Academic Freedom in the New South Africa

Recently, I presented a version of this essay at a rhetoric conference in Johannesburg. I said that one of the characteristics of any idea that becomes a received idea is that, when used, it threatens to identify the speaker’s position in advance, and so it leads to neglect of the substance or content of what is actually said. Received ideas are important because they signal the end of thinking. This is why they are likely to be of some ideological significance. This is also why, though in his own terms, Gustave Flaubert was so fascinated and repelled by them. Hence the interest in his extraordinary project, The Dictionary of Received Ideas, for any rhetorician. What else was Roland Barthes’s Mythologies if not a critically and politically conscious version of Flaubert’s great Dictionary?¹

In South Africa, I argued, academic freedom was in danger of becoming a received idea. One of the signs of this was that even trying to bring up the topic in discussions of higher-educational policy tended to brand the speaker as reactionary or conservative before any actual arguments were made. Precisely because of this, I suggested, one of the tasks of the critical intellectual was to keep on thinking about academic freedom: challenging its status as a received idea by thinking about it critically, historically, and theoretically, the better to make a constructive contribution to current debate and policy. Somewhat to my dismay, my starting point proved all too true. At the end of my talk, I later learned, one fellow conférencier turned to a colleague and said, sotto voce, “I don’t know why we should be wasting our time on talk of academic freedom. Surely that’s something only conservatives are interested in.” The present essay is another attempt to suggest that progressive intellectuals can also be interested in academic freedom and indeed should work to resist its becoming a received idea, in South Africa or elsewhere.² Academic freedom is too important to realizing the ideals of a participatory democracy to give up without a fight.³

Nowhere is the gap between practice and ideal greater than in the case of academic freedom. While few will openly attack, denigrate, or call for an end to academic freedom, even fewer still seem willing to grasp the thorn of what it means to implement or enable it in actual institutional practice. The compromise is lip service paid to a practically unrealizable ideal. Because of this distance between practice and ideal, talk of academic freedom often sounds strangely spurious: high-minded, but unrealistic; a subject for an edifying discourse, but only in the pejorative sense of the term. An entry on academic freedom in a new Dictionary of Received Ideas would undoubtedly read: “Academic freedom: Always be willing to support it in principle, but explain that it’s just not practical right now.” This, in turn, leads to a characteristic use of the term that ironically empties it of its content. Academic freedom is deployed apothatically: Somehow, even in the act of affirming it, academic freedom is practically undermined.

Academic freedom has been a peculiarly vexed and public question in South Africa, at the very least since 11 June 1959, when Parliament passed the Extension of University Education Act 45. Under this extension, no nonwhite person would be allowed, after 1 January 1960, to register as a student at a traditionally white university without express permission from the relevant minister. The legal and systematic, as opposed to the cultural and economic, racial segregation of South African universities was now legally in place, and continued to be so up until 1988, when the National Party government of F. W. de Klerk effectively revoked it, in the first of a series of liberalizing measures that culminated in the unbanning of all political organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

It seemed that the basic conditions for the enjoyment of academic freedom (racially unrestricted...