The European Union is using its flagship Jean Monnet education program to promote pro-EU ideas at universities worldwide, according to a new report warning of threats to academic freedom.
The report, published by the think tank MCC Brussels, reveals what it describes as the largest educational manipulation project of the European Union. According to the study, titled “Professors of Propaganda,” the Jean Monnet Programme—integrated into Erasmus+— does not aim to foster academic excellence, but instead acts as “an explicitly political instrument designed to align teaching and research with the priorities of the European Commission.”
With a budget of around €25 million annually, the programme reaches half a million students in more than 70 countries. The report calls this “an investment explicitly designed to influence curricula and promote Brussels’s legitimacy.”
Many projects funded by the programme openly state as their goal: “To promote European integration, foster European identity, confront the rise of Euroscepticism and of populist, far-right parties.” This approach turns universities into tools for official propaganda, the report says, shutting down free debate and pushing a ready-made set of ideas.
The report heavily criticises a project in Turkey that set out to “reverse de-Europeanisation dynamics in the EU and beyond.” The authors say this “does not describe academic research, but militancy disguised as teaching.”
Far from being confined to the classroom, Brussels expects funding recipients to act as activists. The report describes this process as academics becoming “outreach agents, organising public events, collaborating with NGOs and media, and projecting EU-approved narratives into the social sphere.”
Joseph H. H. Weiler, Jean Monnet Professor in New York and former president of the European University Institute, admitted without hesitation, “Part of our mission as Jean Monnet professors is to disseminate the values of European integration. The Commission openly considers us as intellectual ambassadors of the Union and its values.”
The document warns that this funding structure “undermines the principles of academic autonomy and transforms students into subjects to be moulded into ‘right-thinking’ citizens.”
The programme is also part of a bigger network of universities, NGOs, and media outlets that all get EU money and support each other’s work, making Brussels’s policies look independent when they’re not.
MCC warns that it is not only academic honesty but democracy itself that is at stake. “The Jean Monnet Programme is explicitly structured as an academic tool aimed at projecting and promoting the EU’s policy preferences… This is not education; it is indoctrination,” the report concludes.
