Academic Freedom Forum

http://ahh.sagepub.com/content/15/2.toc.pdf

In a previous issue, Nobel prize-winner J.M. Coetzee argued that it was time for humanist academics to take a stand on academic freedom and argue ‘that we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is a good in itself’.  In this issue, we follow up this call with a special Forum on Academic Freedom which offers discussion on and around the topic from intersecting views and arguments drawn from both the Global North and the Global South.

Writing from South Africa, higher education specialist Lis Lange worries that a certain ‘depoliticisation’ has ‘infected our fight for academic freedom’, transforming it into ‘a right to disengage… from the deliberation about knowledge constitution, effects, distribution in society and its power’, and with the consequent danger that ‘we are abdicating our moral responsibility to the university and to ourselves as intellectuals’ while a number of reviewers (two from Britain, one from Norway and one from Holland) offer engagements with John Higgins’s Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa. 

From the USA, Michael Bérubé offers a striking survey of the situation of academic freedom in the USA, with attention to both the intellectual values of the humanities, and the material realities of the increasing casualization of academic labour.  Comparative responses come from Raelene Frances in Australia, who questions whether anyone in Australia sees the ‘casualization of academic work as a threat to quality teaching’, while Joachim Wiewiura from Denmark, where ‘students are paid to study’ and theorists of education have emphasized the ‘political need to educate citizens’.