Against the backdrop of universities’ current shift toward utilitarianism and performativity, this article examines the condition of higher education by contrasting today’s technocratic, outcome-oriented educational agendas with the modernist educational quest for free experimentation, collaborative research communities, and the convergence of research and teaching as core components of academic freedom. Building on the philosophical foundations of this notion, articulated by Kant and later institutionalised in the Humboldtian university model, the article analyses how early-twentieth-century progressive art schools established themselves as emancipatory spaces of intellectual and creative autonomy. The discussion highlights the crucial difference between the inventive practices developed in these schools and the contemporary, utilitarian conception of creativity, which aligns with what Lyotard (1984) identified as the performative turn in higher education – a shift still evident in a culture of efficiency, managerialism, and constant evaluation. Within this educational framework, the reform of higher education is contingent upon adopting flexible learning experiences that foster the capacity to navigate the uncertainties of the future and to professionally reinvent oneself to adapt to unforeseen challenges and economic necessities. Creativity, in this context, is posited as an indispensable skill to be acquired universally, which superficially appeals to associations between freedom and art, but in fact reinforces the logic of results and effects, testing and performance measurement. Yet if we look at the pedagogical programs of modern art schools founded in the early twentieth century, the teaching of creativity, particularly during the initial, so-called basic or preparatory stages of academic training, was based precisely on the principle of delaying the immediate application of artistic research and focusing instead on unlimited experimentation.

Although the link between art and freedom is often presented as self-evident, a historical perspective reveals that, for centuries, art education was about coercion rather than freedom (Bourdieu, 1993). Furthermore, as the French sociologist has also shown, discourses advocating aesthetic education reinforce rather than neutralise the division of social strata (Bourdieu & Darbel, 1991). And yet, the rhetoric of creativity and innovation in the debate on higher education and in global educational policymakers’ discourse is mobilised as a solution to world issues related to equality and access to education, economic and social problems, and, more recently, challenges that might emerge and should be anticipated creatively (UNESCO, 2014, 2015; OECD, 2019). In other words, there is a schism between the real-life experience of modern art schools as sites of dissent, critique, and creative freedom and the narratives that feed on the affective power of artistic experiences and the aesthetic desire for the ‘creative life.’ It becomes necessary, therefore, to distinguish between the discursive hegemony of creative topoi in higher education and the art university as a site of aesthetic, inventive, and, at times, emancipative practices. 

Taking the historical introduction on the state of academic freedom in both artistic and higher education domains as a conceptual framework, this paper seeks to examine the idea that, within the arena of higher education, contemporary art universities managed to defend themselves from the spectre of utilitarianism by asserting their right to disinterested research and experimentation. Moreover, as if replacing the role given to the faculty of philosophy by Kant, progressive art schools took on the obligation to be agents of social, cultural and political critique. By examining emancipatory experiences in alternative art schools and adopting a cross-disciplinary approach spanning art history, history of education and higher education studies, this article seeks to offer a historically and philosophically informed reflection on how academic freedom was exercised in modernist art education and how the current rhetoric of creativity and innovation is entirely detached from any historical consciousness or real-life experience. To this end, the philosophical discussion on the role of the modern university is outlined and the crisis of this conception at present. Next, the discussion of artistic subjectivity is introduced, and its relation to truth, liberty and artistic life. Subsequently, a historical outline of the nature and development of progressive art schools is sketched, in contrast to the previous coercive model of art education. To explore alternative ways of thinking and doing within higher education institutions, the paper reconstructs the historical experience of modernist art schools in the first half of the twentieth century (Moscow’s Svomas-Vkhutemas, 1918-1927; School of Design in Chicago, 1937-1943), where progressive educational methodologies postponed immediate application in favour of open-ended experimentation and, contrary to the prevailing rhetoric of efficiency, generated an unprecedented body of creative innovation. The conclusion reflects on the significance of these experiences today, in the broader setting of the contemporary educational arena and in relation to the debate within higher education studies.

In today’s higher-education landscape, shaped by pressures toward specialisation, efficiency, immediate applicability, and a managerial logic that casts students as customers and teachers as suppliers of readymade knowledge in the name of “innovation,” it is pertinent to reconsider these premises in light of earlier, already enacted educational experiments. A closer look at the teaching methodologies developed in the discussed schools, which, as argued in this paper, supported the creative production of both teachers and students, reveals that they were not grounded in empty appeals to creativity. Instead, they assumed the equality between teacher and student, the deliberate postponement of immediate application, and the encouragement to experiment without a predetermined goal. What this paper argues is not that progressive pedagogies developed in vanguard art schools should replace current educational approaches in universities. Instead, the idea of invoking the experience of these art schools was to expose how narratives of creative emancipation, as they function today within the global educational agenda, are i) emptied of significance and detached from historical consciousness and real experience, and ii) reproduce what they claim to avoid, that is, conformity rather than freedom, and intellectual confinement rather than innovation. The discourse of innovation and managerialism in education frames academic freedom as an empty ideal, while higher education institutions are cast into the logic of circumstantial responsiveness to whatever agenda is presented as urgent. What also becomes evident in formulations of creativity in the present-day educational debate is that it lacks its essential quality, one that defines its nature, as pointed out by Heidegger – that of the happening of the work of art, its becoming.

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P., & Darbel, A. (1991). The love of art: European art museums and their publics. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. University of Minnesota Press. OECD. (2019). PISA creative thinking framework (third draft). Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/PISA-2021-creative-thinking-framework.pdf UNESCO (2014). Nurturing creative thinking. UNESCO International Bureau of Education UNESCO (2015). Education 2030: Incheon Declaration and framework for action. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245656