This thesis proposes a conceptual framework for the discussion of concepts of academic freedom and institutional autonomy in a South African higher education context. Beyond the conceptual exploration, the dissertation follows a variety of broader debates in higher education in an attempt to add richness to the South African conversations regarding academic freedom and institutional autonomy.
Introduction
Many higher education systems are facing some of these challenges, for example the impact of globalization on the role of higher education institutions. Much has already been achieved; the demography of student enrollment has changed dramatically5, institutional mergers have taken place to reduce the number of higher education institutions from 36 to 21, a national qualifications framework has been introduced, attempts have been made in many institutions to restructure the curriculum in terms of offering programs, and recently a new way of financing institutions has been implemented.
Academic freedom and institutional autonomy
In 1993, during a lecture at the former University of Natal, Mamdani outlined his view on the issue of academic freedom in Africa and highlighted some very real dangers that the South would do well to avoid.7 He outlined three distinct phases of "colonization". As party rule almost completely stifled academic freedom and countries faced major fiscal crises, a new external threat to universities was introduced – this time in the form of international capital and structural adjustment programs through the institutions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and multinational corporations.
Transformation
The post-apartheid era in higher education (as in all other spheres) has been characterized by a plethora of policy changes and policy formulations designed to reorganize the system in all respects. Nico Cloete and Ian Bunting, Transforming Higher Education: performance assessment in South Africa, Pretoria, CHET, 2000, p.20.
Background to concepts used
In these two quotes from very different contexts, some of the main themes in the discussions about academic freedom are hinted at. The nature of the relationship of universities to the state is central to an understanding of academic freedom, as is the relationship of academic freedom to democracy.
Structure of this thesis
In this chapter, I argue that the perceived threats to academic freedom that are central to rather narrow debates in South Africa can be better understood in the context of a wider set of forces arising from globalization and affecting higher education in general. In chapter eight, I examine the view that the state is the main source of threat to academic freedom in South Africa by analyzing policy changes in one area, the introduction of quality assurance in South African higher education.
Conclusion
194 This is a project of the Council on Higher Education (CHE), known as the project on Higher Education, Institutional Autonomy and Academic Freedom (HEIAAF). In the postmodern view, the social dimension is ontologically prior to the concept of subject.
Academic freedom and institutional autonomy – the concepts
Concepts of academic freedom
Thus, an inquiry into academic freedom necessarily also examines the nature of the institutions in which it is seen to apply. I then trace the development over time of the use of the concept of academic freedom in a number of different contexts.
Conceptual grid
- The classical liberal version of the concept – Quadrant One
- The civic version of the concept – Quadrant Two
- The guild version of the concept of academic freedom – Quadrant Three
- The „embedded‟ version of academic freedom – Quadrant Four
The German idealist philosophers55 regarded the Kantian idea of the university and of academic freedom as essential. The primary function of the medieval universities was instruction (rather than teaching, as little reflection on the texts received was required).
Conclusion
Davies, "Postmodernism and the sociological study of the university", The Review of Higher Education, Spring p.316. These criticisms are the focal point of the postmodern argument about the role and function of the university.
Academic freedom in different contexts
Academic freedom in different contexts
- United States
- United Kingdom
- Africa
Academic freedom has been under discussion in recent years in many parts of the democratic world. Part of the rationale for this development lay in the need to manage the effects of the so-called massification of higher education. Evident in the above narrative is a different locus of debate from the United States context.
The conceptual grid of academic freedom applied to higher education in Africa 90
It is in this policy context that I now examine some of the main debates about academic freedom and institutional autonomy in South African higher education. Higgins' analysis of the policy developments in relation to academic freedom and institutional autonomy in the post-apartheid era is bleak. The implications of performativity for the autonomy of the university and the control of knowledge production are far-reaching in the postmodern view.
Academic freedom – the South African debates
Academic freedom pre-1994
These were Medunsa University, the University of the North, Vista University and the University of Zululand. A third group consisted of the University of the Western Cape and the University of Durban-Westville, which are governed by different houses in the tricameral parliament. There was therefore some convergence around the interests of these universities and the interests of the state.
Post-1994 situation
226 Andre Kraak, "The South African context: planning and legislation in higher education", Pretoria HSRC, December 2001, p.2. 231 Martin Hall and Ashley Symes, “South African higher education in the first decade of democracy: from cooperative governance to conditional autonomy”, Studies in Higher Education p.202. 233 Martin Hall and Ashley Symes, “South African higher education in the first decade of democracy: from cooperative governance to conditional autonomy”, Studies in Higher Education p.204.
Threats to academic freedom – state
It is in this policy context that I now examine some of the key debates on academic freedom and institutional autonomy in South African higher education. mutually beneficial and working together towards common goals, in which the relationship is characterized by state power and control over institutions. And as outlined in the policy analysis above, the trend in South African higher education policy has been argued to have been towards greater state direction of the system than predicted in the NCHE Report. 267 Jonathan Jansen, Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria and Trustee of the Durban University of Technology, is a noted writer on higher education issues in South Africa.
