One of the many positive things about the South African Constitution is that it takes the trouble to include academic freedom as one of the rights it sees as essential to democracy and therefore necessary for society as a whole to defend.
A less positive aspect lies in just how the Constitution defines academic freedom to achieve this.
For, either by accident or design, academic freedom is framed in such a way that it becomes difficult (if not downright impossible) to defend it in actual practice.
That not one of the growing list of cases the public regards as academic freedom cases — Dr Anthony Turton’s silencing at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s recent conference, Xolela Mangcu’s resignation from the Human Sciences Research Council, and insults and injuries to bodies too numerous to mention at the University of KwaZulu-Natal — appears to have formally invoked its individual rights to academic freedom under the Constitution in its defence suggests something may be fatally flawed in the Constitution’s formulation.
The Constitution undoubtedly valorises academic freedom by placing it alongside such core human rights as freedom of religion and freedom of association. It took centuries of democratic struggle to gain recognition for these individual rights; indeed, they are still notably absent on many parts of the continent and in many parts of the world. Placing academic freedom alongside them suggests that it too has a crucial role in the development and maintenance of a vital and living democracy, and this constitutional emphasis is to be welcomed.
In a similarly welcome mode, the Constitution emphasises that academic freedom is important not only to academics; it is — as the recent Council on Higher Education (CHE) report on academic freedom stresses — “everyone’s right”.
Yet it is precisely here that the difficulties and complications begin to emerge. Academic freedom: anyone and everyone’s right?
In some ideal and utopian sense, perhaps; but in the reality of the here and now, academic freedom — either in its exercise or in any encroachment upon it — is restricted to academics and researchers as they are employed in diverse public institutional and educational settings.
In focusing on academic freedom as an individual’s right, the Constitution effectively marginalises or perhaps even puts out of the picture altogether the complex institutional setting in which alone academic freedom makes sense. For any right to academic freedom must in practice depend upon how far the institutions in which it is practised observe their duty to enable it and make it possible.
The Constitution’s idea of academic freedom as the right of any individual, akin to, and on the model of, the freedom of creative expression, is, I suggest, a red herring. It distracts attention from the real dimension in which academic freedom operates: the complex and politically charged exchanges within institutions between academics and the new managerial class of administrators; the struggles between universities and the state in relation to the control of teaching and research priorities; and the all-encompassing ideological battle between liberal and neoliberal ideas of the very purpose of higher education which most commentators prefer to pretend is not happening.
In reality individual freedom of expression is not context-bound or dependent in the same strict fashion as academic freedom is.
While anyone can stand on Hyde Park Corner and say whatever he or she likes in the name of freedom of expression, parents of children at universities expect their academic teachers to be qualified to hold the opinions they put forward. Unlike the right to freedom of expression, the right to academic freedom is the hard-earned right of a qualified individual, and not of any and every individual.
Indeed, in its core meaning, academic freedom refers to the right of qualified academics to challenge the paradigms of knowledge and understanding current in their field of specialisation, but with the proviso that they may do so only once they have shown adequate mastery of their field. The whole point of the research PhD is not just to understand but to perform what it means to make a contribution to knowledge through mastering a field of study.
The PhD is intended — as it were — to enable you to perform knowledge rather than just to repeat it; to be in a position to argue an expert opinion rather than just hold an opinion.
Academic freedom expresses the necessary and inescapable tensions between the university as a place for teaching as the passing on of received ideas, but at the same time, the place where these received ideas are constantly subjected to pressure and must be open to challenge and change — with the restriction that the challenge comes from those qualified to make the challenges.
The importance of this restriction — and with it, the differences between academic freedom and freedom of speech or religion — comes through with some force in recent debates in the United States around the teaching of evolution. Here the American Association of University Professors — the voice of the academic profession in the US — has come out against the adoption of a number of Bills promoting the teaching of creationist rather than evolutionary theory. The association did so on the grounds that while freedom of expression enables anyone to both privately and publicly hold creationist views, academic freedom rules that only scientifically credible theory should be taught in schools.
