Academic freedom, students and the decolonial turn in South Africa

Abstract

Academic freedom can be invoked to index different claims. According to Moodie (1996), there are three main claims associated with academic freedom. These include scholarly inquiry, academic rule and institutional autonomy. These three claims can be unpacked by asking two questions: What kinds of freedoms are required for the creation of knowledge and the pursuit of truth? And in whom are these freedoms vested? That is, what is the content of the 'academic' in academic freedom? Regarding the first question, a productive line of inquiry is to employ Berlin's (1971) distinction between positive and negative freedom (Webbstock 2008). Conceived negatively, freedom is the absence of external interference. It is an opportunity concept insofar as freedom is not so much located in action, but in the opportunity to act. Correspondingly, positive freedom is an exercise concept, because its constitutive evaluative question presupposes action that realises certain ends (Taylor 1979). Moreover, negative freedom is defined by absence, while positive freedom is defined by the presence of some quality (for example, self-determination) or realisation of some end. Whereas negative freedom is occupied with safeguarding or expanding a sphere of non-intervention, positive freedom is concerned with cultivating one's sphere of influence. On the matter of the referent 'academic', the relevant distinction, as applies to the three claims within academic freedom, is between individualist and communitarian conceptions. Is academic freedom the property of an individual or of a community engaged in academic activity? The most intuitive understanding of academic freedom involves claims to scholarly freedom made on behalf of individual scholars. Here, academic activities such as teaching and research should be protected against interference from unqualified outsiders (Moodie 1996, 1997). This negative freedom can also be claimed on behalf of universities, culminating in academic freedom as institutional autonomy. An example is the famed T.B. Davie formula which defines academic freedom as the 'inalienable rights' of a university 'to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study' (Centlivres et al. 1957: 11-12; also see Higgins 2000, 2013; Du Toit 2000). This conception of academic freedom was developed originally to insist on a sphere of non-intervention vis-vis the apartheid state's attempts at enforcing racial segregation in higher education in South Africa.