Academic Freedom and the Humanities: some current challenges

John Higgins

doi:10.14426/cristal.v2i2.33

Abstract

This article presents some of the current challenges facing academic freedom and the humanities in South Africa as well as across the world. It focuses first on the shifting fortunes of academic freedom in South Africa, contrasting the pride of place given to it in the pre-1994 social imaginary with its current undermining in higher education policy. It further examines how this undermining is related to a general trend in a global higher education policy which privileges STEM disciplines, and argues that a fuller understanding of the contribution of the NAIL disciplines to the public good is essential to help counter current challenges.

Highlights

In the Students’ Union Foyer, at the base of the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library, hang a series of paintings by the South African artist, Keresemose Richard Baholo
This essay, which extracts and further develops several key arguments from the book, emphasises that the commitment to defend critical thinking in all its modes stands at the centre of academic freedom, and it further examines the ways in which the core values of academic freedom as embodied in the disciplines of the humanities are currently under threat, both generally, in the global policy environment, and in the complex and contradictory terms of local policy implementation
Professor Ihron Rensburg, vice-chancellor of the University of Johannesburg, emphasises that the new legislation – though at the moment of writing is still to be signed into law by President Jacob Zuma – ‘undermines the careful balance struck between university autonomy and public accountability crafted by the Constitution and the initial Higher Education Act’ (Rensburg cited in Mail and Guardian, 2013)

Summary

Introduction

In the Students’ Union Foyer, at the base of the University of Cape Town’s Jagger Library, hang a series of paintings by the South African artist, Keresemose Richard Baholo These form part of a permanent exhibition that commemorates the university’s resistance to the key instrument of racial segregation in the apartheid era, the 1959 Extension of University Education Act, and celebrates the final stage of its repeal in 1993. The forces of apartheid law and order – here figured as a single policeman in blue on the bottom left of the painting – are pushed casually aside by the crowd They carry placards which reiterate the key educational slogans of the day – ‘Forward to a people’s education’, ‘Education is a right not a privilege’, ‘VIVA NUSAS VIVA SANSCO AMANDLA’ (long live student activist groups), while the specific occasion of the demonstration is made evident by those reading ‘PHANSI (down) with De Klerk’s bills on education’ and ‘No subsidy cuts for UCT’. This essay, which extracts and further develops several key arguments from the book, emphasises that the commitment to defend critical thinking in all its modes stands at the centre of academic freedom, and it further examines the ways in which the core values of academic freedom as embodied in the disciplines of the humanities are currently under threat, both generally, in the global policy environment, and in the complex and contradictory terms of local policy implementation

Assault on Academic Freedom

The Debates Are Far From Over

Questioning the question

From STEM to NAIL

What are the NAIL disciplines?