This book scrutinizes the paradoxical functions of reflexivity in contemporary higher education: its capacity to enable institutional learning, adaptation, and renewal, while also eliciting a risk of entrapment in cycles of audit, performativity, and bureaucratic self-monitoring. This book pursues a key guiding question across all its collective contributions: does reflexivity liberate universities and the citizens of academe, or it entraps them? This book provides an integrated exploration of reflexivity as a composite conceptual lens and as a practical condition of university governance, policy-making, and academic life altogether. It brings together multidisciplinary and comparative perspectives that locate reflexivity within each and at the intersection of scholarship, policy, and practice. In doing so, this book engages with key debates in higher education studies, including governance and institutional identity, quality assurance and accountability, the metamorphoses and multi-layered challenges of the European Higher Education Area and other major transnational initiatives, as well as case studies that demonstrate how reflexivity operates across different settings. As a Festschrift in memory of Lazăr Vlăsceanu, this book honors a foundational European scholar whose work on reflexive modernity and the reflexive university remains highly relevant to present-day transformations and interrogations.

Liviu Matei is a higher education scholar, educator, and institutional and policy innovator. He is a professor of Higher Education & Public Policy and the head of the School of Education, Communication & Society at King's College London in the UK. Previously, he was Provost of Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He has taught at universities in Europe, the US, and Asia, conducted research and published extensively on matters of governance, academic freedom, funding, internationalization, quality assurance, and the history and politics of higher education. He has played key roles in applied research and policy initiatives in support of academic freedom, university autonomy and academic integrity, such as the European Higher Education Area project on the fundamental values of higher education. In this project, he led the research team that developed a monitoring framework and currently undertakes the actual monitoring of these values in 48 European countries.

Romiță Iucu is the president of the Board of Trustees and a professor of Higher Education and Pedagogy at the University of Bucharest in Romania, and a member of the CIVIS Alliance governance. With experience in international cooperation in the field of education, he is currently the coordinator of UNICA EduLAB Group, the co-chair of the FOREU4ALL Topical Group on Joint Programs and the European Degree of European Universities Alliances, and member of the Board of FOREU4ALL. He was appointed a Magna Charta Observatory Ambassador and been rewarded as a member of The International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame. Since 2024, he has also been a member of the Future of the Bologna Process Task Force. Professor Iucu is a member of the Romanian Academy since 2025. Professor Iucu held several university-management positions with an important role in designing, managing, and validating higher education and adult education policies at different levels.