Institutional foundations of academic freedom in post-Confucian East Asia: Culture, history, legislation, and governance

• Academic freedom is analyzed as an institutionally embedded arrangement. • A four-dimensional framework compares China, Japan, and South Korea. • Post-Confucian autonomy-service logics shape scholarly legitimacy. • Historical and legal paths create divergent rights channels and boundaries. • NPM reforms translate post-Confucian duty scripts into auditable steering tools. This study maps and compares the institutional foundations of academic freedom in China, Japan, and South Korea by treating academic freedom as an institutionally embedded arrangement rather than an abstract right. Drawing on insights from historical and sociological institutionalism, the study constructs a four-dimensional analytical framework comprising: political-cultural scripts, historical trajectories, legal-regulatory codification, and governance arrangements. The analysis suggests that, in contrast to Western liberal models prioritizing ‘negative liberty’ (freedom from interference), the three post-Confucian systems manifest academic freedom more as a duty-oriented ‘positive liberty’. This pattern reflects shared cultural roots of core institutional logics, including a hybrid autonomy-service model, deeply embedded state-intellectual relations, and neoliberal reforms that function as state steering tools. Despite these common foundations, the study also identifies divergences across the three systems in terms of legal justiciability, channels of state-academic interaction, and internal governance balances. Theoretically, this study contributes by understanding academic freedom as an institutional compromise, extending the multi-dimensional framework for its analysis, and providing a systematic tool for comparative research. Limitations include a reliance on secondary literature and content analysis, which may not capture everyday practices, and the conclusions require further validation through fieldwork.