Yesterday I gave the closing keynote at the annual conference of the NRO in Nieuwegein, The Netherlands, which, as of this week, will continue under a new name: the National Knowledge Institute for Education. A new name, but the same ambition: to make high-quality research meaningful in practice. Easier said than done, a bit like forming a government in the Netherlands. I had that joke ready for my talk, but decided to drop it at the last moment.

My talk focused on freedom and responsibility. Or, more precisely, on two kinds of freedom that I care deeply about: pedagogical and academic freedom. Both sound appealing, and they are, but they are not always as self-evident as we like to think.

Pedagogical freedom doesn’t mean that teachers can do whatever they like. It’s the freedom to make professional judgements within a framework of disciplinary knowledge, ethics, and accountability. Yes, it’s a kind of freedom, but a freedom with boundaries. In other words, the difference between professionalism and arbitrariness.

Academic freedom follows the same logic, but in research and higher education. It’s both a right and a duty: to inquire, teach, and publish according to scientific standards. And yes, both freedoms are under pressure, both from the outside and from within, when the wish to please outweighs the need to understand.

In both cases, freedom requires safeguarding. Not by adding more rules, but by strengthening professionalism. By treating rigour, transparency, and accountability not as threats, but as conditions for credible freedom.

That also means working evidence-informed, not because research always has the final word, but because it helps us make better professional judgements. Only then can we earn, or where needed regain, a crucial third element: trust.

I ended with a line freely adapted from Isaiah Berlin and Gert Biesta:

Freedom without rules becomes arbitrariness.
Rules without freedom become bureaucracy.

Between those two, we try to do our work: teaching, researching, and learning. And that balancing act may well be one of the most important we have.