This book investigates the impact of EU law and policy on the Member
States' higher education institution (HEI) sectors with a particular
emphasis on the exposure of research in universities to EU competition
law. It illustrates how the gradual application of EU economic law to
HEIs which were predominantly identified as being within the public
sector creates tensions between the economic and the social spheres in
the EU. Given the reluctance of the Member States to openly develop an
EU level HEI policy, these tensions appear as unintended consequences of
the traditional application of the EU Treaty provisions in areas such as
Union Citizenship, the free movement provisions and competition policy
to the HEI sector. These developments may endanger the traditional
non-economic mission of European HEIs. In this respect, the effects of
Union Citizenship and free movement law on HEIs have received some
attention but the impact of EU competition law constitutes a largely
unexplored area of research and this book redresses that imbalance.
The aim of the research is to show that intended and unintended
consequences of the EU economic constitution(s) are enhanced by a
parallel tendency of Member States to commercialise formerly public
sectors such as the HEI sector. The book investigates the potential
tensions through doctrinal analysis and a qualitative study focussing on
the exposure of HEI research to EU competition law as an
under-researched example of exposure to economic constraints. It
concludes that such exposure may compromise the wider aims that research
intensive universities pursue in the public interest.
Andrea Gideon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Law &
Business (National University of Singapore) for which she has suspended
her position as Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool. In her
current project she is investigating the application of competition law
to public services in ASEAN. Her previous research concerned tensions
between the economic and the social in the EU with a focus on EU
competition law in which research area she earned her PhD at the
University of Leeds in 2014.
