Idea of a University and its Autonomy in the European Higher Education Area

The paper focuses on the concept of institutional autonomy in four sets of supra-national policy documents in the past decade. It shows the emergence of a new ideation of institutional autonomy with possible effects of the decline and non-usability of the concept. It also argues there is an evident difference in the discourse between the analysed sets of policy documents in targeting institutional autonomy as well as indications of cross-cutting agenda-setting in the time dimension. The documents from three sets are relatively consistent with each other concerning how to achieve or increase institutional autonomy with the exception of one; however, they are all inconsistent when it comes to understanding what institutional autonomy actually is or why it is needed