated to another EU Member State.
It is worth asking whether Article 13, combined with other provisions of EU law, could form the basis for soft or hard law measures at EU level which seek to prevent rather than belatedly respond to interference with academic freedom?
In response to the sanctions and restrictions imposed on US academic institutions, the President of the Commission delivered a strong message to the European Parliament about EU academics and researchers in the US, pledging that Europe will remain a global and free academic leader. She repeated this important message in her video speech yesterday.
The EU’s Rule of Law Reports look at media independence but not at academic freedom, something which might be worth reconsidering given the speed with which and the purpose for which academic restrictions can be rolled out. The European Parliament now has an Academic Freedom Monitoring Report but its practical impact is unclear.
On the occasion of your 50th anniversary, is the transnational EUI not academically and institutionally uniquely well-placed, at inter-governmental level, to take this conversation further at a time when academic freedom in Europe is challenged but not (yet) under extreme threat?
Because this is probably the time to act. It is not by chance, to draw again an analogy between judicial independence and academic freedom, that key operational rules relating to the German Constitutional Court have been moved recently into the Basic Law to avoid leaving them open to the vagaries of simple parliamentary majorities in future.
Turning then to the more sensitive question of academic responsibility, a common feature driving American and European democratic erosion or mere fatigue is a public sense of the precariousness of life under contemporary capitalism and pervasive social inequality.
In such a climate, it is easy to portray universities as bastions of elite privilege and the protected domain of, in the eyes of some, arrogant experts.
Which means that there is a need for universities not only to defend and future proof academic freedom but also to deserve it. As I know only too well from my previous job, few people like to be reminded that responsibilities are also part of the social bargain underpinning rights and freedom.
In a book on The Battle over University Classrooms, published this year, Whittington has argued that, as regards the US:
“Matters are made exponentially more difficult … when the professorate is perceived to be set a world apart from the society that it hopes to serve. … If universities are believed to have been captured by a particular political or ideological faction, they will lose their ability to provide trusted neutral expertiseand will instead be perceived as and treated as partisans in the political fray”.
It would be a mistake, in my view, to assert that such concerns are only relevant in the US.
I don’t have the privilege of sitting in your classrooms. I cannot tell how a seminar in 2026 compares to one in 1976 or 1986. But reading legal literature and blogs in certain fields, not least the field of human rights, I do wonder whether there is a risk of a prevailing culture of value-based judgments about what is considered good and what is considered bad, with the associated risk of shutting down academic voices which raise uncomfortable or non-mainstream viewpoints.
Migration – a subject desperately in need of sensible, balanced and informed debate – seems to attract academic commentary going only in one direction and political proposals for reform going entirely in the opposite one.
It is migrants themselves, the general public and the courts who are caught in the consequential crosshairs of such partisan debates.
I have often wondered, when reading the blogs and literature how difficult it must be for young researchers to go against the current academic grain in such fields.
However, looking in your academic mirror regularly to ensure that pluralism of viewpoints in teaching and research continues to constitute a central objective is surely another facet of academic freedom.
In a book published in 2018, Michael Ignatieff wrote of the need to rebalance the relationship between academic freedom and social responsibility. In return for the freedom to think, learn and teach, academics need to communicate their research (and its usefulness) to society, getting the message across that the freedom of knowledge institutions is a freedom which protects that of society as a whole.
Another dimension of academic responsibility returns us to the question of your roles in academia and beyond.
We cannot all aspire to be litigators, academics, public intellectuals and authors of the calibre of the extraordinary Philip Sands, but there is a reason he renamed his chair at UCL the “Professorship of the Public Understanding of Law”.
As academics you do not of course write for the general public. Nor, as mentioned previously, do you write or work for institutions. But perhaps, when it comes to the necessary balance between academic freedom and social responsibility, the public should not be forgotten by you, nor should the need to communicate effectively that your freedom protects the freedom of society as a whole.
Finally, having worked for many years with trainees and this year with doctoral and post-doc researchers, one thing that strikes me as particularly concerning when it comes to academic freedom is the professional precarity which they face for years in many if not most academic systems and disciplines in Europe.
How free can members of the academic precariat be in job markets which pay them little, often provide delayed social security guarantees and pursuant totemporary contracts whose renewal depends on their drumming up external funding? Grants, funding, jobs and publication requirements, which often encourage excessive rather than quality outputs, are the material constraints on young academics’ production and power of knowledge.
