Accountability and Control

Abstract

Amidst all the changes that higher education has seen and continues to undergo, one issue remains constant. It is the dialectic between academic freedom on the one hand and accountability on the other. Depending on how one answers the question 'Freedom for whom and to do what?' and 'Accountability to whom?', so the nature of higher education, its task and its responsibilities differ. Almost two centuries agin I798the German philosopher Kant sought to reconcile these apparently conflicting principles. Three faculties, he argued, were rightly the object of state intervention on the grounds that their exercise had considerable influence on the people and the well-being of the state. Amongst these first faculties were Theology, Medicine and Law. That distinguished them from the fourth faculty, which was Philosophy, was their regulation by government statute. Philosophy, he argued, did not fall under the constraints of the state. Concerned with the pursuit of scholarship and truth, it is free to judge the teaching of the other faculties. And since Man is by nature free, and thus not under any constraint but the pursuit of truth, state regulation of the philosophical faculty was inappropriate [I]. The development of mass higher education has been accompanied by what can only be termed a polarisation around these twin issues of freedom and accountabiliry. For some, academic freedom acts as an ideology, hiding the fact that higher education is wholly at the service of the ruling groups in society or working in defence of the established social and economic order. For others, academic freedom constitutes the prime condition, the fundamental guarantee that the 'search for truth can be pursued somewhere without restraint'. According to Karl Jaspers,