The article examines the structural crisis of the neoliberal university model through a systematic analysis of how market logic erodes academic autonomy in contemporary higher education. The research employs a mixed-method critical-analytical approach that combines a structured synthesis of peer-reviewed literature published between 2015 and 2023, comparative documentary analysis of institutional indicators from the European University Association Autonomy Scorecard and the Academic Freedom Index time-series, and analytical decomposition of governance, financing, and labour regimes across European and Anglo-American higher education systems. The central finding is that the erosion of academic autonomy operates through four coupled mechanisms — financial dependency, managerial governance, evaluative metrification, and discursive recasting of the academic subject — which form a self-reinforcing system rather than independent policy choices. The empirical pattern reveals a structural paradox in which higher education systems with the highest formal scores on institutional autonomy frequently exhibit the most intensive precarity of academic labour and the steepest declines on substantive indicators of academic freedom. The original contribution of this article is the introduction of the analytical framework of coupled mechanisms of autonomy erosion, which clarifies why isolated reforms targeting only one dimension of neoliberalisation systematically fail to restore substantive autonomy. The paper closes with implications for European Higher Education Area policy, arguing that genuine restoration of academic autonomy requires simultaneous intervention across all four mechanisms rather than incremental adjustments. Methodological limitations include reliance on aggregate institutional data and the English-language concentration of the source literature