Catalysed by concerns about the 'silence' and seeming avoidance of studying 'academic freedom' in post-conflict academia since the cessation of the Cold War, Institute Fellow: Legacy, Professor Dina Belluigi composed a paper for the special issue 'Critical University Studies in Techno-rational time' (edited by Profs Aslam Fataar, Shireen Motala and Andre Keet) for the Southern African Review of Education.  The problematics of idealised notions and narrow professional parameters of 'academic freedom', 'academic autonomy' and 'institutional autonomy' are discussed.

The lens and language of ugliness is proposed as a critique of liberal, colonial conceptions of freedom and as recognition of imperfect acts, agents and collective worldmaking.  This is offered as a thinking with the recent work of Elizabeth Ankler.

South Africa's discourses about academic freedom - at different points in its history - are then speculatively considered, noting heterogenous inter-textuality with English notions, ancient Greek virtues, and misinterpretations of statements made during apartheid by those in the USA.  Historical melancholia of scholars in the post-apartheid period for a state of academic freedom that never quite was, and current complications with capitalism and new managerialism, are drawn on to point towards the need for conceptualising anew these central concerns of academia.

Read the paper here and via open access here.

 

Belluigi, D. Z. 2023. De-idealising the problem of academic freedom and academic autonomy: Exploring alternative readings for scholarship of South African higher education.

Fataar, A., Motala, S., & Keet. A. [Eds].

Special Issue: Critical University Studies in Techno-rational times

Southern African Review of Education, 28 (1) pp. 11-30

 

Professor Dina Zoe Belluigi

Professor Belluigi’s work relates to the agency and ethico-historical responsibility of those who re-present in contexts undergoing transitions in authority and in the shadow of oppression.  She is concerned with the complexity of the conditions which (in)form artists' and academics' critical consciousness within institutions and countries.  One of the current questions is higher education institutions' fit-for-purpose for driving substantive change, such as the SDGs which they have been mandated to do.  She is committed to the growth of pan-African and international networks for advancing Critical University Studies, where committed scholars, practitioners and policy makers across the globe actively pursue an emancipatory imagination for the future university.

The featured image has been used courtesy of Janko Ferlič, Unsplash.