Between crisis and refusal: academic freedom as public argument

'[D]ecolonization, the postapartheid, is first and foremost, a resumption of interrupted history. A resumption not indeed of some original purities and essences before the Fall, but of interrupted dramas, indigenous and universal dramas; above all a resumption of our dialogue with one another, with ourselves.' (Sekyi-Otu 2003) This paper reflects on academic freedom during structural adjustment, a period of economic and political crises so bruising that African societies – and their universities – have yet to emerge from it. Universities often resisted structural adjustment, but instead of defending universities, the state typically responded with brutality. It was then that academics turned towards society for support, and discovered the extent of their social alienation, for the academic project appeared at best irrelevant, and at worst, a form of colonial violence. Within this context, CODESRIA convened a pan-African gathering in Kampala in 1990 to ask: what does it mean to be free as an intellectual? Academic Freedom in Africa represents the first fruits of these debates, but has yet to be subjected to a close reading. This paper focuses on a central claim in the volume: that the lack of freedom in the academic community is closely related to its lack of social relevance. Paying careful attention to contributors’ debates over this claim, I argue, suggests a conceptualisation of the university as a potential space for society to argue with itself, where public argument is a critical component of an autonomous and flourishing society. As such, the book is an act of astonishing and fierce hope – that in place of the developmental university or its marketized counterpart, the democratic, sovereign spirit of a people could come to live within the university. Our time is again a time of crisis, and academic freedom is again a dangerous question. Yet, as a close reading of this book shows, there is something about crisis, and the refusal to give in to it, the refusal to flee intellectually and politically by retreating from self-critique. In the dance between these two, between crisis and refusal, we might find a way to think deeply and carefully together.