Introduction: According to Art. 5(3) of Germany’s Basic Law, the country’s higher education system is free. Unsurprisingly then, that out of a total of no fewer than about 180 countries, the Academic Freedom Index (AFI) consistently ranks the country among its top brass. So how is life at the top? Splendid, one might presume. Because what could be greater than spending one’s professional professorial life as a free academic? There are in fact several recent developments to note that might give rise to concern and that might make one wonder to what extent these changes might infringe on and effectively lessen the degree of academic freedom traditionally enjoyed in Germany. After all, higher education is just one of many different policy sectors; professors are civil servants; and the 16 federal German States’ higher education systems are governed by ministerial bureaucracies with their own ideas of what needs to change in order to improve the performance of German universities. And although enjoying a special constitutional position, Germany’s higher education system is certainly not immune from developments which have had major impacts on different public policies in many countries around the world. The most well-known and possibly the most consequential of these are internationalisation, New Public Management, and the Bologna Process.

Aim: By choosing Germany as a country that is traditionally being regarded as having one of the most free higher education systems in the world and by contrasting this with how German higher education works in practice, we will put into question the received notion of a scientific community which can be characterized as being broadly free from governmental interference. We will discuss how, against the backdrop of constitutionally enshrined academic freedom, regulatory action at different levels of authority is being taken to further the political agendas for systemic change and how this leads to legal, political, and administrative conflicts, e.g. in terms of ultra vires legislation, within German academia.

Methodology: This paper will describe the most salient changes to higher education governance in Germany over the last few years. These relate to, amongst others, professorial renumeration, teaching assessment, and evaluation of teaching and research. To this end, we will give an overview of the literature on both academic freedom and on higher education governance. We will augment this with narratives on currently evolving governing practices, such as renumeration agreements (both between the federal States and their respective universities and between universities and individual professors), quality management systems, and accreditation. At a broader level, our argument seeks to help clarifying definitions of the concept of academic freedom and questions the validity and reliability of expert survey-based indices like AFI.

Introduction: German higher education has in the recent past witnessed dramatic changes. One of them is the putting-into-place of an accreditation system which gave birth to the Akkreditierungsrat, the body responsible for organising higher education accreditation processes throughout Germany. Both individual study programmes and—increasingly—entire universities’ quality management systems are being evaluated. Daniel Immer (Rechtsprobleme der Akkreditierung von Studiengängen, 2013) looked at the legal significance and possible problems related to the systems’ structural setup from a public-law perspective. So far, there exist very few studies that analyse how accreditation works in practice. From a public-policy point of view, a system’s performance rests on monitoring and sanctioning. In particular, principal-agent-theory for multilevel governance (Terry Moe, Political Control and the Power of the Agent, 2006) might be useful for theory construction. We will use a law- and-politics perspective (Clifford Bob, Rights as Weapons, 2017) to shed light on both structures and actors and their legal and political capabilities and what motivates them in the process. Specifically, we will demonstrate the extent to which the accreditation process can be characterized as an efficient new administrative review system as opposed to going-through-the-motions processes, plagued by micro-politics, legal uncertainty, and muddling-through.

Aim: This project will help to find out to what extent the currently evolving German higher education accreditation system helps resolve conflict and produces just outcomes in terms of both actor representativeness and maintenance of the quality of German higher education its study programmes. Doubts might be in order here, as, out of the in total 15.433 processes that are being listed as of to- date (March 14th, 2023) by the Akkreditierungsrat, only 3 study programmes have so far been denied the right to stay running. A content analysis of the existing processes has so far not been proposed.

Methodology: We will first scrape the database of the Akkreditierungsrat. We will then suggest a scaling system for the variation in the data. This will take place regarding both the accreditation reviews’ characterisation of the situation as well as suggested legal consequences, as ranging from accrediting programmes and universities without any recommendations or requirements all the way up to disallowing particular study programs to continue to run and train students. Selected cases will then be chosen to contrast the official review content with an in-depth analysis of programmes’ actual content and the processes that led to their coming-into-being.

This study aims to research the legal gap of the higher education environment and discover the extent of the need to set the competitiveness practices through a public legislative reference. By reviewing the competitiveness literature in the higher education of both European and Arabian regions, comparing the practical space that can be a scope of crises and competitiveness, and then collecting questionnaire’s answers filled by the two regions’ law specialized faculties about the importance of issuing a competitiveness regulation or not, this research would be pioneer in deciding whether there will be new public regulation to organize the competitiveness in the higher education sector. Furthermore, it would enable more research in this area of competitiveness laws.

Keywords; Competitiveness, Law, Regulation, Higher Education, European States, Arabian Countries,