The author reviews the main elements of Richard Münch’s academic capitalism theory. By introducing categories like “audit university” or “entrepreneurial university,” the German sociologist critically sets the present academic management model against the earlier, modern-era conception of academic research as an “exchange of gifts.” In the sociological and psychological sense, the latter is a social communication structure rooted in traditional social lore, for instance the potlatch ceremonies celebrated by some North-American Indian tribes which Marcel Mauss described. Münch shows the similarities between that old “gift exchanging” model and the contemporary one with its focus on the psychosocial fundamentals of scientific praxis, and from this gradually derives the academic capitalism conception. His conclusion is the critical claim that science possesses its own, inalienable axiological autonomy and anthropological dimension, which degenerate in result of capitalism’s “colonisation” of science by means of state authority and money (here Münch refers to Jürgen Habermas’s philosophical argumentation). The author also offers many of his own reflections on the problem, which allows Münch’s analyses to be viewed in a somewhat broader context.

This article concerns the conditions for the institutionalization of open academic debate. The author focuses on the changes that have occurred over time in the seminar’s place in academic practice. She describes three types of seminars, from various eras in university history. In each case, the bases for the institutionalization of academic discussion were generally-held convictions as to what knowledge is and how it should be sought. Seminars legitimized academic debate. The examples provided—of the medieval university, Humboldt’s university, and the so-called entrepreneurial university—have various sources of legitimation: religion, the authority of scholarship, or the economic ‘usefulness’ of science (devoid of other authority). The author attempts to show that the sources of legitimation are reflected in the forms of the seminar’s institutionalization: the composition of the participants, the conversational rules (its public or closed character), and the transparency of academic knowledge.