For the social value of the university is that — ideally at least — it is the place where knowledge and understanding are pursued free of ideological or commercial pressures. It is in performing this function that academic freedom is in everyone’s interest, though its practice is largely restricted to academics and researchers.
The whole point of academic freedom is that it seeks to ensure that debates on, and consequent policy decisions about, such controversial topics as HIV/Aids, genetic crop modification, national language policy, the impact of gender on social and economic relations, as well as what constitutes a canonical text and what books should be taught in the classroom, are matters which are considered through the lens of state-of-the-art knowledge and theory, rather than through prejudice, ideology or commercial interest.
As soon as this is said, of course, it is easy to see why the topic remains such a fraught one, and why it is politically convenient to seek to figure it as an individual right rather than an institutional practice. For in today’s South Africa, as well as in the larger world of which it is a part, there is considerable pressure on universities to become more and not less responsive to ideological and commercial pressures in the name of public accountability.
Focusing on academic freedom as the right and responsibility of the individual usefully consigns to the margins all the issues relating to the responsibilities of state and institution with regard to the safeguarding of academic freedom. It enables the duty of the institutions to protect academic freedom to disappear from the picture, and make it the sole preserve of the individual academic.
So it is that in practice, the restrictive definition of academic freedom as a purely individual right can be put into play by university managements who prefer to forget their duty to preserve and support it. Academics who question or bring to public attention authoritarian managerial policies can be and are disciplined for “bringing the institution into disrepute”.
The common sense response to this — that such silencing of academics itself is the main engine of bringing an institution into disrepute, and must be contrary to a broader understanding of academic freedom — is absolutely correct, and points to the weakness of the constitutional definition and defence.
In common with much liberal defence of rights, it prefers to ignore — as Marx said long ago of the French and US constitutions — the hard facts of the material conditions in which any such rights can or cannot be practised in reality.
What makes the CHE report on academic freedom such interesting reading is the ways in which its often supple thinking bends to the winds of political pressure only to snap back into concrete critique.
On the one hand, the report shares and appears to endorse the Constitution’s definition of academic freedom as a purely individual right when it rejects the too-easy conflation of academic freedom with institutional autonomy. On the other, it is forthright in all its criticisms of the current state of affairs: the ways in which, for all the rhetoric of “co-operative governance”, the state finds it easier to command universities than to consult them; that the application of “growth and development” imperatives to teaching and research provision may be “reckless”; and that, all in all, the government — in its calls for the accountability of higher education, may, ironically enough, not itself be exercising its own democratic accountability “for developing the higher education system”.
In other words — and not surprisingly — in its substance, the report comes round to asserting the values of an academic freedom it seemed at first to abjure, an academic freedom rooted in rather than separated out from its context as a highly mediated institutional practice, caught betwixt and between the interests of commerce and society, the state and the university, the managerial and the academic.
Indeed, the key finding or recommendation of the report is its insistence on the recognition that “no one party can know how, or should have the sole power, to draw a fixed boundary between higher education and society, or between academic freedom and institutional autonomy and accountability”.
The report adds that “any party claiming to know how to do this — or vested with unilateral power to do this — may in practice suppress necessary engagement and free expression of difference”. That this is surely in substance a defence of the classic ideal of academic freedom that the report says does not exist in the modern world points to some of the difficulties of all discussions of academic freedom.
All in all, both the CHE report and the Constitution itself appear to embody just the ambivalence that somehow the ideal of academic freedom always seems to engage when it comes to practice.
Academic freedom is an inconvenient ideal, cherished in theory, but compromised in practice in ways that suggest that talk of academic freedom is always most likely to take place in its absence.
John Higgins is Mellon Research Professor in the Archives and Public Culture Project at the University of Cape Town. He is the author of a forthcoming book on Marx for the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, and of a forthcoming study with Wits University Press, Academic Freedom in the New South Africa