Abstract
The issue of time is at the core of the question of academic freedom. Based on the definition of an “ethical” notion of free-time, and related notions of freeness, truth and autonomy, this chapter addresses two related kinds of threats to academic freedom: “the internal threat”, which is realized when the sciences, having assumed a fundamentally technicized and politicized character, finally forfeit the “scientific difference” through (self-imposed) a-scientific evaluation procedures; and the “external threats” stemming, on the one hand, from the polis at large (through its demands for results whose usefulness remains unquestioned), and, on the other, from an unmindful implication of teaching and research in technological settings ruled by self-contained purposes of effectiveness.