Time and value

This opening chapter places the issue of academic freedom in its widest context—which, as it turns out, most immediately affects day-to-day academic life, and most momentously determines the conditions for teaching and research as fundamental exercises of freedom. This is the context of time, and more specifically of the “time of study” (or scholē), which is shown to be “the political institute par excellence”, meaning that, if this time—namely, the space for free studying—fails to be instituted, there is no polis (i.e., no house of freedom for a free humanity) in the first place. The chapter shows how the concept of value, which informs the nowadays omnipresent and pervasive practices of evaluation in the academic sphere, fundamentally undermines precisely that institution, and, by implication, the polis itself.