A commitment to academic freedom surely therefore entails a responsibility on the part of older cohorts of academics and academic institutions like yours to useyour voice to better protect future generations of scholars in what is and will probably continue to be a very unforgiving market. The transnational and pioneering EUI seems again well placed to further the necessary debate and foment change.
EUI alumni involvement and societal engagement
Finally, I turn to the question of EUI alumni involvement and societal engagement, both of which feature in your new five-year strategy.
Thinking back to my EUI cohort, if many of the lawyers headed initially to academia, after a few years they branched out into practice, almost all the EU institutions, other European and international organisations, administrative and political posts in their States of origin, as well as journalism and even investment banking.
I cannot map the career paths of the other disciplines as easily and am not sure if the EUI or the alumni association could do so either, based on the information presently available.
As far as I know, the EUI is one of the biggest providers of economists at the ECB. But I rely on anecdotal rather than hard data.
Despite the fact that, in Europe, the EUI was at the forefront of transnational postgraduate education, there is a data gap which your Strategy rightly identifies as needing to be filled. Where did we all go? What did we do? What obstacles did we encounter and which ones were specifically linked to the transnational nature of our profiles?
Let’s make sure that, at your next anniversary, these questions are easier to answer than they are now.
It is possible that some alumni have returned to the EUI for different events, but the impression I have from my contemporaries, and from these anniversary events, is that most have not.
But is the EUI not missing a trick when it fails to dip into the large and diverse pool of alumni talent which it played such an instrumental part in forming?
Yesterday I moderated a panel of brilliant alumni: from the Secretary General of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, to an MEP and an EUI Associate Professor who is also an AI entrepreneur. It broke our professional hearts that the researchers were not in the room to hear of their varied experiences.
Reading the EUI convention in preparation for today’s event, I noticed Article 12 § 3. It provides that the:
“Institute may organize periods of practical training and colloquia in which persons already having professional experience in the disciplines under which studies and research are carried out at the Institute may take part.”
When I inquired how this provision works in practice, I was referred to the EUI Executive Education programmes and the Policy Leader Fellowship. These programmes are designed to attract and train international policy professionals from EU institutions, international organisations, and national administrations, as well as policy and private-sector representatives.
Lucrative external facing programmes of this nature serve a different purpose and need to those which could be addressed by engaging with your own alumni, many of whom serve organisations and institutions to which researchers will, going by available statistics, one day gravitate, whether by necessity or by their own design.
In law – and I imagine in some other disciplines – it’s important to stress that there is excellent literature on the important need for scholars to maintain critical distance from, for example, EU institutions.
However, does this distance preclude exposing researchers to the lived experience of alumni who work in varied non-academic institutions and fields, providing them with information on practice and procedure which cannot be gleaned from books?
Turning to the preparation of future alumni, Joseph Weiler, who will speak shortly, put pen to paper prior to a retirement (which never seems to arrive) to write a series on what early career academics should know.
It’s a wonderful series, for those who have not read it, on good academic practices, covering anything from time-keeping and focus when public speaking to the avoidance of power point.
I don’t know whether young academics are now trained in the skill set he covers. Earlier generations of academics were not.
Nor were we taught how to teach or develop a balanced curriculum and course material. We certainly were not taught how to engage with the media, or academic cancel culture, which had not yet emerged.
Nowadays, in the age of social media and the desperate need for those in possession of knowledge to engage with and inform those who are misinformed and misled, academics do find themselves having to take on media work or navigate the perils and possibilities of scholactivism.
Perhaps you provide training and pointers in these regards. Perhaps you do not.
At NYU, I’m struck by the immense value which the Practice Labs operating in some American Law Faculties provide. Perhaps you have considered such additions here in Florence. If not. Perhaps you could?
Conclusions
As I said at the outset, my role today is not to preach to an academic community of which I am not a member, but to provoke reflection, on the occasion of an anniversary, in relation to the road travelled in Fiesole since 1976 and the road ahead in what is a transformed and challenging European and global context.
It’s a tremendous honour to have been asked to speak, not in my own name, but in the name of generations of previous EUI researchers. Some are, sadly, no longer with us. The requests of others to attend these events were not accommodated. We all took perhaps our most important intellectual and professional baby steps in these classrooms and we feel honoured to have contributed to the development of an academic institution which is now thriving, thanks to all of you.But don’t forget us and that institutions are built by people, over time and through different generations.
I won’t be around for your centenary, but for those bright young things who will be, remember your academic rights, your need for resilience but also your responsibilities, individually and institutionally, in the years ahead.