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Ron Kassimir Introduction: Academic Freedom and Regime Transition THE ESSAYS IN THIS SECTION ALL PLACE THE ISSUE OF ACADEMIC freedom and free inquiry more generally in the context ofthe rapid social, economic, and political changes. In South Africa, China, Russia, and the countries of Eastern Europe, the last two decades ofthe twentieth century inaugurated dramatic shifts in the governance of markets, political insti­ tutions, and citizens. The academic literature refers to these shifts as “transitions”as a way of suggesting both that they are “in process” toward something (often a system that resembles the market-based democracies of the West) and that they mark an existential change that is significant but not quite revolutionaiy in the histories of these societies. As anyone with even minimal familiarity with the cases that concern us here knows, the balance between political and economic changes varies greatly across them, as does the degree and nature of the change in the everyday social lives of individuals and social groups provoked by these macro shifts in markets, constitutions, and institutions. While the essays mention the role that intellectuals and academics may have played in bringing about these diverse transitions, the authors focus more on what the transitions have meant for free inquiry as it is embedded in, and embodied by, research universities or, more broadly, in public intellectual activity. W ithin this framing, the authors take differ­ ent approaches. André du Toit, on South Africa, and Sergei Guriev, on Russia, look at transformations in the higher education system of these social research Vol 76 : No 2 : Summer 2009 623 countries and what this portends for academic freedom. Alfred Stepan provides a personal narrative of his experience leading a single institu­ tion—the Central European University—and how its autonomy from governments and its use of scholarly networks allowed it to fill an impor­ tant niche in the early days of Eastern Europe’s transition from commu­ nism. Finally, Merle Goldman focuses on the reemergence of the public intellectual tradition in China, including how it has both responded to and been enabled by the vast economic transition under the dominance of the Communist party. While optimism for the future is not absent in any of these essays, all (with the exception of Stepan) show concern for the future of free inquiry and academic freedom. In South Africa and Russia, these concerns are based in a variety of sources. Both duToit and Guriev describe systemic changes in higher educa­ tion that have been accompanied by a managerial approach to university governance; an understanding ofhigher education as market within which public and, increasingly, private institutions compete for students and resources; and an emphasis on “objective” quantitative measures of insti­ tutional quality, faculty scholarship, and student learning outcomes. At the same time, political liberalization and democracy have led to demands for accountability ofpublic universities from below—that is, from citizens (and voters), many of whom are less concerned about institutional autonomy, academic freedom, and faculty governance than access to and the quality of education for their children. Indeed, in some ways the most revolution­ ary aspects of the transitions in these two countries with regard to higher education is the extraordinary increase in the number of students in the system. The state of academic freedom and the role ofthe professoriate are, in no small measure, being remade by this phenomenon. Thus, the cases focus on how African National Congress-led govern­ ment in South Africa and the Putin-dominated regime in Russia both manage and manipulate the balance between university autonomy and accountability—autonomy as a necessary condition for free inquiry, and accountability as the key way to demonstrate how free inquiry can, in practice, have positive effects on individual social mobility, the quality of democracy, and national development. As alluded to earlier, du Toit and Guriev show how the inevitable democratic demands for account­ 624 social research ability of public institutions has been translated (and, in the minds of critics) hijacked by an entrepreneurial approach to higher education that has the effect of strengthening the control of universities in the hands of administrators rather than faculty. Du Toit quotes a recent report on South African higher education that “threats...

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