The state as threat to academic freedom? The counter-claims
- Universities seen as agents of change in transformation project
- Conditional autonomy
- Differentiation
291 Overview of recent and current debates in South African higher education: academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability, report commissioned by HEIAAF Task Team, Pretoria, CHE, October 2005, p.17. 292 Overview of recent and current debates in South African higher education: academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability, report commissioned by HEIAAF Task Team, Pretoria, CHE, October 2005, p.17. 298 Overview of recent and current debates in South African higher education: academic freedom, institutional autonomy and public accountability, report commissioned by HEIAAF Task Team, Pretoria, CHE, October 2005, p.23.
Threats to academic freedom – managerialism
- Individual cases
302Andre du Toit, "From Autonomy to Accountability: Academic Freedom Under Threat in South Africa?" Social Dynamics. 312 Senate Committee on Academic Freedom, University of the Witwatersrand, Submission to the CHE/HEIAAF Task Team, October 2005, p.2. 316 Roger Southall and Julian Cobbing, "From racial liberalism to corporate authoritarianism: the Shell affair and the assault on academic freedom in South Africa", Social Dynamics p.2.
Conclusion
Most debates have focused on the future of universities in industrialized countries, especially in the Anglo-American world. First, there are implications for the role of the university, given a change in the status of knowledge and in the configuration of knowledge. First, the disciplines are generally seen as the foundations of the university in practice.
Knowledge production and autonomy: the challenge from
The loss of faith in the Enlightenment project
In the postmodern view, this is understood as a metanarrative that both justifies the existence and role of the modern university, and at the same time serves to delegitimize other forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. The third aspect of this critique is a questioning of the modernist confidence in human liberation. In the modernist understanding, reason applied in the political sphere would lead to an assertion of the general will and the common interest and at the same time ensure civil liberties.
Knowledge
Rather, it needs a language already to order and sort its perceptions in the first place. concepts in a variety of different language games. This view implies the dissolution of the distinction between facts and values - facts, conceived in the representational paradigm as external, observable realities, in the postmodern view cannot exist outside of language. One-sidedness in this case becomes a political necessity as part of the discourse of placing oneself inside and not outside history and ideology."365.
Lyotard and performativity
By such knowledge he means the local and partial knowledge of particular communities, of the patient rather than the doctor, of local antipsychiatric discourses – all of which are to some extent silenced by the mainstream. The relationship of suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use has become tendentious. The destruction of the legitimizing principle enables the subjugation of science, the university and social systems to the principle of the legitimating principle.
Implications for the university
- The role of the university
- Implications for university autonomy
- Internal modes of organisation and disciplinarity
- Implications for pedagogy
- Implications for the role of intellectuals
While Lyotard's discussion is based on the founding of the University of Berlin, he sees this model as the basis for the development of higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Disciplines are manifestations of the absolute pursuit of knowledge for several reasons. For the sciences, the useful and useful according to the dictates of the new economy of knowledge is becoming the most important.
Assessment of the postmodern arguments
Academic freedom, as it is now structured, depends to a great extent on the autonomy and integrity of disciplines. 453 As one of the faculties was still in the process of restructuring, these school leaders were not interviewed. Another issue is that in the discourse of those who mourn, the apparent weakening of the disciplines is a fear of loss of power.
Universities, internal restructuring and mergers – academic freedom
Internal structures, academic freedom and the disciplines
- Changes in disciplinary practice
- Epistemological challenges to disciplines
- The market and managerialism
What gives disciplines their rationale is a fundamental concept of the rational pursuit of knowledge. How postmodern attitudes on knowledge affect the practice and organization of research in higher education. I identify this absolute foundation, claim that it manifests itself in the form of disciplines, and argue why this characterization of disciplines is a problem for researchers.
A case study of restructuring at the former University of Natal and University of
- Rationale
- The study
- Findings and discussion
- Merger-related restructuring
- Interdisciplinarity/disciplinarity
- Disciplines and power
- Disciplines and identity
The establishment of only one or two of the forty schools in this event had to be forced by the senate. The informal appointment of heads of disciplines, particularly in the sciences, was apparently intended to address concerns about the perceived weakening of the disciplines. First and foremost, the polarization of opinion between advocates of interdisciplinarity and those who fear the loss of disciplinary primacy encompasses one of the greatest tensions in higher education.
Globalisation, markets and managerialism
Globalisation: the market and managerialism
- Marketisation (massification)
Globalisation: performativity and the evaluative state
- The diminishing role of the state
- The evaluative state
Globalisation: power, the knowledge society and academic identities
Conclusion
Globalisation and the local: African and South African higher
Globalisation and the African context
Globalisation and the South African context
- Globalisation and quality assurance in South Africa
- Globalisation and the curriculum
- Globalisation and higher education policy
- Globalisation and managerialism
Understandings of quality
- Quality as exceptional
- Conceptualisations of quality drawn from industry
- Quality as transformation
Quality in the South African context
The HEQC and quality assurance
Hard accountability
Accountability, development and managerialism
The conceptual framework
The argument
Academic freedom and institutional autonomy revisited
