De-idealising the problem of academic freedom and academic autonomy: exploring alternative readings for scholarship of South African higher education

Set against difficult and problematic legacies of institutional and academic autonomy, this paper cautions against curtailing the recognition, and the study, of troubled and alternative practices of academic freedom. What is deliberated is the possibility of opening the concepts of academic freedom and academic autonomy against the limits, and the purposes, to which they have been recounted in many conflict-affected and postcolonial contexts. The paper begins by raising questions about the state of enquiry within post-conflict and postcolonial academia. It discusses observations that silence and silencing of engagement seem to be case in South Africa, where troubled legacies of the concepts’ operationalisation have had a chilling effect on scholarship. To wrestle the narrowed, dominant discourses away from imperialist and technocratic interests, in this speculative paper the lens of ugly academic freedoms allows for international counter-narratives to be drawn upon to de-idealise and problematise the concepts. This serves to situate recollections of fragments of South Africa’s past and present intertextual engagements with the internal and external threats to its higher education institutions and its academics’ freedoms.