Academic Freedom

This chapter engages with the issue of academic freedom as a particular real utopia. The provision of academic freedom is one of the core aims of university governance. Having focused on institutional governance in the previous chapter, I now want to make sense what is it about academic freedom that makes it essential for academia. Academic freedom is knowledge-based, rather than opinion-based. Knowledge in this account means justified true belief or true belief with reason. Academic freedom is a positive freedom for academics and students to launch new research and debate different matters without external interference. Academic freedom is the frame in which academic endeavours come to intellectual fruition; the frame of self-actualization in academia. Is there still something to the Greek idea of the academy as the extra-political stronghold of polis? I suggest that there is because it is solidarity with the human predicament in the capitalist-sovereigntist world order. Containing a difference with politics tout court, academic freedom thus envisioned is a necessary and vital stronghold of the current polis, fractured and still very much in the making, the global human society.