ACADEMIC FREEDOM IN RELIGIOUSLY-AFFILIATED UNIVERSITIES: OBJECTIONS AND ANSWERS

The theme of this paper, or rather its perspective, is the academic freedom in religiously-affiliated universities, aiming to approach the problem of their autonomy, which today seems to be in crisis, along with the concept of university itself. The specific problem to be addressed has two phases: (a) the freedom of the university to hire professors willing to comply with religious institutional requirements in their performance, and, accordingly, the inverse scenario: to dismiss those who manifestly and repeatedly oppose to said statement of principles; and (b) the real capacity of religiously-affiliated universities to provide a scope of freedom to their faculty, being it qualitatively consistent with the idea of truth that is declared in the founding declarations. Two previous questions must be considered behind the right to academic freedom: the existence or absence of a unique and hegemonic notion of university, and the concept of freedom which is currently valid in the society. This last matter is directly related to the strategies used to dominate public discourse.