Reading academic freedom and academic autonomy otherwise: critical canons to advance Africanist Critical University Studies?

The legacies of EuroAmerican conceptions of academic freedom and academic autonomy are fraught. In this paper I raise a concern that the ways in which they have been operationalised and remembered has lead to scholarly retraction about the subject in post-conflict and post-colonial scholarship. Situating the discussion in the current taboo in contemporary South Africa, where that ‘freedom’ is enshrined constitutionally and critique is prized within public discourses, I discuss the dangers of evasion and prohibition of engagement with dominant discourses and framing, particularly for higher education researchers. Holding that generative counter-narratives of academic freedom and academic autonomy run across various threads of African scholarship, both on and off the continent, this contribution is intended to be catalytic of possible counter-concepts and critical canons to advance Critical University Studies. To begin this, four existing trajectories are briefly mapped, to recognise their potential as well-springs to radicalise and root research on emancipation and higher education. First, are genealogical constructions of academic freedom as part of long struggles for freedom. Second, are those operating from the historical awareness of crushed hopes since ‘decolonisation’, who ways through the nation-state’s fraught relations to institutional autonomy and the public good(s). Third, is the widening of dominant assumptions about ‘threats’ as external to institutional autonomy, to address internal problematics for academic autonomy within those supposed protections. Fourth, are those who challenge the geopolitical webs, bureaucracies and machinations which discipline, commodify and marginalise the production of academic knowledge by limiting academic authorial agency. Deliberating such scholarly contributions holds generative potential for the studying the ways in which the practices of academic freedom is exercised individually, collectively, institutionally and transgressively. They de-idealise freedom and the agents who practice it, exposing erasure, violence and disappointment, and also enabling recognition of alternative, sometimes even unheroic and ineffective, practices of ugly academic freedom. I would argue that this conversation about academic freedom is worthy of de-membering and re-membering (Ndlovu-Gatcheni, 2022) as we negotiate, record and situate our moves as academic communities towards transformative framings, discourses and praxis within/out the African university in our times.