"Because the university is foreign to power, because it is heterogeneous to the authority of power, it is also without power conditions. That is why we speak here of the university without conditions. [...] And I say "without conditions" as well as "unconditional," in order to let the statement of "without power" or "without defense" be heard-understood: because it is absolutely independent, the university is also an exposed fortress. [...] Because it refuses to be subject to conditions, it is sometimes forced - anemic, abstract - to surrender also without conditions." (Jacques Derrida).
In April 1998, at Stanford University in California, Jacques Derrida delivered the lecture "The University Without Conditions". The same lecture was delivered again by him on June 2, 1999, at the French Institute of Athens and a year later in Frankfurt, at the invitation of Jürgen Habermas. His speech is part of the tradition of European philosophical thought (especially German: Kant, Schelling, Humboldt, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger), which primarily questions the conditions of the possibility of organizing the university in relation to the economic, legal, and ethical-political conditions that determine the field of academic teaching and research. [...]