As has become customary in the last few years, I’ve spent autumn conferencing. Again. And again. As usual, I’ve presented papers at two higher education conferences, the European “Consortium of Higher Education Researchers” with the beautiful acronym CHER, and the German equivalent called Gesellschaft für Hochschulforschung, which sports the rather bureaucratic-sounding GfHf. As both conferences have been held only one week apart from each other, I’ve resolved to something that seems to have become a rather bad habit as well: Preparing one paper and presenting it at both occasions.

This time, I had the honour to talk about my ongoing research into attacks on academic freedom on an international scale. I received valuable feedback at both conferences and found it particularly interesting that at the more international CHER gathering scholars were highly aware and rather opinionated about different phenomena, whilst the more German-speaking audience at the GfHf for the most part responded to my presentation on a seemingly completely academic level.

Unrelatedly, the experiences of the two cities the two conferences were held in, were quite different: CHER’s choice of Poznán versus GfHf’s decision for Heilbronn meant that I enjoyed one stay a bit more than the other. Which doesn’t apply to collegial company, which was excellent in both locations. And as a researcher intent of being diplomatic, I won’t hint to which of the two cities I preferred. At least none was as revolutionarily bloody as Dickens made Paris in his tale…