Frameworks for Doctoral Education: Academic Freedom of Doctoral Candidates Across Europe

Both the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Union (EU) consider academic freedom a fundamental value of higher education. As several recent policy reports highlight (Maassen et al. in March State of play of academic freedom in the EU member states: overview of de facto trends and developments, European Parliament, 2023; Kinzelbach et al. in FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and V-Dem Institute, 2023; Bennetot Pruvot et al. in University autonomy in Europe IV, The scorecard 2023, European university association, 2023; Beiter et al. in Vanderbilt J Trans Law 49(3), 2016; Freedom House in Freedom in the World, 2023), academic freedom is in decline globally, including across Europe. For Europe, these reports focus on the academic freedom of researchers, teachers, and students—with students being at the bachelor’s or master’s level while researchers and academic staff are assumed to be holders of doctorates with permanent employment. However, as stipulated in the Salzburg Principles and Recommendations adopted by the European University Association (EUA), doctoral education is a research education and, as such, differs markedly from bachelor’s and master’s education. Furthermore, doctoral candidates, like other contingent faculty, often work under precarious conditions that differ significantly from the conditions of researchers with tenured or permanent positions. This means that their very specific circumstances cannot be addressed if they are subsumed under either the group of students or researchers. In Europe, doctoral candidates and early career researchers in non-permanent positions make up a considerable proportion of researchers working in academia. This paper addresses this blind spot in the current European discussion on academic freedom by providing an overview of national, regional, and, in some cases, institutional frameworks of doctoral education across Europe. It specifically looks at what these frameworks mean for the academic freedom of doctoral candidates in ten European countries, particularly in light of the fact that none of them explicitly take the fundamental values of the EHEA into account.