The Impact of New Public Management on Academic Freedom:
A Comparison between Nordic and Central European Countries
Date: 15.12.2025, 3:00–6.00 p.m.
Venue: Room L621, 6th floor | Faculty of Law | Sigmund Freud University | Lassallestraße 3, 1020 Vienna
Programme
15:00
Konrad Lachmayer
Introduction
15.20
Niina Mäntylä | Melanie Regine | Henrik Wenander
The legal position of academic staff in a changing university landscape: A comparative analysis of Finland, Norway, and Sweden
16.20
Hedwig Unger
Navigating the Tension Between Autonomy, Accountability, and Academic Freedom: The Impact of New Public Management on Austrian University Governance
16.40
Eleonóra Wagenknecht
Reshaping Universities in an Illiberal State: Academia under New Public Management in Hungary
17.00
Konrad Lachmayer
Conclusion – A post-individual academia
The workshop explores the impact of New Public Management (NPM) reforms on academic freedom and university autonomy in a comparative perspective between Nordic and Central European countries. Managerialism, performance orientation and market-based governance have increasingly shaped higher education systems, raising questions about their compatibility with academic self-governance and constitutional guarantees of academic freedom.
Contributions from the Nordic countries analyse how managerial reforms have influenced the legal status and working conditions of academics in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Comparative insights from Central Europe illustrate similar dynamics in different legal and political contexts: in Austria, following the 2002 University Act, and in Hungary, where NPM-inspired reforms have coincided with more direct restrictions on academic freedom.
The workshop aims to assess how legal frameworks and governance models mediate the effects of NPM on academic freedom and to reflect on broader implications for academic freedom and university autonomy in Europe.
Please register until 14.12.2025: konrad.lachmayer@jus.sfu.ac.at
Presentations
Niina Mäntylä | Melanie Regine | Henrik Wenander
The legal position of academic staff in a changing university landscape: A comparative analysis of Finland, Norway, and Sweden
The higher education system has since the 2000s changed fundamentally in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. One reason behind this is so-called managerialism as a part of NPM, which means a shift towards more managerial forms of leadership, business-oriented aspects, and neoliberal university policies. Managerialism in all the Nordic countries conflicts with decades of collegial institutional tradition.
Good labour conditions have been considered as one of the safeguards to academic freedom. Based on the comparative legal studies as method the article analyses how the position of academics has changed and how the legal systems studied have reacted to the current challenges. Is academic freedom at risk because of the changing labour conditions and what is the role of managerialism in this development?
University employees’ status has started to converge to that of private sector employees. However, there is no common framework, and traditions of different legal areas affect the status of academic staff. The development due to the strong emphasis on managerialism has been most rapid in Finland, having the strongest influence on the status of university employees. In Sweden, political ambitions to increase university institutional autonomy have been accompanied by increased control and bureaucratisation. At the same time, it is remarkable that very recent developments in Norway show a trend toward moving away from NPM principles in academia.
The presentation bases on an article published in the legal journal Retfærd (2024) (4) 37.
Hedwig Unger
Navigating the Tension Between Autonomy, Accountability, and Academic Freedom:
The Impact of New Public Management on Austrian University Governance
The presentation examines the transformative impact of NPM on Austrian university governance, focusing on the delicate balance between institutional autonomy, accountability, and academic freedom. The 2002 Universities Act marked a paradigm shift, granting universities greater autonomy while introducing performance-based funding, managerial practices, and accountability mechanisms. While these reforms aimed to enhance efficiency and competitiveness, they also created tensions by aligning academic priorities with governmental and market-driven objectives. The presentation explores how these changes have reshaped decision-making processes, challenged traditional notions of academic freedom, and redefined the relationship between universities and the state through performance agreements.
Eleonóra Wagenknecht
Reshaping Universities in an Illiberal State: Academia under New Public Management in Hungary
Over the past decades, Hungary has undergone not only a profound transformation of its higher education system but also a significant decline in democracy and rule of law. Among other reforms, nearly all public universities have been converted into privately governed universities under the banner of New Public Management (NPM), with boards dominated by government-appointed members. In Hungary´s illiberal political context, managerial and market-oriented reforms have become closely intertwined with mechanism of centralised control, leading to direct state influence over university governance and academic careers. These structural changes have profoundly affected the positions of academic staff and the protection of academic freedom, as political appointments, dismissals of professors, self-censorship and an interrelated chilling effect increasingly constrain free research and teaching as well as university autonomy. The Hungarian case illustrates how NPM reforms, when embedded in an authoritarian regime, can transform instruments of efficiency into tools of political domination and threaten the very foundation of academia.
