Sayaka Oki is invited by the assembly of the Collège de France, at the suggestion of Pr Samantha Besson.
In historical research on the concept of academic freedom in general, the history of German-speaking universities occupies a privileged place. This lecture demonstrates that the history of academies and learned societies, particularly in France, provides an enriching angle of approach for a better understanding of the process of conceptualizing institutional academic freedom. One of its purest forms emerged with Condorcet in his project for a " société nationale des sciences et des arts " in the years 1790. He envisaged total autonomy in choosing the members of this society, with public funding to guarantee the freedom of scholarly activities.
The lecture is in threeparts . The first traces the process of institutionalizing academic freedom as an attempt to transfer the cultural practices of the Republic of Letters to royal institutions. Several rounds of negotiation took place on the margin of freedom available to state-funded scholars under the Ancien Régime.
The second part of the conference looks at the emergence of the French ideal of a national, independent academy during the revolutionary era, and the difficulties encountered in putting it into practice, in contrast to the self-financed model developed in Anglo-Saxon countries in particular.
The third part looks at the transmission of practices linked to institutional academic freedom through the globalization of academic networks, taking as an example the establishment of a national academy in Japan in the last half of the 19th century. This appears to have been the first successful attempt to import a Western academy into a region that had not been colonized and was culturally remote from the West, following a few earlier attempts of a more precarious nature elsewhere. The actors involved in this process conceived academic freedom in different ways, under the influence of French, German and American models, while reinterpreting them with reference to a Japanese cultural base.
