University autonomy and the increasing shift to English in academic programmes at European universities: In dialogue with Liviu Matei

Abstract

Abstract This paper centres on a dialogue with Liviu Matei, Professor of Higher Education and Public Policy at Kings College London, which aims to transcend sociolinguistic disciplinary boundaries by exploring the increasing use of English for higher education academic programmes at European universities within the context of university autonomy. Once Provost of the Central European University, forced to move from Hungary to Austria when its institutional autonomy was increasingly infringed by the state, Liviu Matei’s academic work combines intellectual acuteness with experience, further deepened in the practice of consultation and applied policy research for influential international bodies and organisations, including the Council of Europe and the European Commission. With him, we consider in novel ways the role that legal reform granting a regulated autonomy to universities accompanied by a more corporate style of higher education governance may have played in the rampant growth in recent decades of English language academic programmes in the now European Higher Education Area (EHEA). We reflect on the historical and public policy contexts out of which English as a medium of instruction (EMI) arose, the regulated autonomy of universities by ministerial practices of steering at a distance, and widely obtaining political epistemologies and policy narratives.