Konrad Lachmayer
Conclusion – A post-individual academia
The economisation of universities has led to dystopian developments. The dangers of excessive economisation relativise the modern ideas of universities. The more research output gains importance and the creative aspects of thinking and rethinking lose significance, the more interchangeable individual performance becomes. Taken to the extreme, this would lead to post-individual academia, possibly based on robot scholars who write papers to improve the influence and ranking of universities. Driven by economic optimisation, universities act like investment funds, holding stocks of companies and patent rights, earning money from sports clubs and the sale of merchandising products. The number of students is kept to a minimum in order to promote the ideal of an elite. The core value of the university is its brand, which must be sold worldwide. But is this still a dystopian perspective for the future, or is it the everyday reality of university life?
Biographies
Professor Dr. Melanie Regine Hack | Faculty of Law, University of Bergen (Norway)
Melanie Hack is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway. She holds a law degree from Germany and earned her PhD from the University of Oslo in 2015. Before joining UiB, she worked as a senior researcher for Scandinavia at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Policy in Munich. She is a member of the management team at CENTENOL (The Center on the Europeanization of Norwegian Law), where she leads a work package on labor law. Additionally, she is the head of the LaW-BALANCE project: “Life and Work in Balance: Legal responses to working life in times of change and crisis” and work package leader within the project “Revising Work Time Flexibility Policies to Promote Work Inclusion (REFLEX)”, which is coordinated by OsloMet University in Oslo.
Prof. Dr. Konrad Lachmayer | Faculty of Law, Sigmund Freud University Vienna (Austria)
Konrad Lachmayer is Professor of Public and European law, Vice-Dean for research and Director of Studies of an LL.M. programme on “Public International Law” in collaboration with UNITAR at Sigmund Freud University, Faculty of Law, in Vienna. His research focuses on comparative public law, academic freedom and Austrian and European public law.
Professor Dr. Niina Mäntylä | Faculty of Law, University of Vaasa (Finland)
Niina Mäntylä works as a Professor of Public Law at the University of Vaasa, Finland and also as the Vice Dean of the School of Management. She specializes in administrative law and education law. Mäntylä has led several research projects on issues related to public power and liability in the public sector. Recently, her research has focused on academic freedom but also liability issues related to artificial intelligence. Mäntylä has held various expert positions, including serving as a member of the National Non-Discrimination and Equality Tribunal.
Dr. Hedwig Unger | Faculty of Law, University of Graz (Austria)
Hedwig Unger is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Austrian and European Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests are in the field of public law, especially constitutional law, and political science, in particular issues at the interface of state and law and the relationship between the state and higher education institutions. Her current research focuses on issues of higher education governance and university autonomy from a comparative perspective
Mag. Eleonóra Wagenknecht | Faculty of Law, Sigmund Freud University Vienna (Austria)
Eleonóra Wagenknecht works as a Research and Teaching Assistant in Public and European law at Sigmund Freud University, Faculty of Law, in Vienna and is a PhD candidate at the University of Vienna. Her doctoral research focuses on the protection of academic freedom as a fundamental right and professional freedom in Europe against the risks it faces in illiberal regimes such as Hungary. Her broader research interests lie in constitutional law and fundamental rights protection from an international and comparative perspective.
Professor Dr. Henrik Wenander | Dean of the Faculty of Law, Lund University (Sweden)
Henrik Wenander is Professor of Public Law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden and currently serves as the Dean of the Faculty. His research focuses on European and international aspects of public law, especially in relation to Swedish administrative law. He publishes in English, Swedish, and German and has written on mutual recognition of administrative decisions, the constitutional position of public administration in the Nordic states, the Swedish monarchy, and Nordic legal cooperation. He is one of the editors of the peer-reviewed Swedish journal of administrative law, Förvaltningsrättslig tidskrift. From 2021 to 2023, he took part as an expert in the governmental inquiry on constitutional amendments for protecting the independence of courts in Sweden. He teaches Swedish and European public law..
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